Hail Caesar: Adepticon open play

[RichN]

Saturday night at Adepticon, we will be hosting open play for Hail Caesar rule set by Warlord Games. For people new to the rule set, the demo table will teach the basic rules of the game. For people familiar with the rules (perhaps after their demo!) there will be open battles for people looking to field a whole army or just take over a division. Staffing permitting, there will be both a Dark Age (Norman vs Arab) table and an Ancients table (Successors/Greeks/Romans/Celts).

Hail Caesar is a large battles ancients game for any scale figures although we will be playing with 28mm figures. The game is intuitive and easy to pick up. The basic structure of the game uses armies made up of 3 divisions of 4 units. As a general of a division, the player will issue verbal orders for a unit then test with a leadership dice roll to see if the orders are carried out. A successful roll will allow a unit to move anywhere from 1 to 3 times using a free form unit movement system. Failure will end the command phase for that division.

Unit sizes for Hail Caesar can be of nearly any size, so long as both opponents have the same unit frontage. At Adepticon we will be playing infantry units with a minimum of 160mm of frontage and cavalry with a minimum of 125mm. For those of you more familiar with WAB, this translates into infantry units of 8x3 and cavalry units of 5x2.

Units are classified as heavy, medium, light and skirmish; with each unit type having different amounts of combat dice and levels of moral save. Additionally, units may have useful rules to provide weapon modifications or unit traits. Generally, a dark age army division will be composed of 1 heavy, 2 medium and 1 light or skirmish unit. Ancients armies will focus more on Roman legions or Greek/Pike phalanxes - these armies would typically field 3 heavies and 1 light or skirmish unit.

A group of us are currently running a dark age campaign using the Hail Caesar rules and having a delightful time with it. http://plasticlegionsblog.freeforums.or ... ht-f7.html

Stay tuned to this post for example of the armies we've been using.

[socalwarhammer]

Hail Caesar...Will anyone from Warlord be at Adepticon this year...It would be nice to include them or have them run the game.

[RichN]

I'm not sure if Warlord is attending - sure would be great if one of their reps could drop in for a game.

Update: Warlord is expected to attend Adepticon in 2012.

[RichN]

Two mission's I've written for Hail Caesar. The scenarios use a basic battle point system for those looking to keep score.

1 Camp Raid
2 Take the High Ground

http://chicagoterrainfactory.files.word ... aid-hc.pdf
http://chicagoterrainfactory.files.word ... und-hc.pdf

Astute readers may notice rather similar missions being used in Adepticon WAB events. Feed back welcome

[RichN]

Arab Crusader army list formatted by Battle Scribe.
http://chicagoterrainfactory.files.word ... rab-1.docx

Division 1 - Troops from the city of Damascus
Division 2 - Berber mercenaries from North Africa
Division 3 - Ghulam and Turkoman Cavalry units

[RichN]

Hail Caesar has been the go to rule set for my local gaming club. We've been having a blast playing campaign games using HC - week 7 of 8 is coming up next. The rule set easily handles large battles - each of us is playing at least 12 units with more than 200 figures on the table. Hail Caesar stands up well to competitive play, although I will say that there have been a few movement/combat/proximity issues which were best handled by an official's (guys from the other table) ruling.