Jamie,

Just received #58. Very good. I was most interested in John Murphy's comments about the DB series. While I share your gripe about skirmishers and their immortality, I think my biggest problem is the pips system for command control.

While Murphy does address this, I find that throughout history as one army approached another three things happened:

1. One side slowed down, halted, redressed ranks so that other charging side would strike them in disorder, usually a killer for formed troops' fighting ability.
2. Both said to heck with it and piled into each other, disorder be damned!!
3. Both sides halted, and stared at one another, daring the other to make a move.
4. One side with the tactical advantage awaited the other.

This is my experience with the different rule systems.

The "DB" series usually is (3). "Tactica" and "WRG#" is (2) without the disorder. "Armati" is usually (4) You never see (1) modeled on the war game table. Why? Because of the fearful word momentum.

Wargamers and designers believe that a halted troop is at the mercy of a charging one. Yet in all my years of fighting sword and shield, I never saw that happen. True the initial surge shook the line, but the follow up melee was pretty even. In fact the halted line would usually triumph all other thing being equal, because they weren't winded after their sprint like the other side.

Now all you romanphiles are saying "What about throwing pila. You need to run forward to do that." German re-enacters in Metz proved that to be a fallacy. You need to take 3 steps to throw a pilum 25 yards. Arrian stopped a Sarmation charge at his lego, by having the rear ranks throw pila over their comrades heads. They didn't charge forward 50 yards to do this.

The Spartans never charged. They advanced at a walk. What does that tell you?

Now halted horse might be different case. I have never been in cavalry charge, yet I have read about many. The Normans, with a wild charge, broke Alexius' stationary front line at Durazzo, in 1081, yet these were atypical Norman and Byzantine armies. The Norman and Sicilians had to conquer or die, Robert Guisgard had stranded them in Italy. The Byzantines were mostly mercenaries.

Yet because of this one encounter, the Normans had the moral ascendancy over the Byzantines for the rest of the Komnena reign. Halted horse apparently was at an disadvantage against charging horse, but by how much we really don't know. (Look at the Heavy Brigade's charge at Balaklava, Oct. 1854. The Brigade charged up a slope against a large number of Cossack regiments, 600 against an estimated 4,000 men. The brigade lost about 100, the Russians unknown, and the Russians retreated. But they were not routed, something wargame designers said should happen to horse caught at the halt.)

So where does this leave us? Charging is not always good, in fact it can be counter productive. Charging halted enemy horse with horse may be an advantage, but it does not give an advantage to charging foot against stationary foot.

Likely the charge was developed to "scare" the other side into running away, which may work against poor troops, but this would fail against steady troops. Also by "charging" troops covered the enemy missile beaten zone, quicker, with less losses, but paid for it by fighting disordered if the missile troops were steady. How to model this by wargaming standards? By eliminating the "morale test." and making the melee include morale results, the "element" games have lost some historic "flavor." Armati in my opinion has retained a little more flavor than the DBs, but still falls short. Murphy's additions do a little to restore flavor, but still more needs to be added to the DB series.