So far this year 23 different nationalities or distinct periods have provided armies for use in the Society of Ancients wargames championship. These have been mainly fought on terrain selected according to the method laid down in the Research Group Ancient Rules. This assumes that each army would prefer to fight in terrain that it considers suits it, but that opponents are unlikely to be so co-operative 28 to allow this, so that they in fact fight where the two types of terrain merge. Neither is then completely happy, and neither completely unhappy. In contrast, National Convention orgenisers have always insisted on a fixed terrain, but allowed players to alter the proportions of troop types in their armies, after having seen the terrain. To start with, this is a rather unrealistic procedure. An Ancient General would not know exactly where he would be called upon to fight, and one can hardly imagine him saying to his Hunnic light cavalry on finding the enemy sitting on a steep hill, "We don't want you any longer. Here are your arrears of pay. Go back to Central Asia, and when you pass Illyris, ask them to send some light javelinmen instead, and tell them we will keep the fire burning until they arrive." This is not to say he would not know in advance the general type of country he would be in. He might know that he would be campaigning in say Gaul, where they have swamps, plains, farmland, hills and forests, but no mountains or deserts. He would not know that round the next corner was a warband drawn up behind a swamp with one flank resting on a steep hill and the other on dense woods. The second, and crucial, disadvantage is that if an Ancient British army found itself fighting Huns on a broad flat plain, the privilege of swapping any one of its infantry for more chariots or light horse-would not do it any good. Reversing the case, in continuous heavy woods, swapping 20 light cavalry for 40 light infantry would not markedly improve the Huns prospects. In other words, a fixed terrain will favour one type of army. If this happens to be the type of army that the organisers team has, and they are hardly likely to choose terrain that handicaps their own army, harsh words may be spoken. Let us see how this works out in practise. At Leicester this year, the initial terrain consisted of two shallow hills on the table edges facing each other at one end, the other end being flat with a stream running down the centre. Every experienced player looked at this and said "This competition will be won by a Seleucid or an Egyptian army." This was because the hills could be occupied by rank after rank of archers shooting over preceeding ranks without penalty, who did not even have to move to get there, because the hills extended behind the set-up line. Cavalry could not face the storm, of archery to attack up hill, and could not cross the stream to outflank the hill without beinp delayed and disorgenised. Chariots and camels could not cross it at all! Seleucids and Egyptians were the only armies listed with enough foot archers, the Egyptians fielded by Leicester being even better optimised to the terrain by having an even higher proportion of archers and turning up completely lacking mounted troops. Only one other army type got past the first round, Sam Johnston's Glasgow Romans, and they succumbed to Seleucids in the second round. So on the one hand we have 23 army types fighting happily with no one type having a substantially better or worse record of victory than any other, on the other, the National Seleucid Wargames Championship! The reason always given up to now for sticking to fixed terrain has been the prohibitive expense of providing enough terrain pieces for players to choose from, coupled with a fear that non-symetrical terrain might give one side an unfair advantage. To the first I reply that the cost of providing a few polystyrene hills is very little compared with that of providing the tatty looking one piece polystyrene battlefields that are now the fashion. In fact, here in our flat we now have enough green table cloths, and almost enough terrain pieces to fight off the Convention Ancient Quarter Finals. The answer to the second is that the hundred plus players who have taken part in the Society of Ancients competition so far this year have not produced a single complaint about the unfairness of non-symmetrical terrain and that practically every player I have spoken to considers that choosing the best terrain to fight on is part of the test of a good player. Getting down to brass tacks here is a practical proposal. Give each player a steep hill, a low hill, a wood and a small swami). Tell them that in turn, each of them must place one of his 4 pieces on the table, in any position he likes as long as it is not within 15" of his own table edge. They continue to do this until each has positioned 3 pieces, except that if a player wishes, he can refrain from choosing any at all, or alternatively stop when he wishes. The table, which will probably be a 6 x 4' can then have between 0 and 6 terrain pieces with different characteristics. If Convention organisers like to adopt this system, Research Group will loan them the necessary cloths and terrain pieces. We feel that such a system would encourage manoeuvre and make for much more interesting games, that it would bear a close resemblance to real wargaming than Convention battles now do, and that it would greatly speed up games by eliminating the 45 minutes of army list juggling required by the old system. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter #141 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1973 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com