Return to the Punic Wars

It's back to ancients, my first love in historical gaming.

After a hiatus of nearly one and a half years due to work, life and the distractions of World War II gaming I am back to working on the Punic Wars (after a brief spell of GADD over mythology and vintage Citadel minis).

Settling on an optimum base size and an initial ruleset has provided a much needed spur to reduce my pile of plastic and lead of Punic Wars miniatures.

The petite army lists in Basic Impetus 2.0, of around 10 to 11 units, provided a manageable starting point to focus painting and production. So far, I have nearly finished painting four units: spearmen of the Sacred Band, Balearic slingers, Iberian scutarii and Iberian caetrati. Next up are Libyan skirmishers and Numidian light horse.

I think the toughest decision to make in ancients wargaming is neither scale nor ruleset, but rather what basing convention and approach to take.

Basing and rulesets are reflexive choices, each influencing the other. I finally decided on using Impetus basing for a number of reasons. The primary reason is aesthetic, besides the tactics and history, this hobby is about aesthetics or else wooden blocks serve just as well.

If this time-consuming hobby is about great looking miniatures then dioramas seem the way to go as opposed to single-figure basing focused on serried ranks and files of troops, or an equivalent approach via multi-basing.

Impetus basing - on 12cm wide bases in 28mm scale - lets the figures breathe and allows for greater aesthetic flexibility, especially in composition. 

It also translates well to both the gaming table and the other ancients rulesets I am interested in playing. The latter all happen to be 'element' based and include Hail Caesar and To The Strongest!

12cm fits nicely in a 6' to 8'-wide table allowing a battle line of about 15 units wide, which nicely accords with my desired sweet spot of big games of 20 or so units per side (the rest being in reserves).

Once I took the leap to arranging my troops on their bases in diorama rather than in just dense ranks, there was an immediate shift in my cognitive process. I began to consider how each individual figure related to others in the group, what story they told together rather than how best to face them forward and rank them nicely.

Frankly, it became much more intellectually engaging and pleasing. It became more fun.

Casualty figures become very useful for adding character and story to a base. Here I have a draft composition of a Celtic warband. I love the way the female warrior relates to the Roman she has downed.

I've decided not to pack too many figures on my bases. Partly to save production time, partly because they actually look a bit better with some irregular space between them, and partly to ensure a bit more protective base space when clumsy fingers descend from the heavens - I've already broken one javelin multiple times.

Starting with Basic Impetus 2.0 has already paid off since I have nearly finished painting four units in just over a month. That's more than I've been able to do since acquiring this horde of lead and plastic two years ago. The size of a project for Hail Caesar or To The Strongest! was paralytically large. Too large to get off the ground.

Now that things are moving along faster than ever, being realistic, I should be able to start work on the Romans by the end of the year. 

Collecting an Army: how many units is enough? - Part 1

The wargamer needs something more detailed than long rectangles
though units are but rectangles from a plan view.

A challenge peculiar to historical wargaming is deciding on what units and how many one needs in order to play a particular army, battle or campaign.

Reconciling financial constraints with often vague historical details, as well as a practical size for a collection that can be painted and based in a reasonable amount of time, is quite a logistical and research challenge.

Perhaps this is why orders of battle appear so rarely in ancients wargaming, both in print and online, despite the fact that one can't run away from having some 'ORBAT' when one sits down for a game.

The kinds of rulesets one plays with and their representational conceits will also have a practical effects on how figures one needs to acquire and prep. In my case, I have to wrestle with the desire to proportionately represent the look and structure of the armies I collect versus pragmatics of getting a rules-conforming unit on the board.

For example, if each of 10 maniples of hastati was arrayed in a formation 20 files wide and 6 ranks deep, is it practical to use a 28mm scale battle line two models deep by 66 models wide to represent one of the acies of a legion (a 1:3 ratio)? For a typical four legion consular army with each model occupying a width of 20mm, this leads to a gaming table at least 17 feet wide, without factoring in space for the cavalry wings!

Clearly, we need a more practical scaling method for the ordinary game table that is at least six, and at most, eight feet wide.

Systems with a hard limit, such as points-based systems that cap at a certain number of points or have a 'sweet spot' point total, in some ways make things easier by forcing a limit to what you can fit into your budget. Examples would be Warhammer Ancient Battles and similar systems. You assemble your collection within a points total, perhaps allowing for some unit or option swaps.

This comes at a cost of presenting a 'balanced' game that may bear little resemblance to the asymmetries of historical battles.

Unless one is playing scenarios, the diktats of a 'balanced' game or the need to facilitate 'pick up and play' between acquaintances, makes building an army to a points budget a practical endeavour.

De Bellis Antiquitatis removes all this back and forth by removing the research process and capping the number of units at twelve. The army lists are set for you by the designer. They give a flavour of the troop types found in a given historical army, but they demand that one accepts that the tactical performance of all armies can be adequately represented by twelve units and that particular troop types have a scissors-paper-stone dynamic. Collecting DBA armies is, however, a doddle. Given the fixed parameters established by the designer it is a simple matter selecting the figures one likes the best.

I've never been able to warm to the system but I can see the appeal for those on a budget as well as those gadflies who have little attachment to any particular period and treat variety as the spice of life. I have a narrower interest in the historical battles of the Greek, Hellenistic and Punic Wars, with a remote dream of a Sassanian army some day (but with zero interest in the Byzantines that is some ways off), so DBA is far too diffuse to scratch my itch.

However, one can't dismiss the innovations DBA has delivered to historical wargaming. The army lists have proven very useful for giving a snapshot of what an historical army may have been comprised of. The decision taken by the Wargames Research Group to produce system agnostic reference works such as Duncan Head's Armies of the Macedonian and Punic Wars really makes the derived material useful for any system.

Lost Battles on the surface has some similarities to DBA in that it aims for around 20 units per side. It is avowedly more simulationist and puts a lot of effort into representing actual troop numbers and quality based on the historical record or educated guesswork where the former is missing or lacking. It reconciles its rough unit cap with the representation of actual numbers by making each unit of whatever class - heavy/light veteran/levy infantry/cavalry/etc. - equal in fighting power but each unit type represents a different number of troops of a given morale level.

So in a particular battle a single levy light infantry unit may represent 6,000 troops whilst a single veteran heavy infantry unit may only represent 1,500 troops. This is another way of saying that the fighting power of 6,000 levy light infantry is equal to that of 1,500 veteran heavy infantry, with a number of modifiers weighing in to jazz up combat results.

This has the advantage of paring down components to a reasonable number (20) whilst allowing for greater tactical manoeuvre than DBA's twelve pieces. It does make light infantry much more visually thin than they would otherwise appear on the battlefield, but Lost Battles aims to simulate broadly historical battle outcomes rather than aesthetics.

While Lost Battles 'bakes in' troop numbers and quality into a fairly set number of pieces other systems employ some sort of ratio between the number of units and actual troop numbers and pair this with differential fighting power. This is a fairly intuitive approach but it is one which leaves the gamer-collector the challenge of establishing the appropriate ratio for a given battle (it is more challenging to establish one that works across a campaign), and to set out appropriate statistics and abilities for troops of different types and qualities.

Commands & Colors: Ancients takes a scenario approach. Like DBA, the research process is done for you. The number of units one needs to acquire in order to replicate a given army can be simply derived from the block lists in the rulebooks. All you have to do is decide how you want to represent the blocks that make up a unit.

Use removable stands or hit counters, or some other unique basing solution. You could even just use a figure per block (as is done in Samurai Battles). This was the route I initially took. One doesn't even need to get all the units listed as the block maximums factor in outlier scenarios such as the all cavalry battle between Carthaginians and the Romans at Ticinus. Cutting out such outliers pares the project of conversion from blocks to miniatures to a more reasonable level of hubris; one doesn't really need that many cavalry units.

C&C:A handles troop quality a number of ways. The main approach is to assign different numbers of battle dice to each troop type depending on whether they are light, medium, heavy or something in between. The next level is to open or close certain dice results for certain troops with light infantry having the fewest consequential results. Morale is decided by the dice throwing up a Flag result but modified by the presence of leaders or a supporting battle line. Overall army morale is governed by the Banner system. A most subtle system does it build around dice rolls.

Another subtlety is the use of the apparently amorphous 'Auxilia' troop type that hovers between light and medium infantry. It has some of the combat power of medium infantry (e.g. Republican Roman hastati/principes) but with mobility, morale and missile power of light units. This would seem to model something like a peltast or theurophoroi.

However, it appears puzzling when used on a Republican Roman consular army that only had three infantry types (velites (light infantry),  hastati/principes (medium), and triarii (heavy)). It is generally accepted that Italian allies in the consular armies were equipped and fought in a similar way to the Roman legions. So why have an Auxilia class in the game?

Auxilia in C&C:A becomes a useful way of varying troop quality between scenarios. In some scenarios the allies or even the Roman hastati may be of poorer quality or morale, so the Auxilia classification allows for some finer simulation of historical factors. Until one figures that out it does present a puzzle for a miniatures conversion project for C&C:A.

To the Strongest! caters for both scenario play as well as points so it is a mix of C&C:A and WAB from that perspective. It's grid movement owes a lot to the author's long engagement with C&C:A. Rick Priestley and John Lambshead have recently criticised such systems as being more boardgame than wargame, but I don't see grid movement as such a deal-breaker. What it sacrifices in terms of 'free form' movement it makes up for in terms of time saved, reduced ambiguity, and less fussing over geometry. As for figuring out an army for a scenario one is left to do one's research on the ORBAT. Arguably, research is one of the joys of the historical wargaming hobby. It's a thinkers game on multiple levels.

Hail Caesar is geared for big battle, multi-player scenario play. If you're not using one of the published campaigns you're pretty left with option of doing your research or playing to a points total for pick up games.

Hail Caesar is geared towards the fairly experienced ancient wargamer that knows their period and offers a broad toolbox for recreating historical scenarios. Both HC and TtS! lend themselves to some ratio of representation between historical troop numbers and what one can field on the tabletop. TtS! makes this quite explicit in its discussion of scale.

So if one is collecting an historical army using HC or TtS! there is the task of figuring out actual, or close to actual, troop numbers and breaking that down into units and figures. One can play around with the footprint of particular troop types. Light infantry are often discounted in terms of model numbers in order to reduce the area they cover, especially with figures spaced in open order, though this may come with a possible diminution of their already limited battlefield impact.

Perhaps the best approach to take is to look at the gaming space one has available and plump for a scale ratio that fills the tabletop battlefield nicely - allowing for cavalry manoeuvre on the wings - and match the combined frontage of one's battle line against that.

Two practical table sizes to consider are the six foot wide table and the eight foot wide one. Both HC and TtS! are 'big game' rules pitched at spectacle and multi-player participation, so eight feet wide seems a reasonable place to start. Depth shouldn't be more than six feet since an adult can usually only comfortably reach three feet from the table edge.

In the next post I will consider an ORBAT for Hannibal's army at the Battle of Trebbia, which represents the first pitched battle of his Italian campaign. This should give a nucleus of units around which to firm up a Hannibalic War project.

To the Strongest! Arrives

Yesterday's post brought with it a print copy of Simon Miller's To the Strongest! fast-play ancient and medieval wargaming rules. Beautifully wrapped in purple crepe no less.

I had taken advantage of a flash sale a fortnight ago in conjunction with Simon's birthday. I purchased the digital PDF and the print copy. Simon also threw in a pack of MDF counters for the game.

I've been a long-time follower of his blog, the BigRedBatCave (which features scads of beautifully painted miniatures) and have been eyeing his new ruleset for a while. It also didn't hurt that Simon's based in Muswell Hill and I went to primary school there. Muswellian wargamers unite!

To the Strongest! (TtS!) heartily reflects what I now look for in gaming in general and wargaming in particular.

The rules need to be fast and intuitive, accommodate multiple players, be flexible in basing, whilst carrying enough flavour to reflect the tactics and quirks of the historical armies.

This last point requires scope for toolbox tinkering to reflect emerging or contested historical research. The actual performance of the manipular Republican legion or the regularity of actual Iberian warfare in C3rd-2nd B.C., come to mind as areas of ongoing debate and experimentation. Some rulesets are intentionally open-ended and customisable, others - given the expectations of tournament play - have a particular interpretation locked in which may be hard to modify before an official update comes along.

The more I learn about ancient military history the more it is clear that the best companion to the foundations built on educated guesswork and harder archaeological and literary evidence is an openness to testing and experimentation, such as can be seen in Sabin's Lost Battles.

This leads to another attractive feature of TsS! Simon has primarily been using it to stage re-fights of historical battles and scenario play is of particular interest to me.

Given that I already enjoy Hail Caesar and Commands & Colors: Ancients (CC:A), TtS! is appealing because it has elements similar to both. It shares Hail Caesar's multi-player, casual play approach along with representing troop particularities through succinct special rules that are readily open for tweaking. It echoes the card play, grid movement, and victory tokens of CC:A, which combine unpredictability, excitement, and speed.

Cutting out the measuring tape in favour of grid movement has raised accusations of being more boardgame than wargame (as in Rick Priestley and John Lambhead's new book on Tabletop Wargaming), but it does make for speed and eliminates the harpy of geometry.

The above are from the most recent restaging of Raphia that Simon has done with To the Strongest!
More on his blog.

The most exciting aspect of the rules (based on my quick flip through) is the inclusion of card-based Strategems that allow wily generals to play out tactical schemes above and beyond lining up their troops and mashing in the table centre, much like the actual accounts we read about in history. The ploy of Pyrrhus at Heraclea to switch armour with his bodyguard could be represented by the Patroclus scheme which allows a general to survive a failed save.

Deployment and initiative advantages for Scouting are another nice recognition of the grand tactical role of light cavalry and light infantry, along with cunning generalship.

Since my 28mm army is still very much in the process of delivery and construction, I'm hoping to test drive the rules with my CC:A blocks and some gridded paper. A fuller review will have to wait until then.

I will close by saying that Simon's service was outstanding and prompt. The digital rules were emailed to me within hours of payment, and the print edition popped into the post on the next business day and arrived in less than two weeks in Malaysia. Turns out that I'm the first customer in Malaysia. Let's see if that changes once my Punic project rolls out.

Simon was also kind enough to mail me a copy of an 'experimental' army list for the Polybian legion that reflects some recent debates in the Society of Ancients. (Some of the online discussion can be read here). It should be noted that the army lists for TtS! are all available as free downloads from Simon's online shop. This is a very affordable ruleset, the production quality is very good, reads well and is chock full of stunning pictures of miniatures.

DELENDA EST ROMA! - My 'Enemies of Rome' project

This blog is to act as a record of my progress - or lack thereof - in completing an 'Enemies of Rome' wargaming project in 28mm miniatures.

Hannibal.
1st Century BC-Head and shoulders bust sculpture.
Naples Museum. 

Background

(Wargamers looking for the miniatures bit can skip to the Project Outline at the bottom).

As a one time student of colonialism and empire in the modern period, I discovered the literature and thought of ancient Greece and Rome in the course of exploring the intellectual referents of the Bush-era neoconservatives. These architects of the 'New American Century' and the Iraq War were rather fond of Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, also an influential book in the 'glass half empty' corner of contemporary international relations theory.

I wanted to understand what made contemporary Western imperialists tick. So, I started reading Thucydides and related material in the period, availing myself of the nicely illustrated Landmark series. While Thucydides remains amongst my least favourite writers of this period, I found the overall tale of imperial conflict between Athens and Sparta to be quite fascinating.

I also rediscovered miniature wargaming around this period after a brief reacquaintance with Warhammer Fantasy Battles. The High Elf army I was playing with leant itself to 'combined arms' action in the manner of Alexander of Makedon, whereby shock cavalry would complement a solid infantry phalanx. At least, this is what was successfully argued by Seredain the Cavalry Prince, the nom de guerre of a High Elf player on the Ulthuan forums.

This was entirely appropriate considering that most of the Warhammer armies had their roots in real life sources from classical antiquity. The High Elf army blended in Greek, Persian, and medieval European influences. The tactical advice was sound. In the relatively short run that I was once again active in Warhammer I didn't lose a single battle, mainly because I had a tactical plan that fit my army and my opponents often did not. Work and real life caught up, Warhammer started to drift towards a place I didn't enjoy, so I migrated to ancients with the release of the Hail Caesar ruleset.

This sparked a far longer interest in tactics and generalship in the ancient period. An interest that now finds me building up the army of Hannibal and Rome's other enemies.

Given Rome's substantial influence on modern Western imperialism, fighting Rome in the ancient world, by mustering armies of the people eventually conquered by them, offered some outlet for proxy aggression after all my immersion in anti-colonial studies. Perhaps I should have called this blog 'Beautiful Losers'.

Scale Shift

When I first considered this project four years ago I had initially opted for the 15mm scale due to budget constraints. It proved rather hard for me to find a manufacturer that produced Carthaginian and Republican Roman ranges that I was aesthetically happy with. Scale creep was a particular problem for 15mm. Basing was likely to end up a concession to DBx players, the majority of the local ancients scene, though I had no intention of going down that route.

I eventually plumped for Corvus Belli's Carthaginian range, which had fairly complete Iberian, Celtic and Numidian lines that fit. I was enthralled with projects by glorious mad buggers such as Olicanalad who had played out a Hannibal: Rome v Carthage campaign using Commands & Colors for the battles.

(For those interested, here's an alt-map of the game board by Mark Mahaffey).

I ordered most of what I needed from Corvus Belli before I got sidetracked by work for a few years, during which time CB shut down its ancients lines and went all out for Infinity.

When my ancients bug bit again (as an afterthought to the discovery of the free RPG Mazes & Minotaurs; what if D&D had been based on Greek roots instead of a European hodge-podge?), I looked at getting some Romans to face my Punic forces.

Sadly, the Republican Romans I was holding out for were by Warmodelling/Fantassin, which has suffered some financial troubles and, last I checked, were out of production.

Fortunately, two historical occurrences led me to 28mm. First, was the discovery that Victrix had churned out a fairly extensive line of Republican Romans and Hannibalic forces in plastic, bringing the price point to that of 15mm. The second factor was Brexit, which lowered the sterling enough to make it attractive to go all in.

Perhaps it was the early years with Warhammer that made 28mm seem like a 'natural' scale to me. Perhaps it's failing eyesight and the detailed sculpts of today that also have a strong appeal. I had also picked up some 28mm Greek hoplites before my hiatus. There was unfinished business at this scale.

I bought a box of Victrix Athenian hoplites from my local FLGS to assess their quality. I was satisfied and punched in an order before the pound recovered any further.


PROJECT OUTLINE

Here is a broad outline of the project.

Victrix Carthaginians (from their website)

Step One: Build up a sizable Hannibalic force comprising:

• Africans (Carthaginians, Libyans, Numidians)
• Iberians (Iberians and Celtiberians)
• Celts
• Italians (non-Romans from the South and North: Samnites, Brutii, Lucanians, Etruscans)

These would be the main troops to fight Rome in scenarios derived from the Second Punic War. Each nationality could also be expanded for battles before and after the Punic Wars. Hamilcar's conquest of Spain, the Numantine Wars, the Social Wars, the Samnite Wars.

These along with my Greek hoplites could be used as the basis of a Syracusan army in a pinch. There is a lot of diversity and flexibility in this period provided one is willing to take on a relatively large army project. The benefit is that parts of your Punic army can war against each other during different periods, though this veers into poorly documented and hypothetical territory. But this is what standard scenarios and pickup games are for. Until I acquire the Romans these are the kind of small scale games I could play. There's the 'Eagle Rampant' variant of Lion Rampant skirmish rules that could serve if my forces are particularly small.

Later on, many of the above nationalities can be parts of Roman armies against the Hellenistic kingdoms, another culture and region that interests me. That Pyrrhic line from Aventine is so tempting.

Victrix Republican Romans (from their website)

Step Two: Build up a four legion Republican Roman army.

• Two Roman legions (Velites, Hastati, Principes, Triarii)
• Two Allied alae (ditto)
• Plus cavalry wings

This would represent a fairly standard two consul republican army. It could be expanded to suit with some of the Italian allies of the Punic army, who would mainly bolster the ranks of the hastati.

Side project: I mentioned earlier that there's unfinished business on the Greek front. I also have plans to build up an army that could represent the forces of Spartan king Agesilaus II, friend of Xenophon, who led a dogs of war force on an imperial expedition in Asia. I've long loved the aesthetics of the bronze Corinthian helm and am rather fond of Xenophon's escapades and work.

I may get rather bored of assembling and painting 12 phalanxes of hoplites, but the task will be made easier by three of those units being the lovely Steve Saleh Spartans from Gorgon Studios plus a whimsical single unit of his naked Spartans from Foundry. I've got some weedier Warlord/Immortal Spartan and Classical Greek hoplites that would serve as neodamodeis, perioikoi and Peloponnesian levy allies. The beefier Victrix hoplites could serve as mercenary remnants from Xenophon's 10,000.

Plus, there may even be some games involved as at least one local player is willing to deploy Persians if I make good on my hoplites and there's some owners of the Victrix kits lurking out there.


Rulesets

I'm fairly agnostic on rulesets provided they meet my criteria. I like those that lend themselves to fairly fast play, minimal geometry, historical scenario battles, and avoid tournament-oriented min/maxing. This rules out most of the DBx family and derivative rulesets such as Impetus. It also rules out WAB though the rules structure is eminently familiar to me. I'm just no fan of individual model removal.

The rulesets I'm gearing towards are Hail Caesar for the casual scenario group play, Lost Battles to scratch the simulationist itch, Commands & Colors: Ancients in miniature for one-on-one fast play, and possibly the intriguing grid-based To the Strongest! by BigRedBat who runs an inspiring blog for the 28mm ancients miniature enthusiast.

Enough writing for now. Onward with assembly!

DELENDA EST ROMA!