Part 1

As mentioned last issue, the question of unit/army morale and leadership-has not (to my mind) been accurately assessed and applied to any Ancient or Dark Ages rules currently published. Certainly a Roman cohort of superior morale would perform and last in combat longer than one of less value...or would it? Doesn't the unit leader have a large say in how the unit performs? What would even be the sense of appointing senior cohort commanders if the leadership quality didn't matter? So ... leadership is important, perhaps MORE IMPORTANT THAN UNIT MORALE! (Heretic! Burn him, etc.. As an example, let's take our above-unit, veteran (WRG 'B' class) Roman legionnaires of the 1st Century A.D. We'll have two units of the above named troops being surprised and charged by a large-unit of Germans charging out of a woods. The first Roman unit, cohors I, has a superior leader while cohors II has an abysmal one. Under our "normal" rules, so what? The units would both have the same reaction (biased only by a totally random die roll), How realistic is this? Certainly, the superior Roman training would stand the troops in fairly good stead, but just what happened to Varus' men at Teutonburger Wald or to Cassius' in Parthia? Leadership, when it did break down, pretty much had a lot to do with what happened to the unit(s) involved. So ... cohors I, having a cool and experienced leader would have no real problems, except for reaction delay, in facing the threat and confidently carrying on, Cohors II, though, due to leader fear and vacillation (what do I do?), inexperience or downright cowardice would surely at least be slower to react and even mote likely, may only have the stamina to hold. If the-leader seeing the screaming barbarians charging down on him, turns and runs away, the infectiousness of this cowardly move might run through even the finest class of troops.

Our rules should tailor themselves to some form of leader inspired reaction result and not just unit morale. Even a unit of inferior or poor quality which has an excellent leader would have a fair chance of facing the above situation in better stead than the much better unit with its leader running away! How do we reflect this? In our SAGA house rules (always in the development stage!) a 1d10 is rolled for each leader in our army (one roll for each unit), before the game/campaign and a leader number (% or otherwise) reflective of his ability is determined. Once all units have had a determined. Once all units have had a die roll made, these leadersare assigned to whatever units the player wishes, Often it's better to assign the better leaders to the better units, but sometimes a large, number of militia or fyrd is required to hold an important piece-of the board and you may wish to assign them a good quality leader to help insure their stability.

Part 3