STRATEGIKON SERIES · THIN RED LINE GAMES

SENATUS CONSULTUM ULTIMUM: Turns 3–4, January to February 49 BC

Pictorial After Action Report ·

BigBoard Gaming · @wargamer · November 2026

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TURN 3 · JANUARY 49 BC

Out of Italia

I made a commitment. Shuttling with two triremes, the Optimates moved the bulk of their forces out of Italia. I left one leader and a cohort behind, so that if I need to I can raise another legion there, although I’m getting pretty short on legions to raise. I also raised a legion down in the south, with the idea of bringing the triremes over from Macedonia and popping those men into Sicily. There is a logistical challenge, in the lack of shipping. You cant really do both the Sicilia gambit and the Macedonian potential threat of having less than 30 size steps…thing. That makes it harder for Caesar and the Populares to take Sicilia. If Caesar just pops down there and takes it, it’s pretty much game over: it would be very hard to dislodge him. So it’s a preemptive move that is staged to go. If Caesar goes that way.

Sitting in the other chair, I don’t think the Populares want to put the effort into Sicilia. It looks easier to go after Pompeius in Macedonia and try to hold his force under 30 size points. He is building fast: Army 2, Army 5 and a little fleet came to 21 size points when I counted, and there is plenty left there for him to raise.

The Populares have their own trick. There are four ships at Brundisium, enough to get a whole legion across in one jump. We’ll probably go round by the coast rather than take our chances with the stormy weather, but it means Caesar can start putting pressure on Macedonia soon. I’m enjoying this a lot.

Leg XIX raised and the fleet gathered on the heel of Italy

Army 5 across the Adriatic, facing Pompeius near Dyrrachium

Army 5 secures two smaller locations one capitulates the other is beaten into submission via assault Origum is secured. Supply will soon raise its ugly head as BOTH sides feed off the same province.

Pompeius stands

XIXth is a seasoned Legion raised by Populares, nad they also take on two x 2 step Triremes. The optimates scrape the bottom of the barrel during their raise getting the XIV as a green Legion. Caesar has his now 45 size point Army march on Brundisium, which refuses to surrender. An assault ensues cause one size point loss for each side. The town falls.
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The board in January: Italia emptied, the war moved east

Antonius, Curio and Rebilus with Armies 3 and 5, against Pompeius and Leg XIV at Dyrrachium

Pompeius stood and fought. In hindsight he should probably have backed off, but looking at the situation I elected to keep fighting, thinking I could knock out or degrade some of the Populares forces. It got ugly very quickly.

Round one cost the Optimates two size points. Round two cost them two more, and the Populares one. In round three the Populares rolled very well: three more. Seven size points lost against a rout value of four, and my roll on the Rout Table was a three. Pompeius routed.

Pompeius is kind of between a rock and a hard place. He has 54 combat factors and nees to preserve size points. But he is rapidly running out of resources to recruit, as both sides scour the country side for veterans and green recruits alike.

He elects to attack. Both sides have a 4 rout level by my calculations. Round 1 is horrible for Pompeus. FFS. Romans roll a ten, and this drops the RL down to 2 for the Optimates right off the bat. The next round is also at 1:1, with a red result the Populares eliminate Cav, reducing the DRMS for Optimates. Populares also take losses and drop a rout Level. In the trhird round of combat, combat strength for both sides is 47-40 and Optimates take a beating again, but so does Populares. Optimates rolled a 2 with plus 2 DRM and the Populares roil 9 with +1. The Optimates check for rout and do indeed rout. Pursuit does little damages due to lack of cavalry. Pompey retreat.

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I’ll own it: I misread the table on that third round and fought a fourth, which I don’t think should ever really come up unless the armies are big. Both sides took some more losses in it. I’ve kept them, because I didn’t lay the armies out on the boards for this one. I just flipped this guy, moved that guy, and now I can’t say which units I’d have to put back.

Pompeius’s army retreated, and is now going to be under siege.

Rolling for the rout

How a rout works, and how I’d have built it

Rules 9.1 to 9.4: the land combat sequence and the rout value

One of the first things in a First Man in Rome battle is working out each side’s rout value. Every faction has a base rout level set by the scenario: 30 for both sides here. The battle commander, the faction’s morale and the quality of the army move it up or down. The rout level is then taken as a percentage of the army’s total size, and that gives the rout value. The rulebook example is a Populares army of size 60 under Caesar: rout level 45, rout value 27. Pompeius had 16 size points at Dyrrachium, which gave him a rout value of four.

After each round the army subtracts its rout value from the total size points it has lost. If the answer is above zero, it rolls on the Rout Table, and the bigger the answer, the more likely it breaks. Seven minus four is three. That is the three-to-four column, and a three on that column is a rout.

I found that process awkward, and said so to Fabrizio. To me it feels like a ‘European way’of thinking about it, or it could just be me. I’d rather see it as a track. My rout level is four, so I can lose four size points. Every loss moves the marker down one. When I pass zero I go to the rout table, and every further loss makes the roll worse. I’d know where I stood just by looking at it: the cohesion and the will to fight of the army being used up. As written, the four stays fixed, the losses pile up somewhere else, and I subtract one from the other looking for a positive number, then roll. It’s an extra step, and it doesn’t fit how I picture an army falling apart. I’m looking for a positive number when really the army is going the other way. I know, I’m weird like that.

What I do love is that the rout level in each battle is tied to the faction’s overall morale, and to how much of the army is in the fight.

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TURN 4 · FEBRUARY 49 BC

Caesar crosses

Midway through the Populares half of February, Caesar crossed. Four shipping size points carry, 16 size points of troops, and he went over with a legion. Pompeius is now under siege as of the opening of the Populares turn, as a result from the January fight. That combat changed the dynamic. Spent big in the turn, Baggage Train, Seige train, the works. Money is no object this is for the win.

Caesar arrives beside Pompeius under siege, with Curio and the siege train

Here is where the scenario stands. At the end, if Pompeius has fewer than 30 size points of land units in Macedonia, he is in a nasty situation and effectively loses. The whole province of Italia, not counting Sicilia, has to be held too, and it is: the Optimates have one or two cohorts left there, not even a full legion. Pompeius bet on landing in Macedonia and scraping up everything there. He did pull a lot of forces, but there are none left to recruit. He is at 24, and he isn’t going up unless leaders bring forces in via ship.

There are seven more Optimates size points in the south of Italy. If their fleet brings them over this turn, that keeps the 30 level up. So Caesar has to deny it. I was going to say this was the last video and Caesar declares victory. I don’t think that’s the case. Army 1 has a relatively weak leader, because I pulled Caesar out of it to cross with the legion, but it is going down the leg of Italy to engage them. I would have had to kill at most two of those seven.

I also raised a legion where the Optimates might have raised one, to soak up the pool. It is just going to sit there with its leader in Macedonian. That’s how the strategy evolves, which is what makes this game so fascinating. I’m trying to imagine playing the whole campaign by myself. It’s going to be a piece of work. Which leads us to the winner takes all battle.

Rhegium

Army 1 at the toe of Italy, across the strait from Messana

Army 1 went south. In the name of efficiency it spent the supply that had been piling up for a push on Sicilia, which is very hard to do anyway. Caesar managed it, like a boss, beating Cato to Sicily. For the second round of foraging and supply, rather than go through the whole requisition exercise, I ate the attrition: three size points gone. I think I can afford them!

That left the Optimates army at Rhegium to decide: fight, or go into the city and take a siege. Under siege I don’t believe they can get out, even by sea, and my next move would have been to bring the Populares fleet down to blockade them. Either way they were trapped. So they stood and fought, and lost two size points in the very first round. The Populares lost nothing.

That is the scenario. They can retreat if they can get away, but there are no longer enough size points to stop a Populares win. The Optimates still have their half of February, but they can’t raise forces in Macedonia and can’t get any more there. We’re calling it a win for the Populares.

End of February: Pompeius still under siege, the siege train beside him

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WHAT MAKES IT TICK

This isn’t a review. But if someone were going to play this game for one reason only, I think it would be how smartly its subsystems connect. Movement links to supply, obviously enough. Supply and movement link to attrition. Attrition links to foraging, and foraging reaches out to the cities to requisition. The condition of the units when they get to a place matters, and so does how they got there. The depletion of each sub-province of Italia makes a huge difference. Every area I recruit from has its own pool of men, and how many I get depends on what I’m prepared to pay. Sieges, assaults, the surrender tables, whether to sack a city or not, whether to put a vallum round it: all of it is linked.

Moving anything, by sea or just down the road, starts a chain of questions. Do I need a supply base? Am I in range of it? Should I spend hard-earned talents on a baggage train, and how do I keep it full? How much supply do I need, not just this turn but for the next two or three? Sometimes I’d start a move and stop: time out, rewind. Where do I want to be, how long do I want to be there, and what will I need when I get there? I love that. It’s crunchy without being overbearing or a drag.

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT · MARCH 49 TO JULY 48 BC

A year early

My January and February put the armies in Macedonia. The real war only left Italy in March 49. Pompey held Brundisium with twenty cohorts while the consuls took the larger part of the army over to Dyrrachium (Landmark Civil War 9.25.2). Caesar tried to close the harbour mouth with dams and rafts, and sent the legate Caninius Rebilus, who had close ties to Libo, to arrange a meeting with Pompey. It came to nothing (9.26.3–6). Pompey sailed on the night of 17 March (Goldsworthy, ch. XVIII).

Caesar could not follow. Pompey “had rounded up all the ships available and thus deprived Caesar of the means to pursue him immediately” (9.29.1). So Caesar turned west to Spain. He joked that he was going to fight “an army without a general”, and that then he would deal with “a general without an army” (Goldsworthy, ch. XVIII). The weather fits the game’s winter, too: the Landmark notes point out that mid-March in the Roman civil calendar “corresponded to late January in the solar year” (9.29 n.b).

At my table Caesar did what he could not do in 49: he went straight after the general. The real crossing came ten months later. Caesar sailed on 4 January 48 with ships enough “to transport 15,000 infantry and 500 cavalry” (Goldsworthy, ch. XIX). The game’s four shipping points and sixteen size points are the same kind of ceiling.

Antonius at Lissus

The second wave came over under Mark Antony. Driven past Dyrrachium by the wind, his ships reached a harbour called Nymphaeum, “three miles past Lissus” (Landmark Civil War 11.26.4). The Roman citizens settled at Lissus took him in, and he landed “three veteran legions, one legion of recruits, and eight hundred horsemen” (11.29.1–2). Goldsworthy dates the landing to 10 April 48; the Landmark notes give Kraner, Hofmann and Meusel’s date of 26 March (11.26 n.e). Pompey tried to ambush Antony before he could join Caesar, and failed (11.30).

My siege of Pompeius sits beside Lissus: the ground where the real Caesarian reinforcements came ashore, a year later.

The siege, turned round

Then Caesar did something strange. Short of grain and outnumbered in cavalry, he began to wall Pompey in from the hills around his camp at Petra. He wanted to feed his own men safely, to stop Pompey foraging, and “to lessen the tremendous prestige that Pompey seemed to enjoy among foreign peoples” when “news spread throughout the world that Pompey was under siege by Caesar and did not dare to fight a decisive battle with him” (11.43.3). Pompey answered with a line of twenty-four forts, fifteen miles round (11.44.3). Caesar’s outer line ran to some 17 miles (Goldsworthy, ch. XIX).

Caesar himself says why it was unusual. In the past one army besieged another “in an effort to contain those who had been defeated in battle or shattered by some other blow, and the besiegers always had superior numbers of infantry and cavalry themselves.” At Dyrrachium he “tried to hem in enemy forces that were unimpaired and had suffered no losses with his own smaller force of soldiers” (11.47.2–3). The Landmark editors are blunt: Pompey held the sea, “hence there was no chance of starving him into submission” (11.43 n.a).

My game did it the conventional way. Pompeius was beaten in the field first, routed, and only then shut up. That is the kind of siege Caesar says normally happened, and the kind he could never get in 48.

How the real one ended

The real blockade failed. Pompey broke through at the southern end of the lines, and Caesar’s counter-attack on an old fort collapsed into a rout that cost him 960 soldiers and 32 tribunes and centurions. Caesar said the enemy “would have won today, if only they were commanded by a winner” (Goldsworthy, ch. XIX). He gave up the lines and marched inland. Pharsalus followed on 9 August.

Curio and Rebilus

Two of the leaders standing over Pompeius at my table were never in Macedonia. Caesar sent Curio to Sicily with three legions (9.30.2). Cato there “had no significant forces at his disposal and had seen no point in wasting any lives in a hopeless defence” (Goldsworthy, ch. XIX). Curio then took his legions to Africa, was lured into an ambush by King Juba’s Numidians, and “died fighting along with many of his soldiers” (ch. XIX). Caesar sent Caninius Rebilus “to negotiate with Pompey at Brundisium before assigning him to serve under Caius Scribonius Curio in Africa”, and Rebilus survived the disaster (Vianello, FMIR Dramatis Personae v5, p. 4). In this game both men went east with Antonius instead, and both are alive in February.

Sicily, the other way round

In the spring of 49 the real island changed hands without a fight: Cato denounced Pompey and left (9.30). At my table the Optimates were trying to get men into Sicily, not out of it, and the fight for the crossing happened at Rhegium.

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REFERENCE

The Landmark Julius Caesar: Civil War 9.25–9.30 (Book 1.25–1.30); 11.26–11.30 and 11.43–11.47 (Book 3.26–3.30, 3.43–3.47), with editorial notes.

Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus: ch. XVIII, “Blitzkrieg: Italy and Spain”, and ch. XIX, “Macedonia, November 49–August 48 BC”.

Vianello, First Man in Rome Dramatis Personae v5 (Thin Red Line Games), p. 4.

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