An editor's job is never done

After a good night's sleep, I've had another look at the first draft of the revised Gathering of Hosts. Found lots of minor language tweaks, 1 change of mind and 2 big "too tired" omissions/accidental erasures. 

For reasons that escape me now, I had deprived medium cavalry of the ability to shoot and move, it has been restored. 

Light troops were intended to be able to self order a single move. That somehow got deleted. The idea is primarily that it will allow light infantry and skirmishers to move and fight effectively in broken and difficult terrain but also that fiddling with skirmishers shouldn't overly distract a general from the real fight. They still need orders to rally or double move.

and it was intended that a 1" fallback from melee could be followed up, that was the whole point. 

 The are a few other minor things but the updated version is now loaded. 

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A new year, a new version

The 1st draft of the revised Gathering of Hosts has now been uploaded to Google docs.

In brief, having decided to drop WHAB, a decision to reverse the slow process of converting to single figures and movement trays was not long in following. Despite having various Old School leanings, and despite the potential flexibility, the awkwardness of the single figures and the rules advantages of basing the rules on elements   have swung me back to how I have tended to approach ancients for 25 years, with a few twists.

I have not pursued the grid option but the changes were strongly influenced by Bob Cordery's work with chessboard wargames.  Essentially, the rules are now close to being an ancients version of the phantasm called the Square Brigadier (which rapidly turned into the latest version of Hearts of Tin).  The troops types are those already laid out in Gathering of Hosts, with the orders dice system, initially inspired from DBA though somewhat different in application and a simple hit system inspired by Morschauser, with my own twist on it all.

I am now chomping at the bit to get the Persians on the table. I want to start with something different but a refight of a Greek& Persian wars battle will have to follow soon as a benchmark test.
 

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King Dariross The Obscure and the Art of Changing Horses

My original aims for the Gathering was to refurbish my OS 25mm ancients and get them on the table, making use of as many existing figures as possible and without adding too many figures. Still good aims and the logic that picked the Lydian campaign  as the best route to that goal is still sound. However, I missed a couple of key factors.

I wanted to paint up more Medes & Persians but in order to have a valid use for them,  I needed more Lydians even though I already knew that I was tired of painting Greeks and Greek type troops.  So, the Persians sit and wait while I work through a list of Greek-ish Lydians, or rather don't work through it. I wouldn't mind adding something different like a big phalanx of Egyptian spearmen for Thymbra as per Xenephon but the coffers are bare.

I did briefly consider Hyboria but I wanted to stay with the historical  fantasy approach and the Mede & Persian empire. Luckily, I don't need to scrap any of the troops I have done up or the campaign itself. After all we all knew going into this that the Lydians would eventually be conquered, it was just a matter of when so I can incorporate the Lydians, Phyggians, Thracians and Greeks into the Persian army as subjects and mercenaries and reserve the option to come back and play out the Lydian campaign later.

So its off to the mysterious East. Expansion of the empire is one possibility but there were numerous revolts and what better use for my armies than a civil war? The image in my mind are a series of walled towns, near the mountains, the Caspian on one flank, India on the other. Horse archers, proto-cataphracts, city militia and a few elephants.  hmmmmm

Another change since I started this trip is that my experiment with WHAB style individual figures and movement trays has failed. I'm going back to my old standard elements. Now that doesn't necessarily affect the rules that I started working on, but as long as I am making changes, this seems like the time. Having quite enjoyed playing some games with Bob Cordery's gridded wargame,  I think it may be time to have another look at Morschauser and have a fresh go at an element set.

Winter Quarters

There is no doubt about it, the Lydian army has stalled again.

Within 2 weeks I expect to finish rearranging my room and will have a "permanent" painting area again. At that time I expect painting to step up but there is a huge back log of various things and while I have 2 separate Lydian units 1/2 done, I am not looking forward to the prospect and not feeling an urge to field the Lydians in a game.

Perhaps I'll force the issue and finish the lancers or perhaps I'll troll through the boxes and see what takes my fancy. In any event, I need to get the Medes out sometime in April to test out the revised table.

Elephants! I found elephants!

Having turned my attention back to Cyrus the Great, I recent;y came across an online translation of Ctesias's Persica. This describes (briefly) an expedition by Cyrus against the Derbices, a nation on the Syr Darya. These ambush him with a force including elephants sent by their Indian allies. Aha!

Now, these elephants probably looked more like your average, ancient Indian army elephants than they do the Hinchliffe Sassinid elephant kits that I picked up cheap last year (or was it the year before?) I picked them up, partly because I got a verry good deal and partly because I used to have a pair, a long time ago and liked them even if they weren't as impressive as my massive Garrison Carthaginian beast. The elephants were
one of several units that for reasons I have now forgotten, don't appear to have graduated from college with me.

The original Pachyderms in action in the 70's and yes this is a repeat photo. There didn't seem to be much point in snapping a shot of a bagged elephant kit.


OK so that's not justification for an elephant IN my Mede/Persian army but it is justification to paint up some up for an enemy and nicely gives me a focal point for another enemy, One that could take part in a (rather stretched)  3 way campaign. I had considered the Saka or Massagetae as a 4th army but  they just didn't seem distinct enough and didn't seem to offer anything new for a table top game except the possibility of a swirling conflict of horse archers which is not particularly well suited to my new smaller table which I am planning.

Now I'm not exactly sure what the Derbices looked like or what their army was like and I'd just as soon not know too much at this point (unless it reinforces my imaginings!). A mysterious people in a far away fertile land of walled cities on the edge of a desert? What's not to love?

Given their geographic location, something similar to the Saka and Bactrians seems reasonable. I picture a largely peltast like force supported by archers and cavalry including horse archers, and possibly some chariots since they were still in use in India for some time to come. Dress to be similar as well with trousers, tunic and soft cap. Again, the end result will be troops that can be an enemy or be incorporated  into an Achaemenid army. Eventually some real Indian troops could be added for additional colour.

The plan now looks something like:

a) A Grek army, on its own or allied to the Lydians or as a source of mercenaries for the Persians
b) A Mede/Persian army including proto-cataphracts ala Cyropaedia.
c) A Lydian army including mercenaries/allies supplied by Babylon/Assyria and Egypt including arabs as well as various Anatolian troops including Phrygians, Lydians, Greeks, Thracians/Bythnians, and other tribes from the fringes. All of these could also serve as subjects and mercenaries in an Achamenid army.
d) The Derbices  possibly with gratuitous Massagatae allies as well as Indian ones and including elephants.
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The Lydian Lancers begin to gather

Having made progress on the Phrygian infantry component of my Lydian army, I decided to start in on the cavalry. As always, the information is sparse and largely speculative. Its very possible that the Lydian cavalry looked a lot like some of the armoured lancers on contemporary Greek vases in chiton, bell corselet and plumed helmet or they may have looked more like the Amazon cavalry and like the infantry figures that were the inspiration for the Phrygian infantry that appear in the Funcken & Saxetorph books and the Garrison Miniatures ranges..    .

Going the Greek route would be fairly safe and possibly make the figures more widely usable. However, I already have more Greek cavalry than I can normally use and I want this project to feel semi-mythical so the less common (and less Greek) the better. I made two decisions:

1) The clothes should match my Phrygian infantry in style to promote a sense of identity in the army and of "not being in Kansas" so to speak.

2) Since the Lydians had close contact (and conflict) with various kingdoms which used iron lamellar or scale armour, it seemed reasonable that they may have used it and doing so would make them look less classic Greek even with Greek helmets.

I already had a few RAFM cavalry in scale armour so, last year during their big sale, I raided the various RAFM ranges for Hellenistic cavalry in scale armour and used Thracian and other helmets (including a cataphract helmet with full face plate just for the heck of it, looks very Hollywood) and gave them nice heavy spears.

It was tempting to get back into shading on these but after doing the stripes on the sleeves and other finnicky bits my enthusiasm sank back to normal and the gloss varnish confuses shading anyway (and the lens as well!).

As planned, there will be two new units of Lydian lancers each 12 strong plus two units raised from existing Greek & Macedonian heavy cavalry, (subjects, allies or mercenaries perhaps) and various light cavalry.


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Working up to Thymbra

Well, here I am, starting out on the 2nd year of the Median Revival.  I didn't get as many figures painted as I would have liked and didn't really get the campaign humming along properly but I did played more Mede/Persian  games than I expected even if they were all solo. I'm not ready to take another stab at the campaign, it didn't work well to drive painting and I need more stuff table-ready before I try again. So, what am I going to do?

Well, 2 of the games last year were refights of Greco-Persian battles, Marathon and Platea. Now its time to push the Lydians a bit so I am setting my sights on Thymbra. Evidence is shaky at best as usual but there is enough floating around  to make a workable game around what figures I have. The odds of me finding a few thousand allied Egyptian "hoplites" anytime this year is pretty remote so I suspect that there will be substitutions and concessions as usual.  I also want to fit the game on a 5'x6' playing area and play the game in 3 hours. This implies some serious compression, something on the order of 1-3,000 men per "element".

I should have a rough OB, a painting schedule. and a planned play date later this month. June would be the earliest date and I'm now thinking September or October as a more likely date and I might push it to the end of the year.  There will be other games in the meantime. New troops and rules will have to be tested if nothing else. I may stick with Gathering of Hosts but am tempted to try adapting Legio and may also give Basic Impetus a try.

and now, a gratuitous and completely  irrelevant shot of my 1/72nd plastic barbarian horde fighting amongst itself. (standing in as DBA Early Visigoths vs Late Germans)

(and yes they owe their existence to the inclusion of scaled down copies of Marx's 25mm "Vikings")