SAGA: Republican Romans

 It's been a long time since we played SAGA, in fact my last post about it is from August 2018!

But having recently purchased the Age of Hannibal universe book I've been looking at my Romans & Carthaginians to see how they can be converted from Clash of Spears to SAGA. Whilst Clash gives an interesting game with lots to think about I feel that SAGA will give a quicker game that can be enjoyed in an evening and also a more relaxed game.

Iberians in Disguise

A quick look at the Roman battle board and force composition rules suggested that they would be making use of multiple points of foot Warriors fielded in smaller units. They have no abilities that benefit cavalry or shooting so it won't be worth investing heavily in either of those. I would think a decent starting force would be:

4 points of Warriors fielded in 4 units of 8 (Hastati, Principe, Samnite Allies)

1 point of Levies fielded in 1 unit of 12 (Velites)

1 point of Hearth Guard fielded in 1 unit of 4 (Triarii)

1 General

In order to make the Hastati up to 16 models I added 4 extra Iberians with Roman heads and shields, once in the main unit they blend in well. Other than that no extra models where required to field the 6 point army.

I was interested in how the game would handle Roman Pilum throwing and the Pilum ability allows one unit either a shoot and free charge in your turn or a reaction shot in the opponents turn. For a common dice this is a nice flexible ability and gives you the choice of having a shot on the way into combat or trying to weaken and fatigue and enemy charging you.

As with all the Roman abilities this only benefits foot troops and in this case only your Warriors. As the Hearth Guard are armed with long spears this ties in nicely with the different roles of the troops.

The battle board offers some damage mitigation and Close Formation is a good common dice ability and the rare version with the option to re-roll any 1's or 2's on defence should make that unit extremely durable. The board also has a couple of abilities that automatically cancel wounds, again making the Romans hard to kill.

This could be very important if you decide to leverage the abilities which work better if you have less models in the combat than your opponent, making sure your units still have enough models left to generate SAGA dice could be key to victory.

An alternate way to deploy your units to leverage these abilities would be a force composition of:

3 points of Warriors fielded in 4 units of 6 (Hastati, Principe, Samnite Allies)

1 point of Warriors fielded in 1 unit of 8

1 point of Levies fielded in 1 unit of 12 (Velites)

1 point of Hearth Guard fielded in 1 unit of 4 (Triarii)

1 General 

Several of the abilities have the Maniple keyword, this is only applied to foot Warrior/Hearth Guard units that start the game with 8 models or less, again this discourages the use of larger units.

Being able to remove fatigue in SAGA is an important move and having an ability that does so isn't something every battle board has, so Legion is a good addition to the board, for maximum benefit you'd want to keep your units close together.

The last ability I want to highlight is Gladius which for a common gives you 3 bonus attack dice and for a rare also removes 3 attack dice from your enemies pool. Not cheap if you want the extra defensive bonus but again a nice way to make sure your smaller unit can survive combat with a more numerous foe.

So that's the Romans, I should have the Carthaginian force ready next year so will have a look at their battle board then.