Important 10mm News

MAGISTER Militum, which announced its closure last year, has at last revealed to whom its 10mm ranges of historical figures, including extensive ancients, have been sold.

The new owner is Baccus 6mm, who, as the name suggests, is famous for its 1:285-scale figures.

The company has set up a new website to sell the Magister Militum ranges under the name Tenth Legion. 

Move & Fire

ONE of the interesting mechanisms in Bob Cordery's ancient rules in Developing The Portable Wargame is the resolution of moving and firing.

In most sets of rules, including those in Neil Thomas's Ancient & Medieval Wargaming, there are separate moving and shooting phases.

But in Cordery's rules each unit completes its moving and firing, then another unit follows, and so on.

This worked well in my On The Table battle, and I think it is worth testing with Thomas's rules. 

Victory

VICTORY in Neil Thomas's rules in Ancient & Medieval Wargaming goes to the player who reduces the enemy army to a quarter of its starting strength, ie two two units (armies in A&MW always begin with eight units).

I intend modifying this to makjng the aim being to reduce the enemy to below 50%, which I think is more realistic. In other words, an army is defeated once it has lost five of its eight units.

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.

Generals

ARMY commanders played a hugely important role in ancient battles, especially in biblical times when a general was often also a king.

Neil Thomas's rules in Ancient & Medieval Wargaming do not reflect this.

One way of doing it would be to add a general (and bodyguard) as a separate unit.

But with armies consisting of eight units, I believe that would be disproportionate.

My plan is to instead rule that one of an army's elite units should be declared as having the general with it.

In the unlikely event that an army only has average and poor units, the general should be appointed to one of the average units, which will then count as elite.

The presence of the general means the unit gets a +1 modifier when testing morale.

The downside for an army is that if the general's unit is eliminated, every friendly unit within line-of-sight must immediately test its morale, and every other friendly unit must test its morale at the start of the next turn.

Speeding The Game

IN my biblical dry-run battle we, ie I and my regular wargaming opponent, felt the melees dragged on too long.

And generally speaking I think it would be good to resolve all combat quicker.

Under Neil Thomas's rules in Ancient & Medieval Wargaming a unit loses a base after suffering four hits, which means 16 hits are needed to destroy a unit (all units start with four bases).

My plan is to speed this by removing a base after a single hit.

This will also do away with unsightly markers used to record how many hits a unit has suffered.

However I will water this change down by ruling that a die score of 5+ is required, rather than Thomas's 4+.

And I will further mitigate the effects by adapting an idea from Bob Cordery's Developing The Portable Wargame.

When a unit has suffered a hit (assuming it remains a hit after a saving roll), throw a die to determine the effect of the hit.

Unit Quality....Lose a base....Fall back 3cm*

Elite                      1-2                   3-6

Average               1-3                   4-6

Poor                     1-4                   5-6

*A unit that cannot fall back 3cm, eg if it has impassable terrain behind it, is surrounded by enemy troops, or has friendly troops not in open-order directly behind it and preventing even retreat diagonally, loses a base. 

When an enemy unit falls back in a melee, the victor, if it has not lost a base in the same turn, may choose to follow up by advancing 3cm and immediately instigating another round of hand-to-hand fighting.

These are quite radical changes to the rules. Only testing in a battle will determine whether they are for good or bad.

Terminology

NEIL Thomas in his biblical rules in Ancient & Medieval Wargaming uses the terms Heavy and Light in a rather confusing way.

You might think Heavy Infantry, Heavy Cavalry and Heavy Archers would, by definition, have substantial protection in the form of body armour and/or shields.

Similarly you might think Light Infantry and Light Cavalry would necessarily have little or no protection.

However he is using Heavy and Light in cases where the terms close order and open order are more appropriate.

An example is the New Kingdom Egyptian army, which is allowed up to two units of archers.

These are defined as "Heavy Archers, Light armour, Average."

The last classification refers to their quality, which can be elite, average or poor, but by Heavy he means close-order.

Accordingly I will use the terms close-order and open-order when referring to formations, and heavy, medium and light when referring to body armour and shields.

Command & Control

ONE thing notably absent from Neil Thomas's rules, in Ancient & Medieval Wargaming and other books, is restrictions on how many units a player may move in a turn.

He argues that players make enough mistakes on their own without the need for extra uncertainty.

I am not sure about this, and for my mid-18th century rules, which owed a lot to Thomas's ideas on horse-and-musket wargaming, I eventually adopted the pip system pioneered by the Wargames Research Group.

Armies of the period were generally divided into two wings and a centre, and by allocating different dice - a 10-sided one for the centre, six-sided dice for the flanks - I restricted the number of actions, including moving and firing, that could take place in a single turn.

However my armies for refighting the War of the Austrian Succession contained many more units than are allowed in Thomas's rules.

In Ancient & Medieval Wargaming armies consist of eight units, and, as I have mentioned before, I think this works well for battles where numbers are a matter of much speculation.

My move-variation rule already adds some uncertainty to a battle, and I propose to add more by adapting an idea from Bob Cordery's ancient rules in Developing The Portable Wargame.

He has players rolling dice at the start of each turn, higher thrower moving first.

This means that, not infrequently, an army will get to have two turns, or two half-turns to be more precise, in a row.

I will slightly modify this by awarding a great general a +1 modifier, and a poor general a -1 modifier.

With any luck these additions to Thomas's rules will do away with the need for command & control, but, to borrow a common expression from chess when discussing new moves in an opening, tests are needed.

Sling v Bow

THERE are four types of hand-held missiles in the biblical rules in Neil Thomas's Ancient & Medieval Wargaming - javelins, slings, bows on foot and bows on horseback.

Their ranges are, respectively, 8cm, 16cm, 24cm and 16cm, which, presumably, are effective ranges rather than maximums.

The difference between bows on foot and on horseback is easily explained: "A mobile horse is inevitably not as stable a firing platform as the earth on which the footman stood."

Unfortunately Thomas does not specifically mention whether the range of bow-armed charioteers should be 16cm or 24cm.

On the one hand charioteers are standing upright, rather than on horseback, but cannot be regarded as "on foot" in the normal sense of the phrase as a chariot floor is not stable.

I think the shooting range of bow-armed charioteers should be the same as for horse archers, namely 16cm.

So far, so simple, and in accordance with the spirit of the rules, I believe.

But the question of the range of slings is another matter.

It might be thought obvious that a bow is more powerful and so will have a longer range.

But my reading of authorities on the subject suggests that the ranges of bows and slings were compatible, especially when it came to effective range, ie the range at which weapons were typically used.

Some bows had longer ranges than other bows, but the same was true for slings, whose ranges were strongly influenced by the size of shot.

There were times when slings considerably outranged bows.

The following speech from Xenophon's Anabasis is informative: "The enemy can shoot arrows and sling stones so far that neither our Cretan bowmen nor our javelinmen can reach them in reply.

"We need slingers ourselves at once, [and] I am told there are Rhodians in our army, that most of them understand the use of the sling, and that their missiles carry no less than twice as far as those from the Persian slings.
"The latter have only a short range, because the stones used in them are as large as the hand can hold. The Rhodians, however, are versed also in the art of slinging leaden bullets."

It might be wondered, if slingers were as good as good as archers, and at times better, why they were by medieval times more-or-less completely replaced by bowmen.

This was partly due to slingers requiring many years of habitual use and practice to become proficient, which was why slingers from certain areas, for example the Balearic islands, were especially sought after. Archery also required dedicated practice, but to a lesser extent.

Also, more widespread use of armour made archery less effective - so much so that in most of Europe traditional archery died out, with the crossbow replacing ordinary bows, until both were superseded by gunpowder weapons.

A further complication is that the sling was a concussion weapon, while the arrow was a piercing weapon, which again made their effectiveness vary.

However, the main point is that slingers should, in my opinion, have the same range as bows on foot, ie 24cm.

Move Variation

IN wargaming it is regarded as normal to use dice to help determine such major things as shooting, hand-to-hand fighting and morale.

Dice, or perhaps drawing cards, are also often used for the weather and special events.

But everyone seems happy with troops moving at a strictly regimented pace, which means that if, for example, two units from rival armies are heading for a particular feature, perhaps a hill top, it is easy to see which should get there first.

I like to shake this up in my rules by introducing what I call the move variation.

This has it that if a unit is ordered to advance at least 75% of its permissible move distance that turn, roll a six-sided die.

If the die lands 2-5, all proceeds normally, but a 6 means 25% is added to the distance to be covered, while a 1 means 25% is deducted from the wished-for distance.

This represents the unexpected effects of terrain and other possible factors that may catch a unit by surprise.

The rule should not be enforced too zealously. For example a regiment sent to guard the bank of a river should not have to enter the river thanks to the move-variation rule.