Meeting of Hosts: The camel meets the straw

I have a habit of writing my own rules but while I have occasionally tinkered with various ideas for ancients, I have never really pursued writing a set. Partly this is because there have always been so many sets out there, but mostly because ancients was a social thing for me and it was easier to just play whatever popular commercial set we had settled on at the time. WAB came out just as Hat was releasing its first 54mm plastic Punic Wars range and the two just seemed to go together. Mostly it was the Old School aspects like treating the figure as a figure, rather than the new fangled bits, the unpredictability that meant that an early setback wasn't always fatal and the flexibility that allowed us to play TT Teaser type scenarios without bending the rules. When, after a long hiatus, I resurrected my 25mm armies and resumed a little ancient gaming a few years ago, WAB was still a popular choice for those those of using 25mm and up and better yet, it was still the same set of rules with any additional rules and errata being easily and legally available,

Now, I haven't done any competition gaming in a long while and don't intend to, so my only concern is with local gaming. Even so, having a firm set of rules that I didn't allow myself to fiddle with was a nice break from my other periods and made it worth while putting up with those aspects of WAB that I didn't like, even when playing solo. Now, since I can't justify spending the cost of a  new edition, if I continue to play WAB, I will find myself in the position of choosing whether to
a) play with the old rules knowing that there are improvements and that what we are playing is no longer "standard" if I go somewhere else and play,
b) agreeing to a local set of amendments which will be even less standard elsewhere,
c) breaking my own beliefs and downloading or accepting and using a downloaded copy that was probably uploaded without consent of the publisher and thus is breaking copyright.

 I was all set to go with option b and the friends I have talked to so far have been in agreement but suddenly it seems like a lot of work for something so flawed and since the results will be non-standard and the rules may change with each game depending on which circle of friends I am with. Since there will be no real standard to maintain and the Gathering of Hosts is largely a solo affair, I may as well write the set of rules I want to play with.If my friends can be brow beaten into playing the same, fine, if not then I'll cheerfully play whatever mixed version of WAB we agree on.

It'll take awhile to flush out a basic set for my Lydian campaign and even longer to expand it to a wider context but the basic form is already fixed. The list of credits will be long and the impact of WRG & Comitatus will be felt as well as Featherstone and WAB. The key goals will be:

a) flexible enough to play pitched battles or raids, ambushes  and other low level teasers,
b) simple enough and intuitive enough to be played without a quick reference sheet most of the time
c)  individual figures grouped into units vs elements though flexible enough to allow the use of the latter.
d) emphasis on basic troop types and the submerging of minor differences rather than emphasis of special characteristics.
e) a role for commanders other than morale and being combat super men.
f) simple and intuitive even when superficially wrong rather than complex or clever and right. In other words, some one who doesn't know the rules and isn't an expert should be able to learn the basics in 5 minutes and play and understand what is happening without learning game specific terminology or abstract constructs. This means things like removing figures as casualties to track that the unit has been weakened rather than tracking cohesion etc even though the figure loss will not be realistic in terms of numbers and when they come off etc
g) last but not least, armies used for this set must be easily convertible to WAB or other sets.

The basic structure of the game will include:
a) dicing for initiative each turn with winner moving 1st or 2nd. Units stop before contact
b) simultaneous shooting
c) declare charges according to initiative then resolve

Morale will be at least 3 step: good, shaken, routed
Missile fire and melee  will be based on dice per so many men followed by armour saves and may trigger morale checks. Impact may cause a recoil in some form.

Troops will be grouped by function with armour, morale and drill being properties affecting performance.
Units without a general/wing commander will have to test to move but not to shoot or counter/charge.
 
Now, off to work on a rough draft before the next Lydian campaign game.

  

Rising Tide

There is nothing like playing a game, even a solo game, to pique one's interest in a project. First came the preparations and 2 solo versions of Marathon, then when a snow storm cancelled the live play version, I decided to go ahead and improvise a Lydian-Persian clash to try out the new proposed OB's even though I haven't painted up any actual Phyrgian or Lydian troops yet.  The result was a fun game with that sort of not quite historical feel that I was looking for. The sort of feeling I get from re-reading the account of the Hyborian Age battle in Featherstone's Wargames or the battle accounts in Charles Grant's The Ancient Wargame or in various Tabletop Teaser reports (for example, read this account of an ambush of Princess Zenobi's caravan ( http://www.box.net/shared/5q0wqui8s4 ).  A report of the Bridge of Boats game will appear on the Battle of the Month blog before too long but it brought up some interesting points.

The calm before the storm.

Firstly, although  my original intent was to do just enough units to play a few Teasers, I'm now thinking that I want enough troops to be able to run a campaign with more troops on the shelf than will be needed in any one game. Not sure yet exactly how many more but since shelf space has not expanded, this means I will have to be tougher about evicting some unused or unpopular units or armies as well as finding a way to leniently include some favoured units that don't quite fit. Things like 3rd C Thracian mercenaries in helmets with rhomphai, some wild barbarian mercenaries from beyond the boundaries of the civilized world, perhaps from beyond the Black Sea, some with perhaps a slightly celtic air. 

Secondly, I like some form of uncertainty in solo games and have been used to finding this in some combination of command control and variable moves. The morale and combat  results in WHAB seem to provide enough unpredicatility to satisfy myself and scupper carefully and not so carefully laid plans alike. \\\
They certainly provided several turn around points in the Bridge of Boats river crossing just played.

Thirdly, what to do about catapults? Now, really, in the 5th/6th C  I shouldn't need to think about any sort of engines of war unless carrying out a siege but when laying out the river crossing, I felt an awful urge to include them, like Alexander against the Skythians. Now if I was starting from scratch, I would probably be planning an Imperial Roman vs Sassinid campaign and Scorpions and Onagers would not be a problem. The same would apply if playing a Hyborian campaign, and of course I have a few engines kicking about,  hardly ever used in 30 years, some closer to appropriate than others. The jury is out, but if this is going to be my one ancients period then I may wave my magical wand and include them in certain scenarios, (like a river crossing).

Fourthly, the games this month have confirmed my feeling that points are not a good way to balance a game since some troops are always more worth their points than other, especially in certain situations and in a campaign, troops can't always pick their situation. So, while I may count points after the fact for interest  sake, I won't take them into account when designing the campaign armies. Units will be standard sized and troops armed as they are.Proportions of unit types included will be dependent on what seems reasonabl;e crossed with what is available and what I feel liek painting.

Next post, a first stab at orders of battle for the two sides.









 

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.

IN THE BEGINNING

In order to see where I am going, it sometimes help to see where I have come from. My introduction to wargaming came around 1971 when I stumbled across a copy of Don Featherstone's Battles with Model Soldiers but after various explorations, copies of Charge! and Littlewars, I really became a serious (sic) wargamer while at the College Militaire Royal de St. Jean when I acquired a copy of WRG 3rd ed ancient rules and Simon MacDowall and I started painting and converting Airfix figures into mighty armies, well ok, into the puny advance guards of mighty armies. As my pay was slowly converted into Minifigs and Garrison miniatures, my armies, despite a gloss of tartan and some gaelic names, took the form that they have tended to follow ever since, shock cavalry supported by horse and foot archers and light infantry with spear and javelin and the occasional chariot or elephant. Those are my Valdurians on the right, the picture was taken somewhere around 1976 at the Old Fort on Ile Ste Helene in Montreal.

(note due to a digital (as in finger) error, the original text was deleted. What follows is vaguely similar...)
The wheels of time turned and fictional armies turned to historical ones, Arthurian (obviously going in small steps but Sword at Sunset has been one of my favorite books since high school and Rosemary Sutcliffe a favorite author), Late Roman (Hincliffe), Late Saxon (more Garrison) and eventually elements of the Valdurian army inclding Garrison Scythian foot archers and Sassinid slingers and javelinmen found themselves the nucleus of a Late Persian army when I added Skytrex hard plastic & Benassi metal hoplites, thracians and Scythians (in those days no respectable Athenoan army was without its contingent of Scythian foot archers!) then started converting RAFM Hellenistic figures. These faced off against Agisilaus and his Spartans until more hoplites and peltasts formed a late Athenian army . Some Republican Romans were painted up for a Legio game at Cangames and then the world turned again and Armati Carthaginian and Medieval Scots (more Valdurians) took the stage. Then came the 54mm WAB Interegnum. (must dig out some pictures of those). Finally about 3 years ago, I dusted off those old Persians and found that I could field a 3,000 pt Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB) army. Just then, thanks to Rob Young, the old Garrison miniatures resurfaced so I added more and started back dating the army.



Note the archers on the hill in the left foreground, look familiar from the 1st picture?

So things are good right? Welllllll first I played some games against Gary McMahon's Assyrians (for example the Tabletop Teaser Getting Away With It) and started thinking about the Rise of the Persian Empire instead of its Decline and Fall. At about the same time I started unpacking old boxes from storage into my new gamesroom. What a mess, partial armies (various figures sold off), different basing, lots of broken stuff and orphans. What to do?


Next post: The analysis and formation of a project plan as I reduce this mess to 2 organized armies that can campaign against each other or proxy as enemies for any takers from 700BC(E) to ad700.