I present another 'chunk' from the 'Designer's Notes' section of the rules, edited only to make them fit the blog format. These notes contain some more of the history and motivation behind the project, as well as touching on game play and the wargamer's bugbear: basing.
We wargamers are always searching for the perfect rules for any given period. Go on, honestly, how many sets of rules have you tried, or read, for the ancient period? And I'll bet, a pound to a penny, that the reason you're reading this is because you haven't found the perfect ancients rules yet, and you're hoping that this is them. Well, I'm sorry to say, these rules aren't perfect either. There are several good reasons for that.
The first, and probably most important, reason is that battle is inherently complex – so complex, and with so many interdependent variables, that to model it accurately would require an infinitely large set of rules. It would be very boring, and impossibly slow to play. Secondly, our understanding of battle (even today's battle, let alone battle in ancient times) is imperfect, so knowing what matters and therefore what rules to devise is, in itself, virtually impossible.
We are left, therefore, with the necessity of compromise – compromise in terms of which aspects of battle to model, and also in terms of producing a game which is enjoyable. And that's where the designer comes in, and these notes, where I try to explain my decisions and the reasons I made them. You may not agree with me, and you may not like my decisions, because you may not have the same view of what aspects of battle are most important. That's fine, that's wargaming, and that's why there are dozens of different sets of rules available for each period.
The writing of these rules came about, obviously, because I wasn't completely happy with the other sets of rules I'd played, or read. A bit of history... Way back in the mists of time (about 1976) I and a group of school-friends had great fun playing ancients games with WRG 5th Edition Ancients Rules. They were a bit ‘legalistic' and maybe a bit slow, but we enjoyed the games. But as WRG brought out further sets, the language became more convoluted and the rules more obtuse, as the authors struggled to plug the loop-holes that those (evil?) competition gamers kept finding. Ancient wargaming, as far as I was concerned, pretty much died a death and I ignored it for a decade or so. Fast-forward to the early ‘90s and the advent of DBA. DBA was fresh and new, but it was a long time before I tried it – I had a copy, and I'd read it, but was put off by the language and, to be honest, the bare-faced 'competitiveness' of the game - in some ways it was more like chess - wargaming stripped down to essentials, with winning being what seemed to matter most.
Then along came Armati. Reasonably well laid out, and well-written – this couldn't be an ancients wargame could it? At ‘Intro' scale, it seemed to play rather like an expanded DBA. And it was fun, for a while. But deployment seemed to be everything – after that it was rather a case of sitting back and watching the game unfold, with your army gradually succumbing to chaos through attrition. And then a further edition came out. More of the same, but somehow not as much fun – I think the tournament crowd had got to the designers, and ‘loop-hole-closing' was in progress. So that was put aside.
And then along came Warhammer Ancient Battles. A gorgeous book by the standards of the day – heck, it even had pictures of painted models in it, à la Games Workshop (unsurprisingly, give its parentage). It took a long, long time, and another story which I won't go into, before I had suitable armies and actually played it ‘seriously'. The games were fast-flowing, bloody, and great fun, but there were things that annoyed me – units manoeuvred too easily, and there was a tendency to form them in blocks, so linear warfare went out of the window, and the battles didn't look the way ancient battles read in the original sources.
I began this project by writing house-rules for WAB. But that didn't really work too well, and I found that as I changed one thing, that affected something else, and before I knew it, I was in danger of needing to re-write the whole thing. Taking a step back, and thinking about it, I figured that it would probably be easier to start from scratch, so I did!
This game aims to model large actions, in which the individual is subsumed within a large group. On his own, he doesn't matter much. That isn't what I set out to write – I thought I wanted a game on the same sort of scale as WAB – a big skirmish, in effect. But it gradually dawned on me that I'd rather have a set where I was acting more like a general – controlling formations and units – and not worrying about what particular individuals were doing.
I also realised that, as far as my gaming was concerned, there was a happy medium where command and control were concerned. Armati didn't give the player enough choices, but did a pretty good job of simulating ‘battlefield friction' though the lack of control made it tedious to play after a while. WAB was the other extreme – too much control – it was as if the general had a helicopter, and walky-talky contact with his subordinates.
At this time I began reading lots of other rule-sets, and not just ancients either – Warlord's ‘Black Powder' and Too Fat Lardies' ‘Sharp Practice' were eagerly devoured as well as Piquet, WRG 5th and WAB (again!), Armati, Impetus, and lots of others. The system I've written owes something to all of them, and quite a lot to a few – notably WAB, Black Powder and Sharp Practice.
I hope that the system I've designed manages to tread a ‘middle way' regarding command and control. Deployment is quite important – it's the only time in the game when the general is guaranteed full control over his units and formations. Once the game gets going, you're faced with choices. Sometimes a commander's card will come up when you need it to, and you can follow your plan. At other times though, it won't, and then you have to decide whether or not to ‘spend' a Carpe Diem ('Seize the Day') card in order to get the formation moving. Sometimes it pays off, but sometimes, later in the round, some sort of minor (or major!) disaster strikes and you wish you still had the card. So there's nearly always some tension and uncertainty.
Because of the way the game works though, you can ‘tune' the amount of uncertainty by how many cards you include. If you play with lots of Viri Magni ('Big Men' - commanders) or ‘Carpe Diem' cards, you'll almost always be able to do what you want, when you want to. If you have very few, you'll have less chances to intervene. This could be useful when playing some types of army, or certain scenarios, where you want one side to have a large, but unwieldy army, and the other side to have a smaller, ‘nippy' army – simply give one side more Carpe Diem cards, and/or more ‘Viri Magni', than the other.
I deliberately designed the game so that basing doesn't matter. Re-basing is the part of the hobby I hate most. Providing you can identify which units are Tiny, which Small, and so on, the basing really matters not. It doesn't even really matter whether the two armies are based differently, so long as the frontages of each side's equivalent units are about the same.
It also doesn't matter what scale of models you use to play – though for appearance's sake it's probably best to use the same scale for both sides! You may want to rescale the ranges, moves and suchlike if playing in different scales. But it's not rocket science, and none of this stuff is written on tablets of stone, so do what suits you!