The title of this article was given to me by Brian Dewitt, a fellow PW member, after he had participated in a rousing(?) ancients battle on my ping-pong table.
In the encounter, a unit of four elephant stands was fired at, and failed to pass a morale test (I'm not sure if it was the elephants themselves that failed, or the little fellas that drove the elephants around). But off they went. Fred Haub was the elephant coordinator, and somehow he chose the path of the great beasty unit so that the elephants trod on no one as they fell back.
One or two turns later, the dreaded tusked monsters were right back where they had started from, in the front line, and participated in a grand melee, a great assault in which several units on both sides joined in.
Sad to say, even though our side's battle points were bolstered by the elephant unit, we lost the combat, and back again went the beasties, this time accompanied by a huge mass of troops. And for a second time, the retreating elephants gingerly picked their way across the field, stepping on no one in their fall back.
After about two more turns ... the elephants were back! It was probably at this point that Brian Dewitt decided that enough was enough and that the huge rubber band which seemed to attach the elephant unit to the front line should be cut.
I can remember an ancients game of mine over a decade ago, in which my opponent was Tom Elsworth. Here, too, we had elephants.
Tom's solution to the elephant problem was to have his bowmen shoot "fire arrows" at them. As I remember, the fire arrows set the great beasties afire (or at least did something similarly horrible to them), and when the behemoths failed their morale test, the unit fled to the rear, mashing one, or two of my other units in their flight.
Without doubt, I know Brian would have preferred these rules, a set in which the stampeding elephants tromped on everything in sight.
Our current game was played on a large table-size gridded field of 2-inch squares. In the November REVIEW, I described an ancients game played on the same field. That game used 15mm figures; having successfully tested the concept, this current affair graduated to 25mm figures.
I should note that my ancients 25mm army figures are all mounted on 2-inch by 2-inch bases, so they fit right in with the grid pattern.
Over the years, I have heard cries from those with whom I game to the effect:
- "Why don't you rebase your figures to the standard 40mm frontage so that you can conform to the rest of the world?"
The "rest of the world" refers to, of course, the WRG/DBM/ARMATI basing dimensions. I have successfully resisted these cries. I have even resisted overtures from kindhearted friends who have offered to do the rebasing!
In short, I am a stubborn fellow, one who refuses to comply. He who plays with my 25mm ancients must play with 2-inch squares.
But back to the ancients game. A couple of notable procedures were set forth in the rules. By "notable" I mean "different", and not necessarily worthy of emulation. But that's up to you to decide.
Both in firing and melee, when one side took casualties, the opposing side, that is, the side causing the casualties, received a Casualty Marker (CM) for its efforts. One might say that the CM's were sort of an award for inflicting pain and suffering on the opposition.
If Side A fired on one of Side B's units, then B's unit would take its morale test to see if it held position. But fail or not, no figures were permanently removed, no stands were permanently lost. The only instant result was that Side A received CM tokens equal to the number of hits it had scored on Side B.
Similarly, in melee, if Side A drove Side B back, here too, no stands were permanently removed, and Side A merely collected its CM's.
As the battle progressed, each side therefore, as the result of inflicting casualties on the opponent, amassed its CM's. These CM's could be used for a multitude of things:
- First, they could be used to destroy enemy stands. If Side A had, say, 8 CM's in the kitty, it could select 5 of them and direct Side B to remove one heavy infantry stand. Then it could use its remaining 3 CM's and order B to remove one medium infantry stand. The choice of which particular stand left the field was up to Side B, the "victim". The number of CM's required to remove a stand was listed in a table:
| Heavy cav ... Medium cav ... Light cav ... |
6 4 2 |
Heavy inf ... Medium inf ... Light inf ... |
5 3 2 |
Second, the CM's could be used to purchase reinforcements. Again, use of 5 CM's would bring one stand of heavy infantry on the table, according to the "purchase" table.
Third, when a unit took a morale test, a CM could be tossed in to add +10 percent to the testing unit's morale grade.
Fourth, stands of units in melee that had lost in combat were removed from the field and placed in an off-board "Rally Zone" from which they had the potential to recover and rejoin their parent units. Here, too, a CM could be used to augment the percentage used to rally them.
Fifth, a CM could be used in melee itself; each CM dedicated to a combat provided 2 Hit Dice.
From the above, you'll note that use of the CM's dominated the game. The most interesting aspect of their employment was the destruction of enemy stands.
CM's were kept in a base camp, situated somewhere on each side's baseline. If a force broke through and contacted the camp, then all accumulated CM.'s would be lost, and during the time the camp remained in enemy hands, no further markers could be won.
The nature of the gridded field lent itself nicely to use of a "template" in melee. If one side's front line contacted the opposition's, the attacking side divided the number of stands in its front lines into groups of either 2, 3, or 4 stands.
Thus if Side A's front stands were 6 in number, and they all surged forward into contact, A had the option of defining two separate melees, one with a 2 stand frontage, the other with 4. Or he could define two melees, each with a 3 stand frontage.
With each melee, having defined the number of front rank stands participating, there remained the issue of how many ranks behind the first joined in. Dice were tossed, and if Side A was unlucky, he'd find that only the first rank was actually engaged. A good toss resulted in a total of 3 ranks of stands in combat. What Side A was doing was, in effect, defining a huge rectangle enclosing his stands in combat.
By giving the attacking side the option of selecting his frontage, he could identify all the stands he wanted to concentrate on the enemy force, massing his troops three deep, hoping that he'd be able to include all the stands in the huge rectangle he had defined.
The defender's frontage was decided by the attacker; all the defender could do was hope to include all the stands (up to 3 deep) which were situated behind the front line in combat
Hit Dice (10-sided dice) were given for each stand in melee, with additional dice assigned for (a) the heavier units, for (b) an advantage, and (c), as I mentioned above, for the number of CM's "invested" in the melee. Tosses of 1,2 or 3 were hits and gave the inflicting side its CM's.
The side that lost removed its entire front rank of stands and placed them in its Rally Zone; there they remained until the end of the bound, when attempts were made to bring them back.
The Rally Zone consisted of 3 sections. Stands entering the zone were placed in Zone #1. When they passed a test, they went to Zone #2, and after passing yet another test, they went to Zone #3. The use of multiple zones prevented a stand, which had just been placed in the zone as the result of a loss in combat, from instantaneously rallying at the end of the same bound and immediately reappearing on the field.
As the stands passed through the three sections of Rally Zone, not all of them survived to reappear on the field. Those stands that failed the test were placed back in the box, never to be seen again.
Under the rules system, there were, therefore, two ways in which your stands could be destroyed:
- First, your opponent, using his collection of CM's, could specifically mandate that you remove one of your stands from the field. He chose the type of stand, and you chose the particular stand of that type that was to be taken away.
Second, stands were removed by your own efforts in moving them from one Rally Zone to another. Failing to pass the rally test to move up one zone means instant death.
It's obvious that the above procedures make for a highly symbolic game. In effect, a huge board game. And despite lots of cogitation, I still haven't come up with a rationale for use of the CM's in the manner described. But a lack of logical thought hasn't stopped me in the past.
Nor, for that matter, has it stopped the other rules writers in the hobby in their efforts to bring history table-side.
My own criteria, used to judge the merits of a set of rules, banks largely on the enjoyment factor it provides. Another way of saying this is ... does the set give rise to a group of happy people, or, after two or three turns, do we see a bunch of snarling animals, biting and scratching at each other in their attempts to translate the rules structure in their favor?
And so, I leave you with my illogical rules set ... perhaps,. in the next issue, I'll provide you with my illogical army lists.
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© Copyright 1996 Wally Simon
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