Clash of Spears: Velites

 The week's Roman troops are the Velites, who are a premium skirmishing unit. You get twelve of these in the started box and I added one of the commanders in with a shield swap to act as a leader and to add some colour to the force. The Victrix sprue does come with some wolf pelt pieces which I have put aside for other uses so these chaps just have helmets and shields for defence.

The Velites come in at 13 points per figure which is a significant step up from the 9 points you pay for the Carthaginian javelin men. For the extra points you get a boost in melee to 4+ (from 5+) and a boost in grit to 4+ as well. This means they should have the upper hand in any melee with opposing skirmishers and are more likely to stay in a ranged/melee fight without becoming over fatigued. 

It also worth remembering that activation/reaction activation tests are made against the units grit value so they should be more reliable when trying to carry out advanced manoeuvres. 

Here we can see the Libyan javelin men and below the table of model prices for the various troop training levels. Clash uses a very simple formula for determining model cost so you could easy make up your favourite unit type as long as the special rules needed for them already exist. 

So we can see the Libyan's are costed as Inexperienced and the Velites as Trained, special rules each cost 1 point with armour & weapons costing between 1 - 3 points depending on type.

Clash uses a pre-battle movement system whereby your units are assigned a numbered token (your opponent does not know which number is assigned to a unit) and you then take turns to activate a token and move them. Tokens get locked in place once they reach a certain distance from the enemy and once all tokens are locked the assigned units are deployed onto the table and the game proper begins. Light troops useful in this phase as any infantry unit with a 6+ save and any cavalry with a 4+ save generate a extra 'fake' token that can be used. In the reveal phase this token is just discarded rather than being replaced with a unit. This gives the option to mislead your opponent as to the true disposition of your forces.

Another important part of this phase is that whilst you can activate a token multiple times the unit it represents will start the battle with accumulated fatigue depending on it's armour save and the number of times you have activated it. So you may have done a cunning flank march with your heavy hitters but they would then start the battle with multiple fatigue.

So that's all the light troops and allies done, next up are the three types on Roman combat infantry, Hastati, Principes, & Triarii.