Number Of Units

ANYONE who widely reads accounts of ancient battles will, sooner or later, be struck by the realisation that the smaller army nearly always wins.

So frequently does this happen that one wonders why generals of the time did not do their best to shed as many of their men pre-battle as possible.

However, a not unconnected fact is that contemporary, or relatively near-contemporary, accounts of ancient battles are nearly always written by, or based on the sources of, the victors.

Since numbers given in such accounts are so unreliable, I have much sympathy with Neil Thomas's approach in Ancient & Medieval Wargaming of having all armies consist of eight units.

I will generally try to follow this, except where to do so would be bordering on the absurd, a possible example being one of the earliest battles in the Bible, namely Abraham's night ambush of the Elamite alliance following the Battle of Siddim.

I write "possible" because I am still pondering the best way of refighting the ambush, and anyway I have not yet decided for certain to use Thomas's rules in my biblical project.