black powder/impetus: basic impetus

[petercooman]

Hey all!

Just wanted to ask if anyone has any vieuws on these rulesets.

Black powder i would like to use for the acw and napoleonics, and i would like to know if they are good for the smaller scales (6mm and 10mm) Also, does anyone have the Albion triumphant supplement, and is it useful?

Basic impetus or impetus for the 100 years war and war of the roses, and maybe the age of hoplites. Is it worth getting the rulebook for small scale battles? As i have tried basic impetus with counters and it worked, using double the miniatures (so 2x the basic impetus list)

Any comment would be greatly appreciated, as i am looking for rulesets that cover some different periods, in an attempt to stop throwing rulesets togheter while playing   

[fred.]

The Black Powder / Hail Caesar / Pike and Shotte series of rules are unit based - so figure scale isn't really important at all.

We've played lots of Hail Caesar using 10mm figures - we used 2/3 of the moves (so 6" became 4") and approximately 2/3 of the frontage, we had units 12cm wide and 4cm deep (i.e. 2 warmaster units). The reduction to 2/3 scale helped as we were playing on a 6'x4' table, not just for 10mm.

[petercooman]

Yeah i have seen that the movement is a bit too much if you have limited room. I read somewhere that if you just take cm instead of inches a 4'x3' table would work out fine. I'm still not sure of it though, as most reviews you see of black poxder state that it's more of a set of guidelines than rules...

[sunjester]

We play 10mm WSS with Black Powder using cms instead of inches. We have tweaked them a bit, as a unit's movement was a bit too fluid for the early 18th century, but otherwise I like them.

[Genom]

Impetus isn't too bad a system, you get a good selection of armies in the book from ancients through to late medieval. It's cheap and so are the supplements to get you further army lists etc. It also has a good active playerbase on the forum, and the author is very active there taking on board suggestions and giving clarifications etc.

Basic Impetus armies are usually a bit over 100 pts, it recomends about 300 for normal games so what you did is about right for the size it suggests.

I found the biggest thing to get my head around is the way movement and contact works havign come from a warhammer/warmaster background where you line your units up once they make contact. In Impetus if a corner hits you're in combat and off you go. I suppose it's just a different abstraction, but it does work overall for a game you can do easily in a night.

[petercooman]

Yeah basic impetus was a little bit too small for my liking, having only a handfull of units made for isolated fights instead of a real battle. I found the rules quite easy to understand though, and wondered what there could be more in the book :p

@ Sunjester: the more i read reviews about black powder, the more i am seeing that the movement rates are off, wich really reminds me of warhammer fantasy first turn charges out of the blue 

Am looking at the polemos series too, but they look kinda stiff and not so fluid in gameplay. Any experience with them here??

[Gran76]

For the War of the Roses a ruleset I'm interested in is Poleaxed 2 by the lance and longbow soceity as it is written especially for the period it uses average dice which shouldn't be hard to get hold of.Polemos wise I've got the Napoleonic set and WSS not bad but not really my thing .The rules are centred on a Tempo bidding process and alocation. I've got Black Powder and Hail Ceasar and play with one unit on a 60mm by 30mm base not ideal for formation representation but I get by as units are removed when they accumulate so many damage pts etc

[petercooman]

Yeah i rad about the tempo bidding thingy, seems a weird feature.

Those poleaxed rules sound interesting, but again are specific for one period, wich i am trying to avoid 

How do they work though? Anything they are similar too?