"Recommend 6mm Ancients Rules" Topic

Hello all, I have recently come into possession of two 6mm armies – Romans and Carthaginians. What are currently the best/ most popular set of rules to make use of this unexpected windfall. Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions.

How are they based? That could be a determinent. You would hate to need to rebase right away.

Most rules are size agnostic.

If they are multi-base units, Hail Caesar works reasonably well as a quick and dirty rule set

To the Strongest is both fun and base size agnostic.

They are based on 60mm wide bases. The Legions are 20mm deep, other infantry 30mm, Cavalry 40mm and Elephants on very large bases. I don't have any interest in rebasing so base agnostic would be helpful.

I might do a bit of tough up painting, whoever painted them liked the Carthaginians much more than the Romans :-)

Age of Hannibal from Little Wars is interesting and should work with your basing scheme. I have only played it a few times but had fun every time. They are designed for the Punic Wars and there is an expansion with more scenarios Over the Alps.

link

I agree with Major B that most rules sets are base size agnostic. Any should work. I find that most sets have a difficult time dealing with/representing Roman line relief.

+1 for To the Strongest! or Age of Hannibal

DBA, DBMM, Art de La Guerre, To the Strongest, Field of Glory, Sword & Spear would all work. Depends what sort of rules you like, and more important, what others in your area like. Personally To the Strongest strikes the right balance.

DBA, DBMM, Art de La Guerre, To the Strongest, Field of Gory, Sword & Spear would all work. ~Depends what sort of rules you like, and more important, what others in your area like. Personally To the Strongest strikes the right balance.

Personally To the Strongest strikes the right balance.

What balance is that?

I use Sword and Spear on that same size base for my 6mm ancients and it works great.

I use 60mm bases with Command and Colours Ancients played on Hexon, they also work fine for Lost Battles, the various Neil Thomas offerings and of course DBA using the 25mm scaling.

The big advantage of CnC is that the basic set is entirely focused on the Punic Wars, which you have the figures for.

My Legio VI rules are designed specifically for 6mil armies. They are quite fast playing and aim to keep games at army level to bring out the best in that smaller scale. They are available as a free download from my website at legio-wargames.com/legio-vi
Legio VI Macedonica covers the wars.
link
Simon

+! for To The Strongest!

This is where everyone just recomends their favourite rules.

As has been said pretty much any ruleset which has elements will work

Marcus Brutus asked what balance?
The balance between fast play and historical plausibility.
A game of To the Strongest completes in a couple of hours even with a table full of troops, and is scale agnostic. Works well in 28mm and 6mm

I think that the main issue is how units are constructed and fight.

So if your 60mm bases are "the entire unit" then you are looking for a set of rules that do not remove bases or use formation changes to pass through a gap, for example. The DBx series of rules and several others has a unit = one base, but groups may move in ad hoc "formations" that switch positions.

If your 60mm bases are intended to be 2 or 4 for a unit, then there are several games out there like that, for example Neil Thomas' "Ancient and Medieval Warfare" uses 4 bases 60mm wide in a 2x2 group for the suggested 25mm size figs – your fig size is irrelevent, it's the size of the bases that matter, and how they have been collected to represent units.

Hope that is helpful.

A simple, very simple, set of rules is Lost battles by Philip Sabin. Basing is not critical in those rules, although they are focused on reproducing historical battles rather than ad-hoc games or a points based game.
youtu.be/CsEjtb8HfPk
I normally use 6mm ancients for those games.

Most of my games are on the Punic wars period. Cannae being my favourite, if frustration, battle. youtu.be/5EnkO2phbws

I played with 6th & then (a little) 7th edition WRG rules back in the day. Have recently got back into gaming & am using DBA with 15mm figures, although am now looking at 6mm.
I like DBA, but want something a little more granular…. I loved my Late Imperial Romans having darts, javelins & pila…..but also want to lay with a fair amount of figures to give a sense of scale.
I have a set of ADLG on order….but not sure I'll like having to use coherence markers.
So….I'm jumping on Ischofield's thread looking for suggestions……somewhere between WRG 6th & DBA

If you prefer ad-hoc points based games, DBMM or DBM may be a good option. Hard to learn, but they are certainly granular. DBM is available as a download, as is the older DBM army lists. However ADLG is more popular, at least for competitions.

If you want to reproduce historical battles then Philip Sabin's Lost Battles or Legion rules are a good option. Another option is to convert a hex based set of rules into a hex less format, such as SPI's PRESTAGES. You can download the original rules from link
This shows an example game using 15mm.
youtu.be/K6qDbttZn9c
I am considering using 6mm, but that requires modifying the rules which requires play testing and so far is not a high priority for me.

So far I only use 6mm for Lost Battles and the playing area does look good.