Russ has expressed his frustration with the (occasional) freak results that can arise in FOG - such as my Roman velites being caught in the rear by Carthaginian African Spears (ouch!) with -- vs ++ POA's and still managing to win the fight. But any system with dice involved will always through up such results.
Therefore we've tried both Impetus and DBA. On paper, Impetus (using only the free download rules rather than buying a full copy) looked impressive. Clear, concise rules and army lists with plenty of scope for tailoring an army. But in playing it, the rules started to grate very quickly. One example was in the use of skirmishers - who have to get very close to be able to get their missiles in and yet can be caught by virtually any opposing troop type. This led to skirmishers being massacred without being able to get away - a very unsatisfactory situation.
The troop values also seemed ridiculous - Gauls were almost as tough as the Romans they faced yet losing a Gallic group meant just 1 point from the Army total compared to 4 for a Roman infantry group! Very quickly we both became very disillusioned with Impetus and vowed 'never again'.
So we then turned to DBA. My neighbour Mark is a big DBA fan (as well as for the offshoot 'Hordes of the Things' - a fun variant with magic, gods, dragons etc.). He took us through a couple of battles to get the hang of the rules. At first I thought Russ was dead against them - especially as his Carthaginians took a bttering - but as we got into them we saw the clear benefits of DBA.
* Number of troops. Unlike other systems you only need a handful of bases for basic DBA (12 or so). This makes painting and fielding an army much easier to accomplish.
* Speed of play. A game of FOG for us takes a number of hours. However, we got in 3 games of DBA in an evening. And good battles they were too.
* Focus on tactics. The beauty of DBA is its simplicity. Movement and combat are generally easy to accomplish so you find yourself focusing more on the tactics themselves rather than games mechanics. Its more a game of chess than anything else.
* Cost. We've both now bought a set of DBA rules for £6 off E-Bay. Compared to the £10 or so each army list book costs in FOG its certainly a cheaper alternative. Combined with the small numbers of troops required to make an army in DBA it is definitely an attractive proposition.
We won't be abandoning FOG - but we feel that DBA does give us a good alternative - especially for campaign play (such as the Carthaginians fighting through the Spanish and Gauls to get to grips with the Romans).