"Old rules: Legio and Comitatus" Topic

Soooo, found a great little book in a box after my (latest) move, "Wargaming in History: Romans, Goths & Huns" by a chap named Simon MacDowall. In addition to being a nice guide to the period, it includes extensive rules for gaming, including campaign and large multi-player games. It is from 1990, and shows an interest in gaming and rules for – gasp! – JUST ONE PERIOD!

In this time where we expect rules to deliver a platform that universally supports 4500 years of history and opponants who never HEARD of one another much less fought the other, it was quite refreshing.

So wondering if anyone has played either set of rules, and what they think of them. Also wondering if you really think that a set of rules can deliver proper battles btw ahistoric opponants. Or we should stop kidding ourselves that this is historical gaming when Pontus fights Henry V, Caesar Charles the Bold, and Aztecs the Babylonians?

I have played both. I also have played Romans, Goths and Huns. Simon has newer versions of the rules out for FREE download here:

legio-wargames.com

Simon also posts here. Great guy with good rules!

Thanks,

John

Found that little gem in a bookstore a couple of years ago, behind a few other tomes. Fantastic purchase, and one that covers one of my favorite periods.

Supurb!

define historical gaming

I've played his rules. They give a very good game and best of all are FREE! I recommend that people give them a go.

I had a beer with Simon on Saturday, and played a game using his Civitates Bellatorum rules (similar to legio). Highly recommended; AAR of battle here

TMP link

Cheers, Simon

Apparently it was the only title in that series that sold… 'tis a ghem

Many thanks for the kind words!

I dunno what's better, finding an old gem in a box of stuff, or finding out it's still going? And FREE!? Woo-Hoo!

I'll tell a little how this came up to illustrate our issues…

A pal bought a bunch of nice lead and painted it up – Foundry Romans and Germans (Tacitus reader I guess). Thought he'd play Warhammer Ancient Battles with them. So he did some test runs and didn't like how it played out on the table. Simultaneously too fiddly a game and the results were often quickly one-sided thanks to the auto-break special rule. Also, the scale and lack of Command/Control make it feel like a skirmish game.

Then there's DBA which I'd argue is a "perfect game" design, achieving the authors goals and delivering a very large scope of game for such a small booklet. However it is likewise a bit generic feeling, doesn't deliver a lot of period feel in the mechanics.

So these painted figs have been sitting gathering dust for want of rules. My lovely Foundry Late Romans have sat in blisters for almost a decade. All our rules have been wanting in some regard. All the universal sets are too universal or badly written or so complex they aren't fun.

This has me wondering if we aren't being a bit optimistic when we try to cram 4500 years of warfare into a set of rules. Also as someone here pointed out, ahistorical opponents and time periods are approaching speculative fiction.

So when I found this book I decided I had to read the rules and see if they delivered the scale (big battle), history, and ease of play he wants.

Are the updated rules very different from the old ones, btw? What has been changed significantly in the design.

I very much agree with your sentiments.
The current version of Comitatus has moved on by expanding the period out to the First Crusade, incorporating the ideas I used for my Deus le Veult game published in Slingshot quite some time ago. While this removes some of the beauty of a set devoted to a very specific period, it does allow players to use the same mechanics for a wider number of armies and my view is that the flavour of Dark Age warfare remained fairly constant until the feudal period.
Secondly I incorporated Andy Callan's idea of disorder points to get rid of the need to keep track of things on paper.
I am very pleased with the result and am in the process of getting a fully illustrated hard copy ready for print.
Civitates Bellatorum takes the same basic design but takes the period back to cover the 'classical' Greek and Roman period. These are still in development but you can get the latest version from my website.
Simon

depends on how much of the si No rulemulation element you want. Simulation is inversly related to abstraction which is positevly related to broad periods.

If you care about it then DBA is bad, very bad, and specific period, even specific opponent rules may be the proper venue. If not then DBA (or DBA) games are fine. Whether one or the other is more properly called historical gaming is a moot question. After a point simulation stops being gaming.

I play historical opponents in my games. I won't play 1523 AD French against 333 BC Greeks -- that is fantasy to me. Howevers, the rules I use cover this time range.
BO

do folk still do that?

certainly, most organised events I have seen trim the periods greatly – lists book x only, or eastern step armies only, or armies between years x to y, and so forth.

outside of the 28mm guys, who have a much larger barrier to having a broad range of ancients armies in their collections, I can't see any reason to play non-historically plausable opponent games anymore.

Locally I see a lot of non-historical matchups. Not to say they are 2,000 years apart, but never had armies near each other. Perhaps did not exist at the same time.
BO

I played Comitatus (sp?) a few years ago with borrowed figures and loved it. I eventually purchased my own figures and after trying DBM, Warmaster Ancients, Impetus, Armati and others I settled on Comitatus.

But then I like the Andy Callan disorder points method and have used those rules for AWI gaming.

It's common sense to note that the larger the time period covered the larger the market for a set of rules. Perhaps WAB was heading in the right direction with a basic book that had two armies and their initial offering of an army list book covering a wide time span, followed by books that add rules and complexity by period. Where it seems to fall flat is when armies fight from one book to another, leading to the usual problems. This is still quite common in tournements where an army from Shieldwall can easily fight Chariots or Medieval knights, with odd results.

I'm starting to prefer rules that are more specific in time/location from the ground up.