Blood and Roses 1st St. Albans part 2

Up front I'll say I'm still not sure if I like this game.  Admittedly I LOVE this game, as in I love playing out battles from the Wars of the Roses.  I'm still not sure how much I like the games mechanics, which I assume are similar to the other games in the Men of Iron series from GMT (the other games being Men of Iron and Infidel).

The cleverest mechanic and one I'm going to steel (get it?) for miniatures play is the activation system.  The way it works is whoever goes first in the scenario gets a "free activation," which means he can activate any one of his "battles"/divisions, his entire army for strategic movement (in the St. Albans scenario the armies start the game too close together to use this), or the army's standard.  Once he's completed that activation, he may attempt to activate another single battle, but he has to make a die roll based on the leadership quality of the battle's commander and he can't activate the same battle that just activated, unless that's the only battle left in his army.  If he succeeds he may activate the battle, and once finished make another attempt to activate another battle just like before, only each subsequent die roll becomes more difficult since you add one to each attempt.  You're trying to roll equal to or less than the commanders leadership with a d10, with most commanders being in the 3-4 range.  Once you fail this roll or pass your opponent gets a free activation as above and goes from there just like the starting player.

Why would you pass?  If the scenario has a time requirement, wherein one side has to achieve victory in a certain number of turns, the other player can pass and advance the time by one.  1st St. Albans has this with the Yorkists having to achieve their victory conditions before time expires.

The movement is pretty straightforward and similar to other hex and counter games.  Each scenario has special rules governing the unique terrain where the historical battle was fought (such as the ditch that surrounds St. Albans).

The combat is where I'm not completely sold.  When your units move into combat with the enemy, you don't have to attack.  But, if you do you have to attack all the enemy units you're in contact with.

So in the above photo if the Lancastrians (red) wanted to attack the Yorkists, that single unit would have to attack both of the enemy units that it's in contact with.  I like this and it feels fairly realistic in that units can't single out enemies while ignoring others that are right next to them.

What I'm not sure about is how you actually do the combat.  The game has a lot of modifiers for the attack roll, around a dozen or so.  This is a personal pet peeve of mine that I don't like having to add and subtract numerous modifiers.  I'm not saying it's horrible, it's just doing a lot of something that I generally don't like.  But it's probably a testament to how good the game is in that I seem to enjoy playing in spite of this.

Next up I'm going to tackle one of the larger scenarios.  2nd St. Albans maybe?