"How to handle chariots and arrtillery" Topic

From this thread for reference. TMP link

I've had little experience with artillery and chariots in ancient gaming. I think artillery can be handled as sort of a super bow. Throw 2D and assess hits like any other form of combat. Still a 12 inch range. Maybe throw only 1D beyond that?

How about chariots? How do they really fight? I know the Celtic chariots were used in a skirmishing roll or as battle taxis that the warrior would jump off, fight for a time, jump back on and leave.

How about Egyptian chariots or the heavier Hittite chariots? How would they work?

You have already found the hole in most Ancients rules… chariots were used very differently by different cultures, and there is no one size fits all answer.

Do Celtic chariots add dice to units they are supporting? Are Egyptian chariots effective enough at shooting to match archer units? Are Hittite chariots so chock full of armor and spears that they can break an infantry unit?

In my opinion, in the case of chariots, almost every nationality needs its own rules for chariots, to reflect how they were used by that army.

For Egyptian vs Hittite chariots, I give the Hittite chariots more defense and the Egyptian ones more speed.

For pretty much all ancient chariots, they get a speed in the middle of max infantry run speed and max archery distance (I put cav halfway between chariots and archery), modified up or down a bit (+/- 5-15%) for style of chariot. This gives a dynamic where they are much faster than foot, but much slower than arrows.

Chariots can only move in straight lines on their turn. This puts maneuverability limitations on them; a chariot can't weave in and out through infantry, they have to push through.

I also give them momentum. In their move action, they can increase or decrease speed by some accel/decel number (which is usually the same both ways unless there is a compelling reason not to do that) before picking a direction and going.

For maneuver, I give them an "hour rating" which is the number of hours they can pivot before moving (12 o'clock is straight forward). Generally, there is a high rating for high speed and a low rating for low speed. Again, with a compelling reason, some chariots could have more granular turn rates or different ones to port or starboard. Yes, army people -- port and starboard. Eat it. :)

These rules do not replicate the physics of chariots, but they create a combat chariot like effect for skirmish games and allow for variation in effectiveness. They wouldn't work well for, say chariot races, where different aspects of chariot design become important. But they do give a good tactical feel for skirmishes.

So what we have so far is that all chariots are different per Punk Rabbit. etotheipi suggests that you could mark the differences as Egytians being on the light extreme and the Hittites being on the heavy extreme with all others somewhere in the middle.

For movement, most chariots have a 10" move with the Egyptians having a 12" move. lets say they can decelerate or accelerate at 6" per turn. So in 2 turns they will be up to top speed.

Turning, per my rules, costs a half move so there is a built in dynamic for how much movement is taken per turn. If a chariot is moving at 6" and turns, it will cost 3" to turn and then must move 3" ahead. That would work nicely with the acceleration rules.

I can only suspect that shooting from chariots will not be too potent. There just aren't enough in the formation to make a real difference. So maybe 1 die per unit period.

And now for the part not mentioned by either of you. Can these beauties close to melee? How do they work? Do they just melee like normal?

I'd call Hittite chariots fully armored and all others half armored. Maybe even call Celtic chariots no armor since they really are just a board that the warrior "surfs" on.

And now for the part not mentioned by either of you. Can these beauties close to melee? How do they work? Do they just melee like normal?

I'd call Hittite chariots fully armored and all others half armored. Maybe even call Celtic chariots no armor since they really are just a board that the warrior "surfs" on

That's just it, each will be different. Egyptian chariots have nowhere near the protection or the raw fighting ability of the Hittite chariots, and both would look weak in comparison to one of those Indian jobs with the six crew. Celtic chariots are not a battle platform at all, just a quick way of shuttling the nobility to where they want to be and to look much grander than running about on foot.

etotheipi is dead on about the acceleration, but in my opinion that gets needlessly fiddly. I remember back when i was doing development work for Dark Age Games, I was trying to build a reasonably realistic set of vehicle rules and the acceleration factors were the monkeywrench in the works. We eventually abandoned that line of development altogether, and it's like 8 years later and they still haven't worked it out. We can't just ignore chariots in the Chariot Period, but sometimes it is important to choose which bits about them that need to be overlooked (going too far in this direction leads to DBA chariots, which are my least favourite portrayal in the entire game.)

By the way, I am no means an expert about chariots, i am just sometimes good at synthesizing the information I have learned over the years into something useful. I love chariots, and as a result I have learned everything I can about them which sometimes puts my opnion at odds with the accepted wisdom regarding them. One of the most maddening things is sometimes there is nothing more to go on than a piece of artwork, which only shows how they looked and the crews were equipped, and the rest is just educated guesswork.

For more on chariots here:

TMP link

Actually, there was a massive dicussion once about chariots and did they charge into contact. Can't find it here; might have been on a Yahoo group.

I am looking at the fact that a chariot is pulled by multiple horses. 2 or 4 usually. So lets say they can charge in and attack a unit of warriors…foot soldiers. One jabs a horse on a nearby chariot killing it. Now what? The chariot can't move. There is a dead horse lashed to it. You could cut it away and move back but I don't think the enemy warriors will oblige you.

That is the weakness of a chariot. 2-4 horses and only one of those needs to be killed in melee to disable the chariot. Also, if a chariot is moving at a high rate of speed and one of the horses gets hit, I believe there is going to be a big old accident in the crew's near future.

My game is clearly an army game rather than a skirmish game. So, some/much of this stuff can be abstracted. But it would be good to ultimately know the fighting capabilities of a chariot in close combat.

GarrisonMiniatures thanks for the thread link. It was interesting but unfortunately did not come to any conclusions. The OP did not really know whether he wanted info about Scythed chariots or bronze age chariots and most of it seemed to focus on the former.

It's trying to find the other one that really counts… must have been a Yahoo group, but I dropped out of them when they made it impossible to read anything!

When it comes to Egyptian chariots I think the main tactic was to encircle, divide or herd infantry formations and take shots of opportunity. Think of a dog herding sheep or a man on a horse cutting cattle. I would not give them much if any melee value. They are really only effective against an army who has no cavalry or slow heavy chariots. Their value is to fire from the flanks, exploit breaks in a battle line or run down skirmish troops.

Their value is to fire from the flanks, exploit breaks in a battle line or run down skirmish troops.

That sounds quite viable. Sounds about right for Egyptians.

Now that I am home and not bored at work, I should probably check the usual sources. Barker, Warry and such.

Re: Egyptian chariots, as I have been pondering this all day long I am thinking that really they function like slightly more effective, very fast skirmishers with an emphasis on breaking up formations or simply disordering troops, allowing the regular groundpounders to exploit the opportunities created. I am not sure how you are rating skirmishers in your new rules experiment, but it might be feasible to rate Egyptian chariots similarly but with the aforementioned doubled speed. Likewise the Hittite Armored Assault Tank chariot could function like fast medium or heavy infantry. Both in the interest of simplicity.

Again, I am not an expert, but I have read a LOT about chariots in particular. Mostly, the consensus is that there is no consensus.

I miss the old WRG 5th edition rules where you could line up 30 or so plastic Airfix Ancient British chariots and charge them up a hill and through several fully-formed Roman legions.

Ahh, the good old days…

So it does seem that the Egyptians and the Hittites both used Chariots as a fast shooting platform. The Hittites tended to move up, shoot and then move away.

The Egyptians tended to ride forward, drive parallel to the enemy line and fire arrow after arrow into their ranks.

The Syrians and Canaanites were similar but they also used the chariots as bait. They would draw the enemy toward a stronghold they controlled. They would then offer battle along with infantry hidden near by. It usually started with a downhill charge. The WRG book I read on the subject was pretty vague as to who was doing the charging downhill. Chariots? Infantry? Both? Anyway, if the battle went badly, they would retreat into the fort. It was back in the day where static defenses were almost insurmountable!

Mycenaean chariots were more like battle taxis. They were status symbols for the wealthy to ride to the front. They would dismount, join the fight and if/when the fight was finished, they would mount up and ride home, presumably with their booty. Hittites, Canaanites and Syrians had 3 man chariots. The others were two men. Always 1 charioteer and one or two warriors.

That's what I have so far. I'll see what Neil Thomas has to say on the matter. As well, PB might have some input from the DBM write-ups.

I've never liked the 'battle-taxi' term, in that it suggests a lack of realationship between the driver and the warrior (and possibly a lingering smell of vomit and some cursing in a foreign accent).

I think Celtic chariots are more like expensive sports cars in a James Bond film, impressive but possibly delicate, used to racing around madly with shooting and climbing onto the roof, screeching around corners. They brake, men jump out, fighting, then back in the car.

I do not think that there is a huge variation in the way chariots fought.

The only good written evidence for chariot fighting is for Celtic chariots and for scythed chariots. Can anyone think of a good written account for anything else.
Scythed chariots are a special case, a branch off the normal chariot line.

Celtic chariots rattle around groups of infantry throwing javelins. They do dismount their warriors to fight and then remount, but that is their peculiarity. Their normal mode of racing around throwing missiles is the norm. Unfortunately we do not have a written account of chariot versus chariot warfare, so it is all surmise, even the thoughts of those who have spoken certainties are surmise.
I looks like chariots mainly fight other chariots, being socially superior to the infantry and far more expensive it is no surprise if killing footmen is the last thing on their mind.
Next we know something about the development of chariots. They move from being unarmoured, to having crew in full bronze armour and later horses in full armour. Then they move to having four horses and four crew, all armoured, though in lighter armour than two horse chariots, but with shieldbearers who make up the difference.
As part of this development they fain soecial teams of footsoldiers who support the chariots…chariot runners with javelin or bow. We can make a good guess at what these do because they are similar to later light infantry who cooperate with cavalry such as the Spanish, Celts and Germans have. There the light infantry act as a base for the cavalry to retire upon and its likely that chariots do the same.
Chariots very likely operate in a loose order against each other. Those with bows will shoot as they go, those with javelins and long spears will try and skewer an opposing charioteer as they pass. Looking at the length of the charioteers armour whether Mitanni,nHittite, Egyptian or Dendra style Greek it does not look as though dismounting was on the cards. The armoured horses will have been hard to shoot down. Long lines of chariots would have passed through each other,shot and wheeled again until obe side or another gave up. At that point the chariots attack the opposing infantry. These are surrounded and the chariots create a cloud of dust from which they send arrows into the mass. Because the chariots are moving fast they are hard to hit and horses and men are armoured. true the chariots do not have the volume of fire of a massed infantry unit, but they do have several quivers so they can shoot for longer and they can dart in and out and come infrom the sides and rear and a mass of infantry is an easy target.. Eventually, when the mass is wavering a chariot unit charges it. If its nerve holds the chariots wheel iff to the flanks. In the end the hopelessness of their situation breaks the infantry. It is like the Romans at Carrhae or the Crusader foot at Hattin, surrounded by horse archers , in the end,dust thirst and casualties and the fact that their own chariots have gone, destroy their morale, another chariot charge and they break.
In a recent Slingshot article Alastair McBeath explained how a Sumerian battle car could virtually turn on the spot. As to other chariots turning without loss of momentum just go to the Circus Maximus at Rome, in fact watch Ben Hur…four horse chariots went around a 180 degree turn at a lick. As to scythed chariots, they develop from the four horse chariots. Xenephon in Cyropaedia tells us how the Persians found their four horse chariots no longer effective as a weapon to break degraded infantry because the infantry had got much better disciplined so they stripped out the crew and fitted scythes, armoured the horses and used them as disruptor weapons.

"Chariots are single stand units. They can be rated as no armor, half armored or fully armored. They may function in one of two ways. First, they may be a fast moving missile platform. Each chariot rolls 1 die in missile combat at a range up to 8". Second, they may roll up to a friendly unit and attach themselves giving a support bonus of 1 die in melee combat. Only 1 attachment per unit is allowed. If the unit routs, the chariot is eliminated as well. It is assumed that warriors mount up and run for it.

Chariots move 10" and may make 1 free turn at any point during their move. They may shoot from any angle. If hit, the chariot is eliminated. Egyptian chariots seemed to be the exception and may move at 12"."

The latter type of combat is for the heroic types which dismount to fight enemies. I presume they won't dismount in tiny bands to take on a much more numerous enemy!

I think being able to sub out British chariots for infantry for a turn would be cool.
The Romans thought it was amusing. However it seemed to be an effective way to wage war against other tribes of Britons.

My 2¢

Thanks
Austin

The Romans were quite phased by the chariots at first. The Brhlitons sent away all but the chariots and cavalry and light infantry and proved a handful. Trouble was they could not stand up to a legion

I can only suspect that shooting from chariots will not be too potent. There just aren't enough in the formation to make a real difference. So maybe 1 die per unit period.

I dunno about that.

Your ordinary bronze age peasant is an archer, naked in a ballyrag, shooting a self bow with stone-pointed arrows. Or maybe he has a bull-hide shield to cover himself and a stone-pointed spear.

Your chariot is crewed by a noble maryannu who spends all day every day practicing his martial arts. He's completely armored, with his driver using a shield to block incoming. His horses are armored. He's shooting an expensive compound bow and his arrows have bronze points – he has double the effective range of a peasant archer, and at medium range his bronze-tipped arrows go right through a bull-hide shield and the man behind it.

A squadron of chariots trot-trot-trot up to the vicinity of a mass of peasant bows. The peasants shoot. Their arrows mostly fall short, a few stick in shields or bounce off armor. The maryannu shoot. Phht. Phht. Phht. Every time a maryannu shoots, a peasant dies.

The peasants charge the chariots, trying to close with their stone spears. The chariots trot-trot-trot off in a cloud of dust and horse s. The peasants keep up the chase for a while, then slow down and stop, gasping and puking. A little later the chariots stop and the maryannu shoot the few peasants who've kept up.

Then the chariots trot-trot-trot back to the exhausted peasants. They stop at effective range and the maryannu resume shooting. Phht. Phht. Phht.

The peasants now see that, eventually, they're all going to die without getting in one effective blow. How long will they stand under the bowfire? Phht. Phht. Phht.

"Chariots very likely operate in a loose order against each other. Those with bows will shoot as they go, those with javelins and long spears will try and skewer an opposing charioteer as they pass."

Drews seems convinced that long spear armed charioteers could not 'joust' against each other and spends some time telling us why they could not. It made me wonder if the long spear would be used to kill the opponents horses. The sort of thing the French Gendarmes complained about the Spanish cavalry doing in the early 1500s.

Mind you Drews thinks the Myceneans etc were phht,phht charioteers too.

I have just finished a couple of chariot units for my Picts they will throw javelins on the hoof and dismount as hard hitting warband.

As best I can tell people first rode to battle on a small pony sized horse, and then dismounted to fight. The warfare of this period would be more like an extended raiding campaign as we are talking the copper age here.

The first chariots were an attempt to get these small horses to be more immediately useful on the battlefield. I seem to recall early examples included a representation of a chariot pulled by an onager.

So the tradition that the chariots came out of would not likely involve directly charging into formed troops. As noted by zippyfusenet, with missile fire, the increased battlefield mobility would allow them to act much in the way that horse archers came to act. For those cultures that admired mixing it up on foot, they also allowed for speedy flanking actions, and the potential for escaping on foot.

The difference in chariot types is probably explained by local resources and the type of ground they would be expected fight over. Larger, multi-person chariots are likely getting into wagon territory. I do seem to recall some relatively militant four-wheel Assyrian depictions of carts pulled by Oxen. So I think there is a chariot to wagon continuum that was likely rather blurry.

The chariot technology seems to have gone from west to east with the Aryans according to Drews in The End of the Bronze Age etc. It seems a faily robust proposition and means you would only use Onagers because you had no access to more suitable horses.

I suggest Drews is wrong about Jousting. Chariot drivers were very skilled and. must have ha d a high degree of control . given tha t there are two lines of chariots operating, passing coose to an opponent is not that difficult to arrange. It is the same for knoghts, why doesn't the rider being charged just move off a couple of feet and miss the impact. Weel its because he has someone to his left coming towards him and there is just not the space.
If there is room enough the chariot warrior could throw his lance, or one of his javelins. Illustrations show long spears that would not be much use on foot and do not reach beyond the horses' heads so I cannot see them being useful for crashing into infantry.
The debate Garrsonetc referred t was on a Yahoo list called ancmed. Ultimately it resolved down to those who thought that chariots could crash frontally into formed and resolute infantry and those who thought that would just result in a very dead, very expensive chariot crew. Ultimately its a sirt of West v East debate. Westerners seem to think everything is sorted by a physical collision, Easterners that it is subtle wearing down of the infantry by arrows, dust, outflanking , noise and feint charges.

Yeah I'm not convinced either not least because we keep seeing spear armed charioteers in surviving art.

I think the term jousting conjures the wrong image too. I'm inclined to imagine it as a well timed over armed one handed spear thrust at the enemy. The other hand gripping the cab rail for balance.

I think the one item that gets glossed over is what happens when a horse is wounded badly (killed/disabled).

A chariot, any chariot, has something like 2-4 horses pulling the vehicle depending on the size, nationality and so forth. If just one of those horses is killed, the chariot comes to a stop. It is possible that the crew can dismount, cut the horse free and move off to s safe distance to get another horse/replacement.

Well that is all fine if the chariot has been fighting at range. But what happens if the chariot charges in and a horse gets injured? Likely, the crew is slain or captured. You just don't have the fighting density of a formed body of infantry so likely the crew is doomed. There is zero chance of the crew being able to cut the dead horse free. So crashing through the ranks is likely going to result in a one way trip and possibly ending the life or at least the battle for the crew involved.

That is strong enough evidence for me, empirical as it is, to say that the chariots fought mostly at distance with missile weapons.

Two things come to mind.

Firstly Drews makes a good case that the Sea Peoples dealt with chariots by bringing down the horses with javelins and then killing the crew with swords. Whatever the reality of that its clear that the old Palace and chariot system could not cope with them.

Secondly Ceasar's description of chariots in Britain seem to indicate quite close contact with the Roman foot. Fear of the iron rimmed tires is mentioned I think. From memory though the British chariots only close when they have caught the Romans out of normal tactical deployment. In such cases the Roman foot cannot cope with them.