"Most Rewarding Battle Simulation?" Topic

What do you consider to be the most rewarding battle of ancient history to simulate with miniatures? I will leave it to you to define "rewarding," but I suppose I mean a combination of historical significance, educational value, AND nail-biting playability. I would be grateful for any responses; this should help me choose which armies to start with.

Raphia is a pretty good one, as is Magnesia. Of course, I'm biased towards that era.

Doug

We ran a large Alesia game.

Romans laying siege to a Gaul city who are in turn besieged by a large relieving force of Gauls.

So the Romans have fortifications facing in and out.

The Gauls have to try to break out and link up with the relieving force.

That has to be my favorite ancients game so far.

Bob

Two very good ones! both Magnesia and Alesia are very good games and historically interesting. Where else are you going to have Romans with Elephants?

I think Phil Virerito is doing an Alesia (Classical Hack) game with Mark at Hcon this year or at Cold Wars next year. The theme for Cold Wars is the Rise and Fall of Rome.

Our club is doing Magnesia Triple play using Classical Hack, Might of Arms and Ancient Warfare at Cold Wars as welll.
VR
James Mattes

One good one is the 2nd Battle of Chaeronea. This is Roman vs the Ponts. It has a grat variety of troop types and is visually appealing. We have fought it several times and are just about even on the win loss column for both sides.

Alesia was a great battle but in order to do it correctly requires a huge investment of time, money, and playing space. One has 25 miles of fortifications to build if one does the whole battle area.

Another great one is of course Pharsalus. 17 Legions on the board is quite impressive.

Zama is also a good one.

You can find a number of such free scenarios at:

link

in the files section. Another good scenario is the Battle of Thapsus, and you can get the scenario at the link above, or see it done fancy at:

link

Enjoy!

- Greg

I hardly consider Hastings an ancients battle, but since the WRG early days, the "breakoff" point was this battle, for some reason I have never been able to fathom.

Anyway, Hastings is one of those battles where the forces are relatively even in numbers, yet so different in composition, that the outcome is always uncertain: I have played it well over a score of times (which you can see some of here: 1066.us).

It is a classic confrontation of a defensive (English) army on good ground, trying to hold out against combined arms of missile and shock (the attacking Franco/Normans): yet the defense has missile capacity too, just short-range, hand-thrown; whereas the attackers have bow and crossbow.

If the Normans attack successfully with their cavalry (i.e. don't lose too many to casualties and routing) they usually win. But being able to do this is anything but likely.

Given average dice on both sides, the Normans have a slight edge over the English overall, but that only means that in my keeping track of wins and losses in the games I have played, the Normans won about half, the English won slightly less than half, and the remainder were drawn fields with no clear winner (which strategically means the Normans lost, because William the Conqueror must eliminate all three of the Godwinson brothers, so that the English will not, subsequently to the battle, have anyone to rally to).

The battles of Arthur with his late Roman Wall army, Badon his greatest victory and ending in the epic field of Camlan
I live on the Roman Road and not far from a possible site of one of his battles and continue to trawl the fields with my metal detector, i'l find something one day.....

I second Hastings.

Stamford Bridge - More intersting than Hastings in my view. The initial deployments mean that this is less of a line em up in nice straight rows type of battle. This is a real "got to buy time whilst I form up" scenario.

I've only done one Ancient game, that was Sambre chosen for the SOA battleday just gone. But it was all those things you mentioned. It was made even better by the lectures by expert historians on the day who really brought the battle alive for us. A crucial factor was that of time, the march speed of the Roman baggage train and the reinforcements.

Interestingly, out of the 8 different rulesets that simulated the Sambre battle that day, only one(if my memory is correct I think it was Armati) got a different result to that of history.

I reccommend this day out for anyone interested in Ancients wargaming.

James

I feel that one of the best balanced historical situations is Heraclea 279 BC between Pyrrhus of Epirus's Hellenistic army and the earlier Roman Legions.
The battle lends itself to a tense see-saw game in almost every game system I've used to play it out.
Of course everybody in this kind of survey is going to choose their personal preferance.

Another excellent place to start is Zama. Generally this is a battle that with hindsight makes for a more even match than the historical result would imply.

If you go with Zama or Heraclea you end up with two excellent choice armies for any ancients game.
JeffJ

Try Yarmuk, 636AD for something rather different.

Somewhat challenging to do I would think but it would be pretty rewarding IMO. Also deeply significant historically.

Heraclea, Magnesia, Zama, anything between Rome and Macedonians/Pikes, and maybe some of the Persian v Alex battles (Or Seleucid or Ptolemaic v Rome)

Using Hoplon of course…

Hammer good luck in your hunting, or at least more luck than "Time Team" seems to have in their searches. Years ago, in my horse-owning days, my favorite trail was part of the original Pony Express mail route on my trusty appaloosa/historian's charger. Nothing like actually walking historical ground.

As far as a battle, well I'm very pro-Roman but would have to go for Cannae. While I don't particularly personally like Hannibal, seeing how he used his victims' numerical superiority to defeat them is a tremendous lesson in tactics.