Fabuis the Delayer Style Tacticus

[Straight Arrow]

Has anyone been able to recreate the Fabius tactic of shadowing Hannibal's army in Italy?

In history, Fabius stayed concentrated and entrenched. The troops under his command would stay in their camp, refusing all offers of battle. Instead, the Romans carried out a small war of patrols, constantly skirmishing with Carthaginians to keep them concentrated and to limit supply gathered by their forgers.

A second army would move around Italy taking back any cities that had fallen to Carthage.

I tried Fabius tactics in my last game against a human; it didn't work. Hannibal moved too fast for the second army to risk taking the field. And my main army, even entrenched with Fabius, was unable to operate without being attacked and defeated in the same or adjacent province with Hannibal.

Admittedly, my opponent was extremely talented and has a proven record of uncanning whoop ass on me, but it seems to me that the Fabius tactic of delaying should have a shot at working.


Here's the question, using the Alea Jacta Est system, is it possible to shadow Hannibal, or do the Romans have to abandon Italy, except Rome, to the Carthaginians?

[James D Burns]

The game isn’t a WEGO system and has no intercept function in it, so you can’t really play it in terms of following around an enemy’s army with any hope of causing him to change his tactics based on a strategy like that. He will always be able to move past your army in a IGO-UGO system, as there is no threat of you intercepting his moves unless you already occupy a region he enters during his turn.

Instead you have to focus on the regions and play it in a manner to try and limit your opponent’s ability to mess with your moves to take back regions and cities and at the same time mess with his ability to make new offensive moves.

So if Hannibal is in the southern boot, you might place your main army along the fastest transportation route to the north, and then place some small cavalry (light infantry can work too) units with orders to evade combat on adjacent regions so a solid line is formed across the boot. Then a small army can run around in the northern areas and try and take stuff back in relative safety.

This would limit Hannibal’s ability to make a sudden move north past your big army (he would stop any plotted move north to try and deal with the screening cavalry and they may or may not get away) and possibly leave him exposed in the open during your turn. You might then attack him or simply re-adjust your screen line to try and keep the tiny army up north safe.

This is just one example of how you might go about playing the game, but generally speaking you should focus on trying to limit his move options during his turn, not on trying to simply follow him around.

Also longer sieges are something Rome should focus on at all times since Carthage has difficulty causing breaches. So make sure any walled city of level 2+ has at least one supply wagon, otherwise they’ll surrender in just two turns. It’ll be a lot harder for Hannibal to reduce all the Roman cities if he needs to spend 4-8 turns or more waiting for supplies to dry up. And during those long sieges you can be reclaiming other regions.

Jim

[Straight Arrow]

@ James, this was exactly the information I was looking for. I have a strong tendency to play historically and thus often blind to possibilities the Ageod system offers.

Your insights were clear and to the point; many thanks, I'll put them to good use.

[CatoTheYounger]

I would say the supply wagon is a good idea, But Carthage will be able to starve level 2 and up cities quickly if they have a port. They will need support from a blockade.

When I play as either side, I put all settings on maximum difficulty except for spotting. I leave that on medium. This make Hannibal a terror. Their is no combat bonuses, but the stacking penalty is reduced for Carthage and Hannibal brings a bigger army and his leaders get big activation bonuses. Otherwise, the advice above is excellent. Controlling Regions means he also cannot easily escape regions where there is enemy control everywhere. Only problem is that it is not likely he won't be able to defeat you and knock you out of the way.

Great strategic game.

[Franciscus]

Hi, guys.

Good advices by James, but I must correct him in one thing: Ageod games ARE WEGO (each player plans his actions and the turn is resolved simultaneously), not IGO-UGO.

About Hannibal: He is not invincible, but almost, at least until he gets "old"

As a roman player, even with your best leaders, you will probably lose almost all battles if you have a parity of forces, unless you can caught his army very low in cohesion (which is rare, due to his special abilities).

So, some advices:

- avoid attacking him directly, unless you are sure you have a very VERY much superior force; even so, you may lose; if you really want to fight him, chose your terms: stand on good defensive terrain (but avoid being trapped in cities), well rested and with high cohesion, and make him attack you (but be prepared for the worse :cool

- on the other hand, Hannibal is a military genius but his subordinates are not. So, try to always take an opportunity and fight Carthage forces that are not being lead by Hannibal. This you might call a "Fabian" tactic: he always avoided a battle with Hannibal's main army (note: the ancient military "tradition" of offering or refusing battle is not really simulated in the operational scale of HAN), but attacked his forager parties

Cheers

[Ebbingford]

(note: the ancient military "tradition" of offering or refusing battle is not really simulated in the operational scale of HAN),

Cheers

Playing with the maximum delay setting can help a tad here

[James D Burns]

Hi, guys.
Good advices by James, but I must correct him in one thing: Ageod games ARE WEGO (each player plans his actions and the turn is resolved simultaneously), not IGO-UGO.
Cheers

Yes of course it is, after reading that first paragraph I have no idea what the hell I was thinking at the time... My only defense is it was late and whatever it was that popped into my head that caused me to write that is lost to me now lol. The rest is good advice though.

Jim

[Cardinal Ape]

Being the human opponent in question I speculated how you might stop Hannibal from rampaging through Italy. I came to the conclusion that you can't stop him. The only chance one would have rely on Hannibal's controller to fail at keeping him in supply or thinning his army too much.

If a young Hannibal has an army around 50k he is pretty much invincible, even against a force twice his size. Coming from other ageod games one would think that fighting in defensive terrain like hills or such would help your chances to win. In this scenario I do not think that this is the case for multiple reasons: 1 - A large portion of the Carthaginian forces receive a combat bonus when fighting in wooded hills and similar terrain. 2 - Taking advantage of Frontage has always been a big part of winning against a superior force, but against Hannibal I think it backfires. Hannibal, with his 100% bonus to frontage limits means that he will always double committed Roman forces. What is worse is that with his bonus initiative from himself and other generals will allow him to massacre Roman forces before they even get to fight back. The only way the Romans stand a chance is in clear terrain where they might be able to bring their larger numbers to bear.

In our game, Straight Arrow raised the point if it would be in Romes best interest to take a big field battle loss early in the game in order to gain access to options to recruit new legions triggered by having a low NM. Before I started making a list of events in the scenario I would have said yes. But after having seen the events I feel it is a highly risky play if Rome can not get their NM back up quickly. Most defections and revolts are tied to a low Roman NM. Carthage stands to gain far more forces from these than Rome would gain from options, including a Carthaginian supply base in the boot of Italy.

While I have yet to play Rome in this scenario, I feel the best approach for Rome is to ignore Hannibal completely. Sail for Hispania, muster up the locals to bolster your forces and hurt the Carthaginian economy. With historical attrition on it can be very tough for Carthage to afford the replacements to keep Hannibal from dwindling in size.

It may be possible to interfere with Hannibal's mobility in Italy. Keeping 100% military control in regions around forts can stop Hannibal from moving too quickly. However, the Roman force composition is bad for this task: they have little cavalry and irregular type units. It is very risky.

Essentially, Rome just needs to find a way to not lose before 211BC. At that point Hannibal gets old and he loses his God of War traits.

[James D Burns]

You are completely forgetting Rome's main advantage, cheap manpower. If Rome can accumulate a huge number of infantry replacement chits, it won't matter if they then lose fights between the main armies in Italy, just so long as they don't lose a lot of units. Just keep hitting Hannibal every chance you get as soon as your army recovers from its latest fight. Keep causing hits to Hannibal's army, his African replacement chits cost far more than Rome's do. Hannibal cannot hope to keep up with a long term attrition war if the pressure is kept up non-stop. Winning the fights isn't the goal, causing hits to all his different infantry types as often as possible is. But Rome needs a deep replacement pool first before it starts to attrit him.

Jim

[Cardinal Ape]

Swarming Hannibal sounds a bit risky. I have not compared replacement costs, but I do remember that one elephant chit costs as much as a brand new supply wagon. The main thing I would fear with that tactic is losing too much NM in those battles. At about 85 NM most of the boot of Italy may defect to Hannibal, giving him a very large amount of forces for free.

If you went for that route as Rome you would probably want to inflict some economic damage to Carthage first. Taking Leptis Magna will lose Carthage 200$ a year, depriving them of the Hispania silver mine shipments for another 200$ as well. Making sure Carthage can't send transports to the Mare Internum Commercius for a 500$ trade income in February would be a must.

Rome has a starting advantage in gaining EP's, correct? Perhaps using a lot of Subversion RGDs against Carthage's rich cities would hurt their economy as well since yearly tax income per province is greatly affected by loyalty.

[hanny1]

last game of 219 i tried out a 50% increas to force pools, quite an interesting variant

[hanny1]

ROme ai in PW2 with 50% force pool is a real hoot it crushed Demitrius, dow Car andd landed a 4 Legion army to take/hold utica before Hanny left Spain!