"Best Ancient/ Medieval rules for HUGE battles..." Topic

When trying to recreate the largest of the Ancient & Medieval historical battles which rule set works the best.

As to "huge" let's say historical battles where both sides when combined totaled over 80,000 troops.

Well, we've played 1000 AP battles using DBMM. With 3 or 4 people per side. That works out to around 250 elements a side. At the nominal scale that is ~60,000 troops a side.

Whole thing can be done in 3 to 4 hours if everyone knows the rules. We use an "object of power" that the CinC's exchange so everyone knows who's turn it is.

These games are the funnest games I have ever played. They really show what "fog of war" really is. Nothing like the look of horror on the CinC's face when a subgeneral meekly tells him that his flank is broken!

Cheer's
JohnG

I would avoid Newbury "Fast Play" Ancients.
Trust me.

To the Strongest! and Hail Caesar both work a treat for huge multi-player battles.

Broad question. "Works the best" at what and for what? Two-player battles or multi-player battles? Units as single stands or as multiple stands? Units capable of altering formation while still being a distinct unit (thus, multi stand)? Are you trying to do the glorified chit thing, where a single stand is a unit of hundreds to thousands of men, using specific ratios, or are you just wanting something that "looks big"? (I presume for logistics sake, that you're not using 1:1 representation and/or individually based figures.)

For two-player, multi-stand maneuverable units that "look big," my favorite remains Warmaster/Warmaster Ancients. I know it can be done as a multiplayer game, but I've never tackled that myslf.

What Parzival said, best is relative.

I like Triumph! for Ancient and Medieval battles. It scales well so you can play it "zoomed out" with smaller armies representing larger per figure soldier counts or you can "zoom in" and use more maneuver elements to get more figures on the board.

I have used it for everything from Kadesh to Hydaspaes to Hastings. The rules are easy and fast enough to play a massive battle with two players and engaging enough to have teams play opposing commands. In the smallest scale it generates a result in about an hour, in triple size (my favorite zoom level) it plays in about 3 hours.

To the Strongest and Tactica. We only play massive ancient battles with over 900 figures per game.

Big Battle DBA. To date, I've played with up to 5 regular DBA armies per sideand the game plays quickly and smoothly.

For large battles I use "Art of War" by Rocky and Doug.

BBDBA

Lost Battles is designed to fight huge historical battles, and tbh, so is Command and Colours Ancients.

Anything with elements and a variable ground and troop scale will do (One Hour Wargames anyone?).

But those first two are our go to sets for likes of Cannae etc.

To the Strongest

I would recommend Hail Caesar Rules. Hope it helps.

As always, comments are appreciated.

Take care

Andy

Glad to hear a couple votes for Hail Caesar. That's one of the rule sets I'm looking into.

Uesugi Kenshin wants to play historical battles not chess with DBM

If your looking to re-fight actual battles BBDBA is good for this purpose as it actually states what the troop size a base is, so you have a useful starting point for translating the numbers involved into elements. You still have to make a judgement on sizes of commands and sub generals.Here it can be quite difficult. Yes Lost Battles by the historian Phil Sabin is very good. He views his rules as tool to try and understand what actually happened in the battle.The command and colors ancients website is a great resource for ancient battles. I reckon every key battle is listed.

Whatever happened with the project?

To play large battles and get historical type results I would've that you'd really need rules with a strong command and control system. Something that might, insofar as is possible, replicate the historical command systems.

Since you want to play large battles that suggests you're prepared to commit more time and therefore you can accept some system more sophisticated that just rolling a D6 for pips.

To play large battles and get historical type results I would've that you'd really need rules with a strong command and control system. Something that might replicate the historical command systems.

As usual, everyone recommends their current favourite rules. The answer is that it's horse for courses, and depending upon the number of players the best answer is probably the simplest rules that you reckon everyone knows.

For over 10 years now I've been running big refights with my 1/72 plastics (that is, 12' long table with wall to wall figures more or less) when I can get everyone together on a bank holiday. For these games we use Neil Thomas' rules from "Ancient and Medieval Wargaming" with a few home grown tweaks. They're fast, and newbies will be comfortable with them inside 10 minutes. Here's a sample game from December 2019:

link

To The Strongest and Hail Caesar work pretty good.

BBDBA + 1

Nice to see this thread come back.

always a good idea to explore this

I vote for Hail Caesar. It works with two players or twenty.

Usually have multiplayer games with several hundred figures per side on a 16" table. Our house version of Tactica seems to work best (enhanced morale rules, push-backs etc…). Tactica II has excellent points, but it does not work well for our large games that need to be completed in an evening without several amendments. I would still recommend the rules.