"Use of skirmishers in wargames" Topic

This question is based on games of other periods, not just my games involving Romans etc. I have found that I collect armies of say heavy infantry, light infantry, light cavalry, heavy cavalry and so forth. I set them up, start games. But here's the thing. The light infantry or skirmishers sort of get in the way!

I suppose that the role of skirmishers is to screen your own army from missile fire. To take on and hopefully beat the enemies own skirmishers and start to disrupt the enemy heavier troops, before getting out of the way.

For ancients I use Hail Caesar and To the Strongest. TtS is a bit different in its mechanics.

I suppose my question is, how do others have a slice of skirmisher action in their games, without it going on too long and getting in the way of the main event? Thanks

Seems the problem is your inability to be patient and use the units because you just want to smash units into each other.

Simple solution. Just remove skirmishers from your games.

Skirmishers can annoy the enemy and even make a formed unit or two fall back on a good day, creating good opportunities for the main body to try to exploit. That's my two cents anyways. Of course, you can just not put them on the table too.

Thanks for your thoughts. I have considered not using skirmishers and also considered fighting a battle in two stages, first the light infantry and then progressing to the follow-up action.

I bought the figures. I painted them. I do want to use them, just wondered if anyone else had similar issues and how you play games to simulate things in a half historically correct way.

Or I could just display more patience!

When it's crunch time, they move off to the wings or behind the formed troops.

It'll come down to your rules. Skirmishers with nowhere to fall back to won't be able to delay an advancing force indefinitely. I wonder if the rules you're using are too heavily weighted in favour of skirmishers. In some other periods, skirmishers are abstracted into the factors of units but with ancient battles, that can be harder because of the hugely varied proportions of skirmishers in some armies.

Simply not including them wouldn't feel like a satisfactory solution to me. Too many armies had them as an absolutely integral part of their structure. I don't know what period you're engaged in but ignoring the skirmishers when your legions' enemies are Numidian, Parthian or Spanish for example would be a completely wrong decision. The Carthaginians generally had an advantage in skirmishing troops too over the Romans, which Hannibal was able to use to great advantage, but which lesser generals were unable to replicate.

At Telamon, where that Gauls were trying to maintain a defensive position, the Roman velites were able to operate with a lot of freedom and consequently wreaked havoc on the Gaesatae. At other times, skirmishers were able to be caught or driven off easily.

Getting that balance right in a battle-scale game is always tricky. essentially, the dominant skirmishers should be able to buy time for a bit of pre-contact jostling before, as 79thPA notes, taking more of a support role, threatening flanks, harrying enemy on the wings or simply falling back behind the line, any of which can be useful, but ancillary roles. PIP style mechanisms (and other command limiting rules) can be a useful way to reflect this because they're always at a premium so expending them on skirmishers once the heavy hitting troops are engaging is seldom the best use of such a limited resource. When you're starved of command resources, you won't be inclined to fiddle about with a few slingers when the legionaries are demanding your attention.

Cheers,
John

In Triumph skirmishers can pass through formed troops and formed troops can pass through them.

They are quite useful for pulling enemy troops out of formation just before the main lines close in or screening the main line from enemy skirmishers and light troops.

Very useful units.

Yes I think most rules have some kind of provision for foot skirmishers to pass through, and or be passed through by other troops.

I think they can be an intriguing aspect of the game opening but I can imagine that if all you want to do is get your legionaries into contact, they would seem quite pesky.

Skirmishers are very useful for holding ones beer when it's time for the main event.

Mortem et Gloriam handles skirmishers in a slightly different way to many rulesets.

Skirmishers who don't run away fast enough and are contacted by heavy troops in the open are automatically dispersed. Heavy troops can also push enemy skirmishers back.

Shooting in MeG can slow troops down so the skirmishers do have some influence and in massed numbers can do significant damage.

You can always pass through your own skirmishers and withdraw them in order to charge.

Skirmishers don't count towards losing the game.

It is a balance between not having them at all and making the game too slow.

I think games like DBA and DBM tend to overrate skirmishers somewhat. In DBA all armies have 12 elements so an element of skirmishers has to have the same overall usefulness as an element of legionaries. Give me a legion any day…

That's one thing I don't like about DBA, but it's not that they have "the same overall usefulness". Rather, an army of skirmishers will generally be defeated by an army of close formation troops or mounted troops, unless they simply hide in bad going.

DBM recognised that by costing legionaries at 3.5 times the price of the skirmisher without substantially changing the interaction.

DBM overrated skirmishers differently, by allowing tiny numbers (the lone psiloi) to slow an enemy to a crawl.

DBMM has gone a long way to address that problem by changing, among other things, the march rules.

Cheers,
John

Thanks very much for people's responses. I agree that they should be used. It's how to get a good balance of playability and realism, or at least what we can imagine to be realistic.

That's my takeaway anyway

MeG handles skirmishers better than any other rules I've played. They do have value if used well, but they don't dominate.

I admit it. I'd rather get to the main course than watch skirmishers continue to delay it.

Still, skirmishers are so (insert favorite descriptive word) useful it just seems wrong for me not to use them. I only have experience playing DBx rules and I appreciate how skirmishers can be used to ones advantage. After all I don't have to use them, do I?

I typically use them to:

a) delay my opponents troops while I try to figure a way out of the (insert…see above) mess I've put myself in, or…

b) keep my opponents troops in one place while I attack another, or…

c) contest difficult ground that I need to control access to, or…

d) screen troops who may be attacked at a disadvantage without them, or…

e) face off against other skirmishers.

So while I do find them a bit boring I've learned to live with them, for better or worse.

I've never really played DBA much so won't comment on that but DBM had some bugs with their being too effective at slowing people down – you had to be pretty skilled to neutralise reasonably well handled skirmishers and that didn't feel intuitive to new players. As the OP indicated, a handful of skirmishers causing your legions to grind to a virtual halt irks a bit. DBMM has made that much harder to achieve. I think it allows for realistic use of skirmishers without them bogging the game down. To do anything meaningful against a significant body of troops you really have to commit significant numbers of skirmishers yourself. Otherwise they're just speed bumps. I've always found them interesting myself. I like that aspect of the game but it is a tricky rule writing balance to achieve – just look at the debates in Napoleonic circles on the subject.

John,
MM and M have the same rules regards skirmishes , so don't see where M overrated Skirmishers, unless you can tell me where in the rules I missed it.

Lone Ps can't slow any groups to a crawl , in fact both M and MM say that skirmishers have to be a larger group than the enemy in order to slow them down much.

In fact single elements of anything in both rules can't slow anything down , groups can get to within 50 paces of single elements.

Again unless I missed something and you can tell me where to look in the rules, but from my recollection I don't think MM changed anything from M on the subject.

And yes M had bugs/ loop holes as does MM or every other game for that matter, the DBA3 road torpedo is one example.

Impetus has well thought out rules with respect to Skirmishers. They are essential to the functioning of some of the armies (like the early Spanish, Thracians etc..) Elite skirmishes can be especially effective even if they are not ultimately decisive in most cases. The ideal situation is to wear the enemy main battle lines down sufficiently before melee so that the advantage rests with one's own.

Hi Aynsley,
I agree of course that all rules have flaws. I can't comment on versions of DBM since DBMM came along as I haven't played or read them and I haven't played DBA3 so don't know about (although I can guess a bit by the name) the road torpedo. (Wargamers are great at coming up with names for bugs in games (quantum tunneling, reindeer, buttocks of death, floating zone of death etc.)

Without framing them in contrast to current DBM but only with the last version I played, some measures that weaken skirmishers in DBMM are:

1 allowing marches to into contact (with commensurate risk),

2 limiting what stops a march from commencing to groups of non-skirmishers,

3 Psiloi being subject to spontaneous advance if within a TZ (ZoC) – so they either engage (shoot in contact) or pay pips to stand or withdraw.

4 moves (even for Ps) less than maximum costing an extra pip, so it's harder to make delicate moves to perfectly position elements for geometric effect.

I'm not noting these to extol the virtues of DBMM as a perfect system, although I do think it's a great set that rewards the high level of effort required to master it. In fact, for example I didn't agree with marches into contact (or much of the marching rewrite although it does work) whereas on the other hand I am responsible for the Ps spontaneous moves in ZoC (on the basis that milling around ineffectually in close proximity to enemy would not be the default action of skirmishing light infantry).

I'm sure newer versions of DBM give great games and I'm sure DBA (and ADLG, MetG etc etc etc) do too. I just don't have the time, energy or brain power to engage in more than one at a time :-(

Cheers,
John

John,
I think you may of last played a very very early version of M for the effects you mentioned, as I don't remember that version at all.

And I was going from memory with MM rules , as we all looked at it when it came out around here but never switched to it for various reasons.

I was on the NZ team twice in Lisbon for the ITC there for DBm. I think the new French game ADLG does an excellent job with skirmishers , you can't just throw them away and they seem to be just of an annoyance enough without making them too powerful.

2.1 I think it was. The last version Phil Barker was involved in before the 'split' over the advent of DBMM. I know that much because I had only come back into wargaming when the previous version (2.0 I think) was on its way out. Whichever one it was numbered as, it was the one that eliminated the floating zone of death because my Ptolemaic Egyptian phalanx endured the ignominy of that phenomenon in my first game of DBM before I even realised what was happening to me, then a new version arrived which fixed that and that's the version I played until DBMM arrived. I am aware of further development of DBM since, which I believe Richard Bodley Scott continued on with without PB's input. It brought in things like a mitigating + for back rank Ps rather than the straight +1. I thought it was a good idea (and had provenance via DBR I think) but PB wouldn't have a bar of it for DBMM, possibly, I suspect, because RBS had put it into DBM . . .

I think it went 2.0 end of ‘97 , then went to 3.0 July 2000, the 3.1 was in ‘07 where I think it was just a bunch of player requested amendments that they wanted and Richard did which is when MM and FOG came out anyway, so the great split had already happened as MM was out for player comments at that point already I believe.

After that it was only a bunch of British players who got together , with Barkers permission added a few more player requested tweaks in a similar way to barker getting player input on MM, and is on Barkers own website somewhere available as a printout , version 3.2.

We can see the direction each author wanted to go.

Interesting, and it seems my memory of version numbers was completely out . . .

Thanks for the info.

Cheers,
John