Hello all,
I've had a set of rules kicking around in my head and in a Google Doc since 2014. I've rolled them out for maybe a dozen test games in that time, along with a whole lot of thinking about different mechanics.
One of the core decisions I think that needs to be made when designing rules is (perhaps obviously) the intended scale. Not as in the size of the figures, but rather what the figures or units on the table represent.
Many older games were focused to an extreme degree on figure scale, on how many men each figure represented. To me, this seems ever so slightly absurd, especially when you consider the varying density of Ancient Armies and the limits of base size and the ratio of width to depth. It simply doesn't make sense to treat a Macedonian Phalanx and a Roman Lengion with the same "figure scale". You'd end up either A) Giving the Macedonian player far too many individual units, allowing them to extend their frontage to an unrealistic dimension or B) Deepening the Phalanx units so much that the ratio of Width to Depth, already out of wack by the very nature of the game, is totally nonsensical.
Many more recent games (Impetus, Hail Caesar, DBA, etc) do a few things to get around this problem. The first was moving from "figure based" to "unit based" games. This meant that the number of figures on the base didn't really matter, the base itself was just a "unit" and could be modeled however the player wanted. Along with that, another shift in thinking was around making armies merely "representational". If a Macedonian army should have a big block of pikemen, a smaller contingent of cavalry and a couple fun units, then that's what it has, and as long as the proportions are right then the scale of the unit doesn't really matter.
This works, it lets players feel like the generals in the ancient sources, moving big blocks of men around and generally gets around the scale issues. Sure, movement distances and bow ranges may make you scratch your head, but only if you think about it, and it makes for quite a fun game.
So what's all this long preamble for? I want to discuss my approach to scale in my rules and gather feedback.
So, in my rules (tentatively titled Onward to Glory), here's how I approach all the scales (ground, time, and figure).
Time Scale: Purposefully vague, anywhere from five minutes to half an hour. The game uses "Phases" as seen in Chain of Command and Sword & Spear. Not every unit can activate every phase, and seeing as ancient writers were NOT very exacting about the time scale of these battles anyway, it feels correct.
Ground Scale:
Here, I have two options. To begin, all measurements in the game are done in "Base Widths", the width of a Unit's frontage. So any size collection can be accomodated.
1) The rules provide army lists, and these lists are "representative" of the standard army of the period. If a Marian Roman army and a Greek Hoplite army would be of a different size, perhaps by an order of magnitude, that doesn't matter. Each individual army in effect has it's own ground (and therefore unit:number of men) scale. This allows for easy pickup games and follows the pattern of most modern Ancient ruleset. If one had to give this a number, it would be something like "1 BW = 100 – 500 Meters, depending on historical army size".
Obviously, things like bow ranges and movement distance simply have to have some sort of scale to be accurate, which leads to…
2) For folks wishing to recreate specific historical battles, or who simply need a specific scale (I consider myself among this camp), I've set the ranged weapon ranges, move distances, and command distances to something close to a "1 Base Width = 200 Meters".
From this given ground scale, using the average frontage per man and depth for a variety of units (as historians best estimate them), you can work out how many men each unit represents. The default scale I provide works out to around 600-750 Roman Infantry per unit (as their depth and order varied), 3500 Pikemen in a Macedonian Style phalax, and around 1800 Hoplites.
This gives a Manipular Roman Legion of 6 Units (2 Hastati, 2 Princeps, 1 Triarii and 1 Velites [Velites are likely underestimated in terms of pure numbers, but in general this works]).
As an example, at Magnesia, two "overstrength" Roman legions (we'll say they have 3 Units of Hastati and 3 Units of Princeps) each took on a 10,000 strong Phalanx . Doing the math, the frontage ends up perfectly matching, at 3 units a piece.
EDIT: I realize I forgot to talk about unit depth. From a gameplay and visual perspective I find it works to add additional base of depth to units with 10+ ranks, but technically it's not required at this scale. It does make Pike and big warband visually distinct.
So, thoughts?