Previous ancients battles that I had witnessed played before DBA typically had units wandering all over the table, and produced results that seemed to have little to do with accounts I had read. While the nice neat lines in a history book are, of course, simplifications, one point that stood out from accounts was the importance of maintaining a solid battle line, the deadliness of flanking maneuvers, and the difficulty of command control. Efforts to model these in games like WRG 7th edition produced excessive complication and didn't really give the right feel. On the other hand, Tactica produced a game that was so static as to be pointless. (Sure, the general probably didn't have much control after his battle plan, but he would have briefed his subordinates, and THEY would have had some initiative... as a player you can't just play the general, you must also play at least one lower echelon -- at least in my experience.)

My first few battles of DBA, on the other hand, made command control a priority. The rules for flank support and the PIP system encouraged the player to form historically sensible battle lines in a painless fashion. Suddenly, battles began to look the way they read. Sure, we didn't get super-detailed resolution of weapon vs. armor, fatigue, tracked casualties, etc. -- but in general, these are areas that are areas that we don't know much about from the ancient sources, so any set of rules will have problems of realism anyway. DBA gave me realism where it counted: the overall feel of the battle, and its end result. What good is it if an encounter between 300 cavalry vs. pikemen is ultra-realistic when the overall battle looks nothing like a historical account?

I was corresponding with a friend at the time I first got DBA, and I sent him battle reports -- not flowery fictional ones, but just descriptions of what happened in game terms. He remarked that they seemed very much like real battle reports -- they lacked all the game speak you normally got. DBA may resolve many actions on a single die roll, but in general, when I lost battles I could trace it to a tactical decision I made, not to a poor roll. Given that most of the accounts of ancient battles we have are on the same grand tactical scale as DBA, the game system itself seems perfect for modelling them. It has realism where it counts.

It is asked why Ancients players are predominately Competition & Tournament players while the rest of the historical miniature hobby is not? How did this come about?

A few reasons.

First off, a tournement scene works best if you have an accepted single set of rules and base sizes -- ancients has been dominated by the WRG, with 4-7th edition, then DBM, so this makes it easier for players and tournement organizers to know they will have a sufficient player base.

Secondly, the broad scope of the ancients "period" not a single war like WWII or ACW, but a few thousand years) means that if ahistorical type matches were not used, there would be a very good chance that someone who had a certain army would never find opponents: it would be a little boring if everyone just painted Roman and Alexandrian.

Third, ancients battles WERE often fairly set piece affairs where more-or-less equal sized armies lined up with the sole goal of defeating each other. Due to the prevalance of hand-to-hand weapons, winning tends to require both offensive and defensive action. On the other hand, after gunpowder was perfected and certainly post ACW, firepower gives a huge advantage to the defending side -- all things being equal, if one player digs in or goes hull down or whatever, and the other comes at him, the defender has a better chance (provided rudimentary tactics like reserves are used). Thus, a modern or ACW battle needs some form of scenario structure to prevent both sides from simply digging in and waiting for the other to come at him -- this may be giving one side more or better quality forces and the goal of taking certain objectives within a time limit, or giving the defender reinforcements that will arrive, forcing the attacker to act quickly, or whatever. In other words, ancient battles work well as open field set engagements (as do, to an extent, Napoleonic), while modern battles require a scenario in order to ensure they don't turn into WWI.

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