Lessons Learnt – The Franks

I had my first game with the Carolingian franks today and received a solid beating. Not only was it my first game with the Franks battle board, but also my first game with cavalry and so was a wonderful learning opportunity.

So rather than a battle report, which would be short and to the point, I thought I’d share my impression and learnings of the Carolingian faction.

Quick Overview of Faction

The Carolingian’s are marked as a difficult faction in the Age of Vikings sourcebook, at first look they offer a good range of warband troops:

They also have the choice of 2 Legendary Units – Charlemagne and Count Roland

This provides quite a flexible and potentially powerful list, now lets have a look at their Saga Abilities –

SAGA Abilities

This is where the Carolingians start to differ greatly in the Age of Vikings.

Basic SAGA Abilities

We have the standard 3 basic abilities

• Caballarii – Activate hero or Hearth Guards (see there is that name for the imperial guard again :-) )
• Milites – Activate warriors
• Footmen – Activate levy

This is pretty standard for most battle boards in the Age of Vikings (with the common exception of the Anglo Saxons – who I will cover in another post).

Next we come to Combat Bonus – this again is a common SAGA Ability but when you look carefully for the Carolingians it brings a twist and also first mention of their truly unique SAGA Special Ability the PROELIUM (for you geeks, ok us geeks, this is the Latin word for Battle).

So normally with Combat Bonus – you place SAGA dice into the ability and spend them to up your attack or defence dice during Melee, Shooting or Shooting/Reaction on a 1 for 1 basis.

With the Carolingians you up your attack or defence dice by the number of dice currently in your PROELIUM, which can be between 0 and 3, and then remove a single SAGA Dice from your Combat bonus (as normal) and one from your PROELIUM. This means that potentially you could up your total attack/defence dice pools by 6 dice during the Saga Abilities and Fatigue step of a Melee/Shooting activation if you started the round with 3 SAGA dice on your Combat Bonus and 3 SAGA Dice on your PROELIUM.

	SAGA Dice On	SAGA Dice On	Extra Attack/Defence
Saga Abilities and Fatigue Round	Combat Bonus	Proelium	Dice Pool
1	3	3	3
2	2	2	5
3	1	1	6

Round 4 on use the fatigue and other SAGA Abilities, in comparison you opponent over those 3 rounds at most could get 3 extra Attack/Defense dice using Combat Bonus. If your opposition manages to use 3 rare symbols then they 2 could have 6 extra Attack/Defense dice.

The PROELIUM

So unlike most other battle boards, the Carolingians do not get the activation pool in the top right hand corner. Instead this position is occupied by the PROELIUM. Now Ragnar does a good explanation of this in SAGA Age of Vikings (Page 53, Column1, Para 5), so I won’t rehash his explanation. But simply you can can place up to 3 dice in this area, each one showing a different symbol and then this number of dice is reference by the Carolingian Combat Bonus and several of the Advanced SAGA Abilities.

Advanced SAGA Abilities

As with all the Age of Vikings battle boards there are 10 Advanced SAGA Abilities.

• 5 are triggered during a Melee activation,
• 3 are triggered during a Shooting activation,
• 3 are triggered during the Orders Phase,
• 2 are triggered as a Shooting/Reaction,
• 2 are triggered during the Activation Phase and
• 1 is triggered as an Order/Reaction

Again Proelium comes in to play here – Only 2 do not reference your Proelium, lets start with those.

DOMINE – Latin for master – this ability can be very powerful as it lets you trigger a Melee, Shooting or Shooting/Reaction ability on you battle board even if you have already activated it this turn – this means using this ability you can use an advanced ability twice. It is limited to DEFENSOR, VINCO, POTENTIA and FORTIS and potentially itself (which is a bit odd but a valid option).

PARATUS – Latin for Prepared – this is the only SAGA ability available to the Carolingians that enables the adding of an extra SAGA dice to your Inactive pool to be spent on the battle board, it is expensive requiring two dice to trigger, but guarantees the Rare SAGA dice icon. It allows you to take 1 available SAGA Dice and add it to your Inactive SAGA dice pool with the Rare icon face up. So despite its expense, it could be very decisive, enabling activation of any unit type, DOMINE, POTENTIA ,FORTIS or even DAMNATIO if you have another inactive SAGA dice with the right face showing.

The remaining 2 triggerable during the Order Phase are –

DAMNATIO – Latin for Condemnation or Damnation – It cost 2 SAGA dice, 1 of the common icons and 1 of the rare icons. This allows you to choose a unit with NO MORE THAN 3 times more figures than your Proelium – so in summary

Proelium	Max Unit Size in Figures
0	0
1	3
2	6
3	9

Until the end of your turn all attack dice TARGETING this unit get a +1 bonus – now this does mean you really need to choose an enemy unit – unless you really hate one of your own units. But as a benefit it is fairly powerful as all of your units targeting the chosen unit get the bonus (this may be worthwhile having a token for)

VIRES – Latin for Power – this is available for triggering in the Orders Phase OR as an Order/Reaction, it is the only Advanced ability that causes the number of dice in the PROELIUM to be changed. When you trigger this, you take the SAGA dice used to trigger it along with ALL SAGA dice on your PROELIUM , roll them and then place them back on your battle board. Ah I hear you shout – but you said that PARATUS was the only advanced ability that enabled you to add a SAGA Dice to your inactive pool – the difference is where the SAGA dice come from, PARATUS allows you to take an AVAILABLE SAGA dice and add it to your inactive pool, VIRES allows you to take multiple active dice from your battle board – re roll them- and then you must add them to your battle board. PARATUS does not insist you allocate the inactive dice to your battle board and as such you can combine it with another inactive die to potentially activate DAMNATIO.

Right now lets look at the 2 that are generic Activation Phase abilities –

ILLUSIO – Latin for, yes you guessed it ,Illusion – This allows you to activate a unit for a charge that generates no fatigue. So this is best used to initiate either a second charge for a unit or a charge after the unit has already moved or shot. But, and there is a big butt (queue song by donkey), you can only activate a unit that has no more than twice your PROELIUM in figures. As PROELIUM is capped as 3, this can only be used to activate up to 6 models.

ARDOR – Latin for love – this is a nice multi unit activation ability. Again it is tied to your PROELIUM. You can use this to activate a number of friendly units- any where on the table- up to the number of dice in your PROELIUM i.e. max’s out at 3. These units can be activated to move or fire, NOT CHARGE, and don’t generate a fatigue from the activation. So in line with the recommendation for ILLUSIO – this generates the biggest benefit when used on units which have already been activated.

This leaves the 4 which involve Melee, shooting and/or Shooting/reaction and are tied to the PROELIUM.

DEFENSOR – Latin for defender – this is a nice simple one. Activate it during the Melee or Shooting/reaction phases to gain defense dice. You get one more than your current PROELIUM. This does mean that although this is tied to the PROELIUM even if you have no dice in the PROELIUM you can benefit from it.

VINCO – Latin for excel, ok ok, and defeat – this is another reasonably simple one. Activate it during a Melee or Shooting phase to inflict a number of automatic hits equal to 1/2 your PROELIUM, and because of the standard SAGA round up rule that basically means 1 or 2 so long as you have at least 1 die in the PROELIUM. Even if the enemy uses SAGA Abilities to reduce your attack pool to zero, you still get these hits. The target still gets their defence rolls against these hits, so they are not automatic casualties.

POTENTIA – Latin for potential – oops no actual Latin for power – A nice flexible and potentially powerful Advanced ability. Activating this enables you to re-roll attack dice which didn’t score a hit. You can re-roll up to to twice the number in your PROELIUM so a max of 6. For an ability that can be activated by any symbol, and does not reduce your PROELIUM when used this is really useful. Remember there is the standard -You cannot re-roll a re-roll rule in SAGA – so be careful about using this and then using DOMINE to reactivate it again, as it will not help unless you really missed a lot of attacks. Ragnar discusses this in Age of Vikings (Page 53. Column 1, Para 14).

FORTIS – Latin for luck – this is a nice and powerful ability, it may not seem it at first reading, but when you further consider it. It allows you to gain attack or defence dice equal to your PROELIUM – hold on you say that’s what the COMBAT BONUS allows me to do so – well it also forces your opponent to discard the same number of dice of the same type from their attack/defence pools. So using this it could be possible to give yourself 3 additional defence dice, and if you only managed to hit the opponent 3 times, and they had no other SAGA Abilities to use, they would not be able to roll any defense dice so your attacks would auto inflict casualties – now just saying, that’s enough to potentially kill a Warlord. I have been corrected on this point, you can of course only discard defence dice that exist at the point of triggering the ability, (if any have been added because of Saga abilities) and as this is done before the base attack dice are rolled and you cannot have negative dice in you defence pool, this means you will always get at least 1 dice in defence per attack achieved, At the same time you get 3 additional defence dice to use against any successful hits they achieved.

So we have look at all the Basic and advanced abilities on the Carolingian board and what are the learnings –

1. Building up your PROELIUM can seriously super size some of your advanced abilities.
   1. However this will also potentially limit early game activations whilst you use SAGA dice in the PROELIUM instead of using them to activate units.
2. The more SAGA Dice you can generate the better,
   1. When designing your list, resist the urge to increase unit sizes at the cost of SAGA dice.
3. Only Combat Bonus and VIRES cause the PROELIUM to decrease,
   1. Dice allocated to the PROELIUM are pretty safe,
   2. Releasing dice from it to use else where requires use of extra SAGA dice.
4. Build a strategy that climax’s in turn 3 or 4,
   1. Use the speed benefit of the mounted troops options, draw your opponent in and then spring your trap.
5. Losing SAGA Dice will seriously hamper your options
   1. Don’t be tempted to strike early, wait until you can swing the odds in your favour

So this list is not good for impulsive players, the Carolingians were a well organised semi-professional army and this list and battle board reward good planning and organisation.

So guess how I played them in my first game with them – yep I charged straight in – lost the ability to generate 2 saga dice in the first turn and basically watched as I struggled to use any of the abilities on the battle board and my opponent mopped up the rest of my warband. But as I always tell my daughter, you can learn more by trying something and getting it wrong, that not trying it at all. Also you learn more from what you get wrong in a test than what you get right.

Hope this was interesting/useful, I intend to do some more from the other boards which I have used so far, and may even do a bit on those I have not played but applying a similar analysis.

Remember the basic odds – the rare SAGA symbol in a set comes up 1 time in 6, the uncommon comes up 1 time in 3 and the common comes up 50% of the time – but as wargamers we know that million to one events happen 9 times out of 10.. :-)