Friend Neil expressed an interest in getting a Roman army for To The Strongest, but wanted to test one out first. I could oblige and so, for the first time, my Venetians faced my Romans across the tabletop.

As Neil also quite fancied having a go at a competition or two, I marked out a standard competition table size on my somewhat larger set-up, and off we went. Neil would us my Early Imperial Romans, I would use my trusty Venetian Condotta army.

The Venetians, thanks to their light troops, won the scouting, so watched as the Romans deployed with their cavalry on the right, surely ripe for wiping out with my superior Knights!

Regrettably not!

Very early on in the game, my right hand command of Knights was soundly defeated by the inferior Roman horse: an event that effectively set the scene for the battle as a whole.

No matter: I had more Knights on the left, and had sent them forward to try and get behind the Roman flank.

This sort of worked, but the extreme manoeuvrability of the Romans meant that their Praetorians could quickly move back to block that flank, leaving my elite troops to merely keep the Praetorians and the rest of the veteran Legionaries from interfering in the main clash in the centre.

And so on to the centre, where the game would be decided.

The two lines came together in quite a disjointed way. I partially refused my left, hoping to temp his Romans forward to be flank charged by my Knights, but Neil was too canny to fall for that and all that it meant was that half my spearmen sat watching as their colleagues were defeated elsewhere on the field.

On the right of the centre, my Alabardiers proved as solid as usual, defeating the Roman cavalry who charged them. The Alabardiers then retreated to a nearby hill where they would eventually be assailed on all sides by fresh Roman troops.

The battle now broke down into a series of individual clashes that the Roman got the better of, leaving things very disjointed as we entered the end phase.

Disaster then struck on the left, where Neil had finally realised that my two units of Knights were tying up his main infantry strike force, and moved forward to attack and defeat my ‘Broken Lances’.

It was now only a matter of going through the motions as the Roman battle line, the mincing machine, came forward. With half my Knights routed and the other half stymied by disorder or poor positioning, I had nothing that could standard up to the remorseless gladii and the game was Neil’s!