The Battle of the Halys, sort of.

To test the  current version of the Gathering of Hosts rules, I staged a game loosely based on a scaled down version of the Granicus with Lydians and Medes standing in. This will kick off a truce and let me get on with the Great Rebellion, this time with a little more background imagineering.

The rules themselves under went some fierce scrutiny, primarily aimed at preferences and some very visible changes without changing the core ideas and values. The updated rules as played are available from the google docs. The battle report is on BattleGame of the Month.  The short version is that the Medes are convinced that scythed chariots are the weapon of the future........well, as long as you can get the enemy to present the flank of his phalanx to you......

I want to run the rules again so next up will be a game which sees the Rebels and the Great King's forces clashing over an important watering hole at Apochyrpha on the border of Hyrkania.
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Experimental Clibinari

I decided to indulge myself and start in on some Clibinari. These are from the  Garrison 25mm Achaemenid list. What I really wanted were some Sassinid figures, but I had a unit of these in my Valdurian army many years ago. Like my Sassinid elephants, they went missing when I graduated from college and headed west. To be honest, I expected to have followed up with Sassinids by now but maybe this fall. In any event, it felt like time to paint some up. This is where I hit a small hitch, I had no idea how the figure should look. 

This figure, with its baggy pants, cowl, short sleeved over tunic and gallic style hauberk, doesn't resemble any illustrations of Achaemenids that I have seen, thought the short sleeves are typical of Garrison Persians.  I thought I saw something similar in the 2,500 th anniversary parade but on reviewing the video footage I couldn't find them again so perhaps I imagined it.  That was one problem, the other was that I hadn't decided yet who they will represent, Rebels, Persian Nobles, subjects from which province?  It seemed smart to stop and figure that out and work on a test figure.

After trying a dab a colour or 2 to see how it looked, and doing some thinking, I decided that these would be Nobles answering the call to arms, not a regular guard unit. My first thought was to make them Rebels along with my Garrison light cavalry, my "Hyrkanians", but the more I looked at what figures I had available, painted and unpainted,  and thought about scenarios, I decided to put the Garrison Persians on one side, that made these loyal Nobles. One question answered.  

Leather seemed like a reasonable fabric to make a protective hood out of but in addition to not being able to find .any Persian or similar examples, the hood has wrinkles like cloth not leather thick enough to protect. fabric. If you ignore the helmet, the head piece actually resemble one versions of the usual Persian headgear. Since this is often shown as white, I tried painting this one white. That seemed a bit too stark a contrast so I fell back on a dark yellow.

The short sleeved over tunic could probably be almost any colour, my Immortals and light cavalry wear uniform versions but then you can see the whole thing, here only the sleeves show. More than that, I decided that these would be Nobles rather than guardsmen and uniform doesn't sit well with Nobles. A compromise was in order, I went with a dark red that might have been a leather under tunic or might be a tabard of sorts.

Baggy pants and tunics were next. Since they were now nobles answering the call, colourful and non-uniform seemed in order. If the pants had been tight, I'd have thought about embroidery but stiff embroidery doesn't seem to match billowing fabric and I didn't want to go for the cotton print look either so solid colours with embroidery on the tunic, mostly a little brighter colours than this fellow with his dark blue pants perhaps.

Although the armour might be  bronze scale, I have opted for iron since that says "cataphract" to me, but I added polished bronze bits to brighten them. The shields might have been wood or leather or born personal devices but without a reference point, these being nobles in the King's service, and me being lazy, I settled on plain purple shields with a bronze boss.

Now, 11 more to go as the opposing Royal and Rebel armies take shape in my mind.
 

Ready for a Taste Test

I have gone back to the January edition of gathering of Hosts and applied various lessons learned. The results are now ready for a play test, hopefully one by me this weekend. We will be on puppy watch so I can't go far anyway.

Apart from tightening up details and language, the big change is to replace a rally test and a break test with automatic disorder if suffering 25% missile casualties in 1 turn or losing a round of melee by suffering 50% more hits than inflicted. A compulsory rally/break test for all disordered units then closes the turn. This avoids most of the double jeopardy issues with a separate test but gives a small chance to recover in melee while putting levies, under strength units and melee losers at risk of panic.

It also allowed me to simplify the movement rules.

The old figure rally rule was both fun and tiresome and while it sometimes worked, I think this will give me the same general end result with less fuss and more reliability. Poor units will tend to fall apart, good quality heavy units can withstand a tremendous amount of missile fire before being destroyed but are at risk of temporary disorder.

The updated rules are available on Google Docs.

Large, Small or Not at All

That pretty much sums up two key issues that are on the table as I prime some Clibinari and try to figure out where I was at with the rules last June: scale and unit organization.

Scale can mean various things when talking about a miniature wargame, what I am considering is the size of size of battle being represented and its implications for ground scale and the figure to man ratio.  The traditional approach was to design a low level game and then fudge it for use with big battles, an approach that seemed to work well for many despite the inherent contradictions that meant that it probably wasn't  really a good simulation at either end.

I started off last year with an "Old School" approach settling on 24 man "regiments". Each theoretically represented around 1,000 men,  but were used to refight both "bathtubbed" historical battles and scale-less Tabletop Teasers, some approaching battles in feel, others with a skirmish flavour.   In large part this is a reflection of the pleasure that I have had over the years from reading Charles Grant's ancient battle reports. Lately, I have been drawn to the idea of each stand being a unit.   This has confused the issue dreadfully.

Unfortunately, there are no right or wrong answers to these questions, they are a matter of preference.

So perhaps the real question is:
 "Is last year's decision still valid or is there a good reason to change course?".

I decided that a good starting point was to review the games played last year. All these were solo games (except the 40mm Prince Valiant skirmish which at first blush has nothing to do with the Gathering of Hosts). The battles ranged from an ambush of a priestess and her escort to refights of Platea and Marathon. The rules varied once I decided to start writing a set but they were all aimed at the same sort of  game, and I enjoyed them all. One mark for staying the course.

The ambush game was probably as low as the rules can go and really was smaller than what the game was designed to represent just as Platea and Marathon were technically larger than what the rules were designed to represent. The ambush game could have been played as easily, or perhaps better, using the Prince Valiant  Dark Age skirmish rules but oddly, it was a version of the mid-sized battle that was successfully played as a skirmish. Here, perhaps, we find another hidden question at the heart of the matter:

"Do I need 2 different 'ancient' collections?".

If all the skirmish games were played using the individually based 40mm Fall of Rome collection and the 25mm figures were used to recreate large battles, then there would be a clear separation of purpose beyond liking the look of this figure or that or being emotionally attached to various toys. After all, time for painting and playing are limited as is money for acquisition of figures. Wouldn't reduction to a single pre-gunpowder period make sense? Well, yes, but its not always about making sense and anyway, abandoning the Persian Project now after having just invested scarce resources to it doesn't make sense either.

If the Persians are going to stay, does it then make sense to rob them of the capability of fighting many different types of action just so the big battles can be done more realistically? Not to me. If they were redesigned to primarily refight the great battles of history as fought by all the Persian armies from the days of the Mede Kings to the fall of the Sassanians, wouldn't I then be forced to acquire yet more armies for them to fight as well? That doesn't make sense either.

What about altering the 25mm armies so that they can be used to provide a |'Portable Army'? This is the another question that has been lurking. If each stand becomes a 'unit' of a thousand men and a small game can be played with say 12 such units wouldn't that be convenient? At the same time, historical battles could be fought with large armies represented by 50,000 or more men using rules designed to do that. Both these suggestions have merit but only if these are things I really want to do. When and against who would I play these games. I have other portable games that I can play when I feel the need, do I need them in all periods?

I decided to go back to one of my other sources for inspiration, my tatty little Penguin translation of the Xenaphon's Anabasis.  It didn't take long for things to come together. Xenephon describes both small skirmishes and largish battles, but he does so in a way that you feel involved  at various levels. in fact you feel a bit like you do when playing some of those less than accurate simulations that were Old School ancient wargames or reading of of Grant's battle reports. No wonder I enjoyed what I had been doing last year, I was well primed for it.

In other words, it looks like I have allowed my self to be diverted from the path I was on by distractions and false trails. As long as abide by my allocations of shelving space there is not really any advantage to getting rid of existing collections if I take the long term view. For example, I have unpainted figures on hand for both Prince Valiant and my Persian armies and their foes and I may well buy more if I have the resources to spend but I can already stage games with either collection. The addition or refurbishment of  figures is only to add variety/options or to improve the look.  I can't paint or play both at the same time, but there may well be years of gaming ahead yet and even if each collection only gets out a few times a year or only has a few figures painted up or even skips a year, there will be games enough to make each worth having and figures enough to paint.

Given that conclusion, the answers become that my units should remain as they are, 24 figure "regiments" of a 1,000 men  that can be sent to do the work of 100 men or 10,000, without worrying about scale at all. What this also means is  that I need to revisit my rules, especially some of last June's experiments.

Contemplating the Great Divide

For the last 15 years, I have done my best to keep my ancient armies "compatible" with hobby standards, which meant, amongst other things, maintaining the ability to field 60mm wide elements regardless of how I based my troops. It hasn't always worked well for me and during that time, my Greeks and Persians have had, that I can recall, 8 opportunities to face some one else's army across the table, 5 of them against large 25mm figures using WHAB which isn't element based, 2 against large 25mm figures using Warmaster which neither of us were based for, and 1 using WHAB against a 1/72 plastic army based for WRG 3rd). The last opposed game was over 2 years ago. I don't see the opportunities increasing in the near future. Most of the large-25mm armies I might face aren't terribly appropriate enemies for my Persians anyway and the option to borrow an opponent always exists for away games. Hardly seems worth  the effort does it?

In amongst this, I have been looking at the old Grant book and looking over what's on hand with an eye to either refurbishing another old unit or starting a new one. My eye was caught on some of my older troops still based on a 15mm frontage and it brought me back to older days. My new units, in a mad attempt to harmonize 24 man  units with the option to go 2 deep or deeper while maintaining 60mm elements, and while accomodating some poorly disciplined spearmen, slid up to a 20mm frontage. Five mm doesn't sound like much but over the frontage of an army, it can mean an extra unit or 2 in the battle line, and now that I've cut my table down, that matters. It also happens to look more like massed troops.

So I am now contemplating heresy, mounting  6 heavy/medium infantry, 4 light infantry or 2 cavalry on a 45mm square base. Skirmishers will simply have their bases spread out. This will allow me to continue to field an average of 4 bases per unit so that they can go 2 deep or 4 deep but with the troops massed a little tighter with hoplites shield to shield.  I do have some heavy/medium infantry, which will remain unnamed, which cannot be squeezed onto a 15mm frontage but luckily, these can be squeezed comfortable into a 15mm depth so can be deployed 2 wide and 3 deep on the same base, so still 6 figures per element. Everyone is accommodated. That 2 of the new bases will fit inside a 4" hex is almost a coincidence that may or may not become important down the road. What ever the terrain is like, this will facilitate pursuing some Morschauser inspired rules and fitting the planned armies on the smaller table.

Not going to rush out and rebase the troops that have been recently rebased but I will try this out on the next units to be raised or refurbished. These questions of  basing, organization and compatibility have been  sticking points ever since I got frustrated with my experiment with singles and movement trays. Hopefully the way is now open to forge ahead again. My rules, my troops, my basing and organization and my not quite historical setting. Armies that only play at home, but guests welcome.