"WRG 6th the best Ancients rules?" Topic

I was just reading the July Miniature Wargames (it takes a long time to get to Australia). Ian Dickie had a comparison chart of 8 wargames rules sets, the best being WRG 6th., WAB 3rd, & DBMM 5th. Do you agree? I must admit that on reflection, remembering my earlier days of Ancients with WRG 5th & 6th, they were a lot more exciting than DBM or WMA.

Sure. Why not.

"Best": what the heck does that mean, here or anywhere else?

Best.

(chuckle)

Yep, OK. Fine.

Best.

(snort)

…

…

Allen

Best WRG 5th or 4th. Current available items DBA big battles.

WRG 6 wouldn't come in first in a one horse race. You have to understand that "Best" is an utterly bogus thing. "Best" is in the eye of the beholder because everyone has different criteria.

WRG 6 is designed for a 1 to 1 Competition setting. It plays fast, requires a set of rulings the size of an encyclopedia to resolve disputes with and is very "gamey". Personally, I don't play competition and hate how the rules can be used in utterly unrealistic way some times. It's not particularly good for scenarios or models of actual battles or multiplayer games which are 100% of what I do.

DBA is a great competion game as well. It however has no relationship to Ancient warfare that I can see. But, the the cheap crowd that has limited space and budget, it's perfect.

I enjoyed it, and think it superior to 7th and Warrior for one reason: You have to roll to go impetuous. I guess today, when all the kids on the soccer team get trophies,and no one keeps score, all you have to do to go impetuous is say you are doing it.

I hate all questions that ask "What is the best…" when there are NO objective criteria to judge them by. A chart? To chart WHAT, exactly?
Ask 5 gamers what the best rules are, and you will get 6 different answers. Or 7.

It depends whether Phil's favorite army was your favorite army for that edition of the rules.

I rather prefer the 5th as well, and double DBA is my favourite "in-print" set. But neither it or WMA which we also play a lot seems to capture the feel like the old WRG rules. Now I know we're 'pushing lead' not leading an army, but the excitement level, win or lose, seemed to be much higher.

WRG 6th a but 'dry' and there is a kink in the casulaty table that means once you go past a certain point, casualties almost double.

Noooooo!

Never could get the hang of the orders/reactions/movement interaction. I was incapable of doing much lacking understanding of the rules, succumbing often to players who could combine the rules with their army better than I.

BBDBA – the way to go. But that is my opinion, not a fact that you could test and validate.

It depends whether Phil's favorite army was your favorite army for that edition of the rules.

I quite enjoyed the Late Roman triple armed legionaries: JLS, HTW and D and you could mix archers with them as a third rank too

In my opinion none of the WRG ancients rules fit into the "best" category. Maybe the 6th edition was the best among WRG, but certainly not overall.

Better games (again in my opinion) are Tactica and Armati, by far.

I have no idea what "Best" means. For tournament play in a few hour rounds? for visual apperance? To play grand historic battles? It is all relative. WRG 6 only gave me a starting point for army research.
VR
James Mattes

Best? WRG 3rd ed. It was all downhill from there.

Rich

Only "best" if you get into a time machine and go back to the 1980s . Long winded , read like a insurance document , had there time !

Regarding WRG 6, my moment of clarity occured in a WRG Tournament at an Historicon, or HMMC, in the early 80s. I deployed my Roman Army in an historically accurate manner, and promptly got my ass whipped. The host said, "Too bad, you arranged them historically, but that doesn't work under these rules." I never played them again.

If you can't fight an army the way it fought historically, why bother?

I loved 1st with amendments … but the I do have a grey beard.
At the mo I watch gamers build armies that will win but have no or little link to the historical evidence. So I solo. And wonder why they don't play orcs v Roman whatevers.

The answer to the original question is: no!

Naturally, that's just my personal opinion. But then, the NW article also represents nothing more than one person's personal opinion.

Having played dbm, warhammer etc i got into sixth and have played competitions here in england for the last six, or seven years, and i agree they are not the best but then again i can say the same for dbm.

I can remember as a complete novice playing in sheffield without a clue. I had gallic, the opponent had greek. Despite my total inability to understand the rules i won totally and the reason for this is the fact i only had to push back to destroy where as he had to do double damage.

So i say each person will call a set of rules the best only because he enjoys it the most and not necessarily because he thinks it is the most realistic.

I remember one year listening to some people who used to competition sixth and now competition dbm. Their reason for the swap was that dbm was played by inexperienced players and was easier to win.

I believe that each person will say this is best, or that is best, but at the end of the day each set of rules has elements which are good and bad.

I think it depends on the kind of player you are, the kind of army you field. All rule sets are flawed in some way, down to personal preference.

I imagine one of the reasons that I prefered WRG 5th and 4th was that our club at Fort Hood Texas played plenty of non-competition games.

The same with DBA, I have played more non-competition games than I have tournament games.

I've recently started playing 6th edition again in 28mm. I like DBA and DBM--and even DBMM (and I might like DBMMM whenever that comes out). However, they come across as bland a lot of the time. Everything is so generic.

But I have to agree that "best" is far too subjective a term to apply to a game. Even if I were the only vote, I'd still say one thing one day and another thing the next.

Best is a really subjective thing…

I happen to think that Hoplon is the best thing on the market… Others would disagree…

It does have one thing (among MANY) that someone mentioned above:

Rolling to go impetuous… This is something that is not automatic in Hoplon. It also has a real morale system to it, rather than an abstraction that is combined with the combat outcomes for each interaction. It has Units like 6th/7th, but also has the ability for the elements that make up those units to act independently if they wish, or if needed (such as to flank an enemy unit). It has "some" of the equipment modifiers that came with old WRG rules without making note of each and every thing that a soldier had (It only has five regular modifiers, called "Distinctives" and about 6 modifiers that are what are called "National Characteristics" or National Distinctives). It also allows all troops armed with missile weapons to shoot (at least once… I am probably going to propose a change to that at some point so that all troops may shoot in all situations where they are allowed to do so. Some troops are limited to just one shot in support of a charge, or against a charge)…

And, like Artorius, one day I might prefer something else to Hoplon depending on what I wanted to do (I may want to play with a smaller army, and thus DBA might be it, or I may want to play with 10mm WMA armies, in which case, WMA or Ancient Conquest would be the game… etc…)

reddrabs wrote:
And wonder why they don't play orcs v Roman whatevers.

I've played orcs v. Seleucids, if that counts.

It's like asking "what's best, red or blue?"

Wonder how extensive the list of candidates was too.

having cut my "ancients" teeth on the end of 5th and played a lot of 6th during the 80's before work took me away from the UK, Having been back in Europe for 5 years now the first club I joined played 6th and the Worlds were still going.

A yahoo group now exist with 137 members and there are at least 5 well supported competitions a year in the UK.

We have taken a leaf from the WAB players and have vastly7 improved the terrain and every table is themed with various period buildings etc.

Check out the Yahoo page, more and more ex-6th players are getting back into the game because they enjoy playing 6th.

Cheers,

Graham

Last Conformist,

I have played Lizard Man Seleucids v Chinese Orcs before… It worked out great… Lot of fun… I managed to save the Lizard Man Seleucids from my ex-wife too when she stole all of my minis too…

Hoplon ….. Iscariot ….. Zzzz

One of the big thing I like most about WRG 6 and earlier is that the FIGURES count. It seems like many of the rules are written now so the STAND is the important part. So now we see lots of fiddling little rules about 'aligning' and 'squaring' stands to make the rules work.

Of course those earlier rules also did have a stated number of men to model ratio that was relatively small 20:1. So it was possible to make units pretty close to historical.

For RudyNelson you said:
I imagine one of the reasons that I prefered WRG 5th and 4th was that our club at Fort Hood Texas played plenty of non-competition games.

I was at Ft Hood in 76 and 77 and started ancients gaming then. I don't remember names very well, I wonder if we ever gamed there.

WRG6th Rules OK

wballard wrote:
One of the big thing I like most about WRG 6 and earlier is that the FIGURES count. It seems like many of the rules are written now so the STAND is the important part. So now we see lots of fiddling little rules about 'aligning' and 'squaring' stands to make the rules work.
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It's one of the worst things about WRG 6th and earlier rules. But not the worst thing – that would be having to keep track of all the 20 men a figure represents.

Thanks heavens for stand-based rules. So much quicker.

Each to his own.

Personally I found the switch from 6th to 7th quite refreshing, getting rid of single-figure casualty removal. You still have to track fatigue points.

Recently I have been looking at some ACW rules and thinking it makes no sense that there is no casualty removal until the unit gets beaten.

It shows you just can't please some people.

Wballard, I was with the basic group that met at the bunker each weekend on Sat or Sunday. We rotated between Napoleonics and Ancients as the two main games. That evening we often went to someone's house to play a boardgame like Third Reich.

6th were a product of the knowledge of the time – they weer better than 5th, not as good as 7th, and nowhere enar DB*.

As somoene posted above – "historical" deployments were crap – you had to know how to use your 6 figure wedges, guard your shieldless side, write and interpret orders, and cope with all sorts of other bits of spurious accuracy.

I'm a DB* proponent – mainly because it at least tries to do away with what I consider spurious accuracy – whether a bow was long or not, whether a soldier had a 12" disc of bronze vs a complete corslet of hardened leather and the like.

Even where we do have info on such details (and mostly we don't!) we have no real idea of how much difference it made, so any set of rules trying to portray any such difference is already doing badly IMO.

Agreed wwith everthing Aloysius the Gaul said- apart from 7th edition bit.

Don't bases look a lot nicer now- than when it was indivudal casualties?
And individual basing is too damn fidly with 15mm figures as well.

Actually regardless of the size of the unit you only needed to split up one stand, if 4 figs to a usual stand then split two a two and 2 single figure stands, if 3 then 1 and 2.

If you wanted to create interesting formations like wedges you might need a few more, but at least the wedge looked like a wedge.