Bow & Spear

If you are putting together any flavour of Achamenid Persian army, then sooner or later, you have to deal with the question of how the infantry were armed. The confusion is due to the old conundrum of a little knowledge, in this case, conflicting knowledge. There is no question that spears, bows and shields were used by the Persians, Medes and various subject nations in addition to various hand weapons. The question is in what combinations? The evidence of a small amount of comtemporary artwork seems to imply that different units carried different combinations: bow & spear, spear and shield or bow and shield. Herodotus says that Cyrus divided the archers from the spearmen but describes the units in Xerxes' army as being armed with all three. A popular theory today is that the front rank had spear and shield while rear ranks carried bows.

Here we see the advantagce of element or unit based combat capability. Assign a missile factor to the unit and a close combat factor, fill the bases with figures to taste, and off you go. Simple and effective! Obviously I'm not going to go there. No, I've been increasingly seduced back into the world of toy soldiers and thus, individually  based wargame figures and while one can still give a unit combat and missile factors even if the figures taht constituute it aren't lued to bases and it is not absolutely essential that the figures are treated in WYSIWYG manner, it is part of the charm to do so.

Since WAB caters to this and is popular with most of my most likely opponants, its worth looking at how they treat the Persians. Right away we see both the strength and weakness of the system. The official lists give suggestions but let you make your own mind up as to what you think is the best intreptation of the history. Not that this isn't possible with other rules if you have a mind to, but I like to see it encouraged. The problem is that when dealing with individual figures in a scaled down unit with varied weapons, there is rarely a good solution. Their proposed one is to field 1 rank of spearmen and 3 of archers. Fair enough but the gamesman in me immediately says "wait a minute, a single rank of spearmen fights exactly the same as a rank of guys with just handweapons so why should I pay extra?". The historian says "well even if I buy into the front rank of spearmen intreptation, that theory says 1 spearmen and 9 archers make up a file, that's 90% archers,  not 75%".  Finally, and most importantly, I say "but the figures I want to use come from the days when we believed that Herodotus meant what he said and was right, so my spearmen all carry bow and shield as well!"

Lucky for me not only is it "MY army" but the rules allow for what I have without having to resort to house rules or modifications. My Immortals will be well armed with every man having bow, spear and wicker shield. The Medes and Persians will have 2 ranks of bow, spear & shield  armed troops and 2 ranks of bow only troops in the rear.   All of the above will be able to form the shield barrier depending on the rules being used.

The subject nations will be more varied and will be fielded as the figures are, some just spear or javelin and shield, some just bow, some mixed bow & spear, oh yes and 1 unit of slingers. I haven't decided yet which bow armed levies will be able to do the shield barrier thing.

The cost of reorganization. My 36 Immortals merged with 12 Medes to make two 24 man units. Since this was the size originally envisaged, I have enough leftovers to end up with 1 Immortal and 2 Mede/Persian infantry regiments all 24 strong. Somewhere down the road, I will add a palace guard in long robes but there are 12 guardsmen that will have to turn in the yellow caps and red over tunics that mark my Immortals and don the white caps and varied tunis of mortal soldiers. I have 12 castings ready for priming to deal with first though.

Next entry, selecting a campign army list without including nations not yet conquered.
 

Second Thoughts

I spent a considerable time and effort convincing myself that 18 figure units, or more accurately, units with 3 bases each of 6 infantry or 6 bases of 3 cavalry, were the way to go. Maybe one day I'll learn that when I have to work that hard to convince myself of something then its probably not right. While preparing to refight Marathon, I ended up having to play with unit configurations and found that surprise, surprise, the 24 man units that I had originally envisaged were flexible and looked good.

As originally envisaged: 24 man units with 12 man light infantry and cavalry units.

Now if I do revert to 24 man infantry units, what do I do with the cavalry? Keeping to the premise that all regiments are 1,000 strong I have 2 choices: field 24 man cavalry and skirmisher units or field the cavalry and light infantry as 1/2 units or wings, for example the Skythian horse archer unit would be 24 strong but might take the field as two 12 man wings or even four 6 man troops on the day of battle. Actually having the "quarter" as an administrative and tactical sub-unit appeals to me. I have no reason to believe the Persians used such an organization but then, as I've said before, this is "MY" army.

Of course, now I'll need to paint up more troops, but that's not a bad thing.

One Last Look Back

One of the 1st wargame units I painted, was a unit of LMI (light-medium infantry for the uninitiated) with spear and bow. Thee were converted from Airfix Ancient British kneeling figures, short sleeved red shirts, leather jack, yellow pants, conical bronze helmet. Absolutely useless under WRG3, light infantry would outshoot them and heavy infantry could slauhter them in hand to hand. When I started thinking about those old armies, and checked my usual sources of inspiration from college days, I came up short. The bow and spear idea came from the Persian entry on the list of allowable double weaponry. But why did I think those Britons looked like Persians? Then I dug out an even older book as I started to prepare to refight Marathon.

  Well, well, lookie there! That's them in the middle, well pretty much. How about that?
The book is Stories of Great Battles by Robert N. Webb, illustrated by Shannon Stirnweis, published by Whitman Publishing Co in 1960.  More on the book and the Marathon refight on my other blog.

The good news is that I have started work again on organizing and rebasing as I prepare for a small spring campaign. More on this later this week.

Tales from beyond the frontier

Last March, 4 of us got together for a weekend WAB  campaign of the use what you got sort. My Persians, Gary's Assyrians, Big Jeff's Barbarian's and Little Jeff with his dad's Carthaginians.  We played four 1 on 1 games (2 each) and then the Persians with their Assyrian levies, err I mean allies against the various outlandish types. Having seen what was out there, we decided there was no need to expand the Empire. (unhuh, yup that was our story).

In the first game, Rosius destroys the Phoenician Rebels, err I mean the Carthaginians, despite their use of strange beasts.

Persian levies massed for the final battle. Pity that our Assyrian allies cracked...........

RAFM Skythian noble cavalry chases off some some barbarian tribesmen.

A new blog

Happy New Year  to all!  As promised, I have just started a 2nd blog. There still some wrinkles to work out, especially as to how the 2 blogs will relate and interface, if at all, but the new blog will consist primarily of battle reports as I play through some of the scenarios and Tabletop Teasers in Battlegames Magazine. It can be found at: http://gameofmonth.blogspot.com/
Hopefully next week I can spend a bit more time working on my armies and will be able to add some more posts and start towards getting the lads on the table again.