An Engineer and a Mathematician stand on one side of a room, two pretty women on another. They are told that when they reach her they will get a kiss, but that each time they move they can only move half the distance between themselves and the girl. The mathematician is disappointed because he knows he'll never reach his girl. The engineer however is not since he realizes that he'll got close enough.

--Old Joke

It one substitutes Historian for Mathematician and Game Designer for Engineer then one has the necessary tension between the designer and the historian in our hobby. The historian is already haunted with the doubt that he will write something which in time will be proved foolish.

One needs only read -the works of a seminal historian like Delbruck to understand the amount of refutation necessary to make a new leap from one traditional viewpoint to a more scientific one. The passage of time can even be cruel to someone as rigorous as Delbruck since his statements about the worthlessness of studying the Mongols were proven wrong not 10 years after his death.

The game designer constructs something which lives. Ideally it should be able to grow with the passage of time much in the same way as WRG has matured. It is a practical instrument for the study of history and while it is subject to the same vagaries of time it need not cover the ground with as much detail as the historian since the object is only to got close enough.

The Game Designer also has to deal with the vagaries of the market place. At the end of tke seventies the board game market was for large complex games that cease to be even called games but were marketed as "simulations" since the object was not to create games to be played for fun but simulations that gave Players the feel of the responsibilities of the actual commander. These games are now collectors items as the constrains of time and space rendered them impractical for the average gamer.

The trend turned to the role-playing game and then back to the war game as originally designed by Avalon Hill, a game to be played by two players in an evening, the beer and pretzels game if you will. Board games were inspired by miniatures games but even these have followed the trend from primitive to complex returning to a sophisticated simplicity on a much slower time scale. Whether the current trend towards the simpler game is beneficial to the hobby or not depends on what kind of miniature games one is talking about. At the present time the problem is how to create a set of ancients rules which will replace the aging WRG systems.

Two Branches

There are two branches of wargaming: gunpowder gaming (c. post-1500) and ancients gaming (c. pre-1500). The more I come in contact with people in the hobby the more I am convinced that the people who appreciate one have trouble appreciating the other since the two types of gamers aren't talking about warfare In the Same way. This may explain why Renaissance games have never had the draw of the ancients or the horse and musket periods. Renaissance gaming contains elements of both the ancients and gunpowder gaming.

Gunpowder gaming is a conflict between two relatively homogeneous armies where there are three basic troop types, infantry armed with a firearm (and in the Renaissance period a pike-or sword and 1puckler), artillery with pieces of varying sizes and cavalry which expresses the variety of the ancient army. from the beginning of the Renaissance until the potency of the firearms grew so overwhelming that massed blocks of Imn became a form of suicide, gunpowder gaming is about the maneuver of masses of troops. it is a scissors-rock-peper game with only the six possibilities.

This condition was brought about by the fact that the technology, and the sociology related to it, required for the gunpowder army was in a constant state of flux. Little changes like replacing wood ramrods with metal ones could influence battles and large changes like the creation of the mass state in the French Revolution could create geniuses with the fame of napoleon.

As the battle of Jena illustrates an army from the previous period (the professional armies of the Lace War period) was not competitive on the battlefield with an army of the current period (the mass armies of the Napoleonic period). Gunpowder armies measure their effectiveness in decades, ancient armies in centuries.

Ancient armies did depended on mass to deliver victories but unlike gunpowder armies they are not technology driven which meant that the capacity for organization in ancient and medieval cultures made for smaller armies as technology progressed and the organizational capacities of technological societies improved armies became bigger. This the the theme of Delbruck's four volumes [1] and is best illustrated by Keegan in his comparisons of battlefield sizes in THE FACE OF BATTLE. [2]

As armies became bigger and bigger because the training became easier and easier (It is infinitely easier to kill someone with a gun than a sword or spear.) then armies had more and %or* people concentrated into smaller and smaller areas. This trend continues until the advent of the technological revolutions in the end of the 19th Cent. made massed units obsolete. The capacity to create mass armies and the reduction of war to a test of technology is the theme of the gunpowder period.

The theme of the ancients period is different. The armies of the 4500 years before the effective use of gunpowder were with certain exceptions, much more personal things, reflecting the personality of the commander and the troops available for his command. These were not simply building blocks but groups of warriors which were hold together by something other than discipline and patriotism.

To begin with each man was a skilled fighter. He was practiced with his weapon or he was ineffective with it. Secondly he was part of a group. In some cases this was a military group much like we find in the gunpowder world but in most cases this was a family or feudal group. Lastly the individual had a stake in the war. A bodyguard could have a huge stake in the outcome of a conflict, a militiaman somewhat less and the peasant yanked off his farm would be looking for the first chance to desert.

Balancing between the troops available and the troops needed for a specific opponent was the first puzzle an ancient commander had to so solve. I suspect that it was rather analogous to what an NFL general manager must go through trying to put a team together except that the process would be much move complicated, the ancient commander dealing with some a commodity much more precious than a million dollar salary.

I contend that this army list building is essential to both the historical accuracy of a set of ancients rules and remove& some of the enjoyment from playing rules which diatate the lists for you. making an army list is a solitaire game I play with myself sometimes just for the pure enjoyment of it. Those rules which preset the armies for the opponents are nothing more than games with immutable scenarios (one army against another army being on* scenario) which once any given scenario is mastered it becomes monotonous and a whole now armies will have to be built. This seems to me to be an expensive way have a game vary from one game to another.

Ones the ancient commander has mustered his army he must then contend with the vagaries of what his opponent is using against him. Vagaries like elephants and rockets could ruin a commander's day, although to be fair they only occasionally seem to have tipped the scales of battle. Even the opponents army could have been strange to the commander.

The horse archer was a mystery to the Romans until they came in contact with it in the Punic Wars and could adjust themselves to this new troop type. These adjustments would have called upon the ingenuity of the commander and some of the solutions they came up with were ingenious. Rome's much vilified flaming pigs and Tamerlane's flaming camels are just two of the anti-elephant strategies which commander's came up with and since elephants were a historical reality then these strategies must have some basis in history and need to be included in any attempt to simulate ancient warfare.

If a football coach is suddenly presented with the opposing players on horseback it would complicate bin life enormously. But that would be against the rules you say to which I ask, "Isn't that the real difference between strategy and wargaming?"

In wargaming one must manipulate the rules to gain an advantage, in war won need simply break or rather remake the rules to gain the advantage."

One brief comment relative to the mixing of ahistorical armies.

Aside from the constraints ridged adherence to historical opponents could have on the basic strength of the ancients community (the fact that with a few adjustments an opponent from California with a Feudal English army can play someone from Virginia. with a Gallic army) it is also a fallacy that armies from one period would be incompatible with an army from another period. A Swiss pike in no respect differs from a Macedonian pike. As much as the gunpowder gamer is insulted with the presence of Macedonians and Knights on the same table it seems to me that the manipulation of the two armies differs in only a small way if the armies were Fraconian and Persian or Swiss and Imperialists.

So you now know that I agree with the basic premise of ancient gaming as it has been practiced for the last 21 years or so, namely a set of rules covering the entire period before gunpowder became effective which includes all the stratagem's and troop types extant in this period and allows the player to build an army within historical and cultural parameters any way he chooses. This does not however mean that I 29ree with the present set of rules. WRG's newest effort, De Bellis Antiquitatis seems to have substituted die rolling for rules Writing and the Seventh Edition's seeming innovations owe so much to other sets of rules that came out between Fifth and Sixth Edition [3] that one wonders whether Mr. Barker's rules writing is coming from his keeping up with the new discoveries of history and archaeology or his now discoveries of wargame rules. In short I suspect that VRG, which has created the best sot of wargames rules to date, may have a bad case of hardening of the arteries.

So now the task becomes to design a now and innovative set of rules. I think that the first stop tu tkis design is to identify what should be the driving idea behind the rules. The driving idea behind Seventh Edition seems to be that morale and organization are the Cohesive elements in every army and that weapons and armor differences are insignificant. [4]

I agree with most of this statement but I foot that the fact that he feels that the rules can be written for every army denies history. To me every culture fought differently, i.e. used a different set of rules, from its cultural opponents. The Dark Ages Vikings fought an entirely different battle than the Ancient Scythians.

In other words the army lists (A List of the predominant and available troop types possibly with organization information.) would drive the rules rather than the rules driving the army lists. This concept would create an impossibly complex set of rules if it was all one set of rules and a player tried to learn every detail of every rule from every army but if one simply had to learn only the rules for the army he was playing and could trust his opponent to stick only to the rules pertaining to his army then the rules wouldn't be so complex.

If someone could combine this principle with the new discoveries in archaeology showing things like the actual capabilities of the long bow &PA the historical investigations of Keegan and Van Craveld then he could create a set of rules that might even live through as many editions as WRG's rules.

[1] Delbruck, Hans, History and the Art of War: Within the Framework of Political History, Vol. I-IV, trans by Walter J. Renfroe, Jr. (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT: 1975-1984)
[2] Keegan, John THE FACE OF BATTLE (The Viking Peess, Now York. 1976) pp 83, 124-125, 240, 308.
[3] see Ancient Waroaming (Milgamex, Wayland, MA: 1975)
[4] Barker, Phil. WarGames Rules 3000 BC to 1485 AD (Wargames Research Group, Wilshire England: 1985 rev 1987) p.3