At 8:00 PM, on Friday, August 20th, during the PW meeting, we, the Committee of Three... Messrs. Hurst, Haub and Simon... entered a small room off to one side and took our seats. Our mission: to learn to play WRG Ancients, 7th Edition.
The story began at the HISTORICON convention in July. I had, during my wanderings through the halls of the convention, closely watched Tom Elsworth and other WRG fanatics, registered in the WRG tournaments, engage in battle.
Surely, I said to myself, surely, there must be something to this game, there must be some redeeming quality to attract 30? 40? 50? people to sign up for this sort of thing. And surely, I continued, surely, I can master this game sufficiently to get an understanding of the goings-on.
And so, sometime during HISTORICON, I announced that I, the noted Lion of Ostlandt, intended to enter the WRG tournaments at the next COLD WARS convention in March of '94. Somehow, as word spread throughout the kingdom, the rumor, as any good self -respecting rumor is wont to do, expanded and expanded, until Fred Hubig cornered me and said: "I hear you've committed all of us to enter the WRG lists!" The "all of us" referred to the daredevil team of Hubig, Haub, Hurst and Simon.
Bob Hurst, a devil-may-care fellow, immediately entered into the spirit of the thing and actually bought a quantity of 15mm Teutonic knights and support troops at the convention. Teutonic knights are good people to have in your WRG army because of their ability to "form wedge". The cognoscenti of the wargaming world know that forming the dreaded wedge is an essential element in WRG foreplay; no respectable WRG player would be caught dead without an array of wedgies in his army.
I must admit that my first thoughts were that the entire episode would be a lark, that I would come up with enough notes for at least ten articles in the REVIEW, and that all WRG players who would be pitted against me in the tournament, would be pleasantly surprised at being matched against an unskilled WRG no-nothing and thus handed an easy victory.
But as soon as Bob Hurst purchased his army, I knew this was serious business... we were actually going to have to do some homework and attempt to become familiar with the rules.
Which is why, at the August PW meeting, our Committee of Three sat down, arbitrarily divided up Bob's Teutons amongst ourselves (about six units apiece) and hoped to go through some of the WRG procedures in this, our very first familiarization session.
As Haub and Hurst chanted "Om-m-m-m-m-m..." in unison, I solemnly opened the book which was to be our bible... WRG Ancients, 7th Edition... and commenced to read. Page 1 was a good place to start. Omigawd! I have never read such a collection of incoherent, opaque, and randomized rules!
Understand that the three of us had each agreed to start out with a clean slate, we would each forget about our past anti-WRG prejudices, we would each begin from the beginning, we would each approach the subject with an open mind, and we would each try, try, try...
'Twas no use. We managed to get through the first turn, which, because all the units were some 24 inches apart, consisted of nothing but "march moves". i.e., a series of strategic moves which speeds up the game since it permits all units to advance at faster than normal rates as long as they come no closer to enemy units than 6 inches.
On the second turn, we ran into a stopper. We did our "approach moves", i.e., normal movement, and then we came to a phase called "counters". Counters? Counters? What's a counter?
The text defines a counter as a "response". What's a "response"? Is it a move, a retreat, a change of formation... what?
One of my cavalry units had approached one of Fred Haub's. Fred wanted to change formation as a "counter". Can you change formation? I can assure you that you'll never find out by referring to the section titled "Formation Changes"! Nor, for that matter, in the "Counter" section!
Perhaps, then, in the "Movement" section? Are you kidding?
And so, here we were, on the second turn, five minutes into the game, up against a wall. A large, solid, impenetrable wall. Our determination to do good, to bring light into a darkened world, to defeat the forces of chaos and evil... all was for nought!
Mr. Hurst looked at Mr. Haub, Mr. Haub looked at Mr. Simon, Mr. Simon looked at Mr. Hurst... what to do?
Our unspoken, yet shared common thought was that this first session was kaputt, a bust, a failure. But, since we have the troops out, let's play DBA, we said. DBA, as we all know, is a very fast and playable game; both DBA and the WRG Ancients rules were written by the same author(s).
Peevishness
There are a number of current wargaming authors who assume an air of self-annointed pseudo-scholarly pensiveness, simply by placing one index finger up their nose (this betokens deep thought), and typing out, with their other index finger, their rules sets. I will term these good people the one-index-finger authors. Somehow, despite its one-index-finger origins, DBA is an entertaining game. I repeat, a game.
The one-index-finger author has hyped DBA as an historical simulation... he gives "army lists" for his 12-token-per-side simulation. Each token is termed an "element". What's an element? How can an historical battle simulation always pit 12 elements against 12 elements? Don't ask, because you won't find out.
But back to our Committee Of Three, who thus started to kill the remainder of the evening in a couple of DBA matches. And then arrived Jeff Wiltrout, well versed in WRG lore. I have come unto you, he said, to guide you through the darkness, and he set out his WRG Seleucid armies.
Digression. A recent British guest, who shall remain nameless, insisted that Seleucid should be pronounced "se loo' kid", with a hard "c". My 8,000 page Random House dictionary says that the pronunciation with a hard "c" is okay if you're Greek, but that "se loo' sid" is just as right and proper if you're a Murican.
If one is going to use the Greek pronunciation, one should also pronounce "hoplites" as "hop lee' tees". Let's have no half measures here. End of digression.
Jeff Wiltrout ran us through a couple of turns in a WRG game. We made our march moves, we made our approach moves (approach moves are those that take you nearer the enemy), we made our counter moves (counter moves are moves that take you no closer to, or away from, the enemy), we formed up our wedgies, we fired, we charged, we tossed our regular dice, we tossed our average dice, in short, we WRG'ed the night away.
A couple of days later, Jeff arrived at my house for a second lesson. Again we set up his Seleucid armies.
We were each given a scythed chariot. I cleverly placed mine on the left flank, thinking that I could scythe my way diagonally across the opposing army; Jeff placed his chariot squarely in the center of his army formation.
The game began, and I quickly discovered Rule #1, all about scythed chariots that you'll ever want to know... the vehicle must move and charge toward the nearest enemy target unit, and once having set its course, it proceeds along that line with no permitted deviation.
The one-index-finger author's theory has it that the scythed charioteer, or rather the charioteer of the scythed chariot (since the charioteer himself is not scythed), or, perhaps, the chariot-person, sets his sights on an enemy target, aims his vehicle, and then, with great agility, hops out in the middle of the battlefield and runs like hell, leaving the chariot to remain on course.
And so, with my scythed chariot on my left flank, it was quite easy for Jeff to use one of his light cavalry units to attract it, and then step out of the way, leaving my chariot to run off the table. In contrast, the opposing chariot, Jeff's own, in the center of the field and aimed straight at my phalanx, went right up the middle, routed one of my archer units and ploughed into the phalanx.
Next, I discovered Rule #2, don't charge elephants with horsepersons.
I had two superb units of catafracts, well armored, and quite expensive in terms of point costs. I placed these on my right flank (after all, I thought my scythed chariot was going to protect my left flank), and charged forward, right into Jeff's elephant brigade. Poor tactics under the WRG scheme of things.
First, the archers in the howdahs zapped at me, and then the elephants disordered my horses (the effect that elephants have on horses is similar to the effect that microarmor has on me), and then I discovered that each elephant model (there were 2), fights as 4? 5?, I forget how many.
The result: my bold catafracti turned tail and ran. Jeff and I tossed dice... me, to see how fast my horsi ran, and Jeff, to see how fast the elephants pursued. It turned out that my cavalry unit didn't run fast enough, for the great lumbering beasties easily kept pace with my boys, getting in free hacks every melee phase.
And so it went all afternoon, with me doing one dumb thing after another... but it was, after all, a learning session.
Other Weapons
In perusing the rules book, one fascinating weapon category in melee is termed "other weapons"; I believe my light cavalry were armed with these. They would make contact, use their lances in the first round, and then, in subsequent rounds, deftly switch to their "other weapons".
One would think that a one-index-finger author, with a lot of time on his hands, could come up with a more colorful term ("Matilda," said Odin, "I'm going out to fight for our liege lord. Please take my 'other weapons' down from the wall and set them on the table.") . Another interesting item about melee is the configuration. The way Jeff explained it, it's a simple stand-on-stand procedure. Opposing stands are "squared off", 1-on-1, and one gets no credit for "overlaps" as in previous WRG editions.
Instead, the overlap procedure is turned into a flanking procedure. If I have 2 stands, charging side-by-side, my first stand is aligned with the target unit and fights Round #1. My second stand, during this round, remains beside the first and simply watches.
Then, during Round #2, assuming the melee continues, my second stand then whips ahead, makes a quick right-angle turn, and smacks into the flank of the enemy. Which means that 2-on-1 battles are desireable.
In the Simon archives are some old rules sets, and I picked up the WRG rules, 5th Edition, from 1976, to see how the combat tables had changed in the period '76 to '93, almost a 20 year span.
Here is a portion of the combat table, showing an increase in the apportioned casualty rates.
Comparing the two tables, the casualty rates have been increased by a factor of 1.5 to 1.6. All of which is consistent with the switch in scale: the 5th Edition used a ratio of 20 men per figure, whereas the 7th Edition upped the scale to 30-to-1. The ratio of scales is thus 1.5:1, consistent with the increase in casualty rates.
There are other interesting comparisons to be made between the 5th and 7th. For example, it appears that the scythed chariot was invented after 1976, the year that the 5th Edition was published... the 5th doesn't appear to have scythed chariots in it.
In general, it appears that weapons have been slightly devalued over the years, i.e., their combat factors decreased. A random check of several configurations shows:
And finally, a note on DBM
Mike Guth, a fellow for whom I have the greatest respect, will not go near DBM. Mike was (may still be) a WRG Ancients player, and when he initially picked up the DBM rules book, looking for definitions, he knew they would probably be as obtuse as those contained in the regular run of WRG texts.
But what completely turned him away from DBM was the definition of a "group" (it should be known that group movement is the heart and soul of the DBA and DBM games). Mike read:
- A group is defined as a number of elements which, except as made necessary by a wheeling column or passing through a gateway, are facing the same direction, and each in both edge and corner to corner contact with another of the group's elements.
As soon as Mike saw the word "except", he tossed the book down. If the one-index-finqer author could not define the most important item in his gaming system, on which the whole game is structured and all movement is based, without using the word "except", Mike wanted nothing to do with it.
Incidentally, looking at the above definition, it would appear that every game of DBM I've seen and in which I've played, has been misinterpreting the definition of a "group".
For example, a cavalry stand is deeper than an infantry stand, although both have the same frontage. If you place both infantry and cavalry side by side as shown in Diagram A below, with the intention of moving them together, you cannot take advantage of the group movement rules, for the simple reason that you do not have a group.
The stands, or elements, are "facing the same direction", they are in "edge... contact", but they are = in "corner to corner" contact because of the greater depth of the cavalry stand.
I've also seen players using the configuration shown in Diagram B for group movement. Here, if one reads the definition, it could be argued that the "corner to corner" requirement is met, but the "edge contact" requirement is certainly not.
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© Copyright 1993 Wally Simon
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