To the Strongest - typical army size

[BKC Grenadier]

I've read the To the Strongest rules, and think they might tempt me back to ancients.

I cannot figure out the size of a typical army for the recommended 12 x 8 batlefield.
Can anybody help, whether unit count or points?


It may be a paradox, but it seems that a grid game requires more specific troop density than a free form one.

I have never, in 40 odd years of wargaming, played Ancients !.......everything else, but not Ancients.  Having firstly purchased Portable Wargames, One Hour Wargames and then FK&P it was a no brainer to get TtS.  All these have made Ancients so much easier to digest, understand and get to grips with.  Never had a problem sorting out an ACW Brigade, Gd'A Division or WW2 Panzer Regt. but Ancients defied my very limited abilities with the huge breath of period, variety of armies and mind boggling unit types.  Thanks to the rules above, all of them, I think I can actually manage to play an Ancients game with some semblence of knowing what I'm about lol.  Just need to get TtS Ancients Army List Book now 

[John Cook]

I have never, in 40 odd years of wargaming, played Ancients !.......everything else, but not Ancients. 

I empathise, I really do.  I have never gamed anything before 1066 and even sorting out 11th and 12th Century medieval armies is a bit of a challenge which require considerable imagination.  Years ago, in the 1970s, I bought a copy of Armies of the Greek and Persian War by Richard Nelson.  I still have it.  I haven't looked at it years as it only made it worse.

Reading it still gave me no clear understanding of how Greek units and armies were organised.  As for the Persians, well, that is where I just gave up.

Perhaps there are better books out there now and I would welcome any recommendations. 

[steve_holmes_11]

I empathise, I really do.  I have never gamed anything before 1066 and even sorting out 11th and 12th Century medieval armies is a bit of a challenge which require considerable imagination.  Years ago, in the 1970s, I bought a copy of Armies of the Greek and Persian War by Richard Nelson.  I still have it.  I haven't looked at it years as it only made it worse.

Reading it still gave me no clear understanding of how Greek units and armies were organised.  As for the Persians, well, that is where I just gave up.

Perhaps there are better books out there now and I would welcome any recommendations. 

it's hardly surprising.
Compare with some popular alternatives.
* Napoleonics: 26 Years (Max), 7 big combatants. Well recorded timelines, alliances and orders of battle.
* ACW: 5 years, 2 main combatants, well recorded timelines, battle accounts from all ranks, fairly standard orders of battle.
* WW2: 7 years (More if you insist on including Sino-Japanese conflict), 6 major combatants and a number of brief contributions, well known timeline, extremely detailed order of battle and weapon stats.

Now let's do ancients:
4500 years (90% of history).
500+ army lists.
Difficulty aligning even the major timelines among the oldest lists (eg Bronze age eastern Med).
Few surviving military treatiese, some of those vague, or the work of fantasists, (or self promoters who would make Patton blush).
Very few surviving battle reports.
Dubious orders of battle.
Magical thinking by "historians" of the day.
Army reconstructions based on ceremonial art (eg sarcophagus engraving).

No wonder it's confusing.
I'm coming around to the idea of treating it in the way we do imagi-nations.

[T13A]

Hi

I think Steve has summarised the issues with 'ancients' extremely well. If you approach ancients wanting the same level of information regarding troop types, unit organisation etc. that we have for WWII (for instance) then it is going to be difficult if not impossible. Can you have interesting and enjoyable games? Certainly, and I am a big fan of both 'To the Strongest!' and 'For King and Parliament', both of which have (IMHO) a good balance of playability and realistic results and a bonus is that 95% of the time we actually get to finish a game properly! That said my group use dice and 'chits' instead of playing cards.

Cheers Paul

[mmcv]

To be honest, I think that is half the fun of ancients. Piecing together the information and trying to come up with some reasonable understanding of how things were organised. There are some decent books on those sorts of formations these days, Jusin swanton's Ancient Battle Formations is a good one looking at Greek, Macedonian and Roman formations, but certainly the information needs a bit more work and imagination to sort out. I quite enjoy that aspect of it. I find I'm somewhat daunted by the more "modern" conflicts just from the sheer volume of detailed information there is available. With ancients you can use your instincts and information from other periods and similar armies a bit more to fill in the gaps, whereas with modern stuff there'll likely be an answer somewhere, but trawling through the huge amount of information can make it difficult to find. If you aren't already quite interesting in say Napoleonics or WW2 it can be quite difficult to penetrate, particularly the 20th Century where technology and tactics became obsolete in months rather than centuries as before. The strategic picture tends to become a lot more complex as well as you get closer to the present.

There's probably some personality types who prefer one type over the other, e.g. those who are very good at finding key information and researching large detailed data sets and those who are more comfortable piecing together disparate information and using a bit of problem-solving and guesswork to fill the gaps. Both useful traits to have depending on the situation! It's probably a bit easier to be "lazy" with ancients too, since there are a lot of unknowns there's less onus on getting every detail exactly correct, if that's something that's important to you. For some, that's probably a relief, for others, added stress!

[Lord Kermit of Birkenhead]

Started on WRG 3rd 4th Edition. Play almost anything.

[steve_holmes_11]

Ancients certainly suffers form a lot less "You've got the wrong colour epaulettes", or "Your 1806 gunners are wielding the 1812 bricole".

Unless those pesky archeologists discover it all and force us into the "great rebasing".

[FierceKitty]

Ancients certainly suffers form a lot less "You've got the wrong colour epaulettes", or "Your 1806 gunners are wielding the 1812 bricole".

Unless those pesky archeologists discover it all and force us into the "great rebasing".

And alleged ancients gamers ignore facts even when we have them. How many Scipionic legions have you seen on other wargames sites armed with gear four or five centuries too modern?

[sultanbev]

I stopped playing ancients at WRG4 when invisible shield walls were introduced. The latter are still around. A lot of ancients rules defy the law of physics in places so aren't worth the paper they are written on as far as I'm concerned. I have tried writing my own but didn't come up with a bland set based on our standard fall back Fire & Fury. So have bought more books and doing a lot more reading before I retry.

[Ithoriel]

I stopped playing ancients at WRG4 when invisible shield walls were introduced. The latter are still around. A lot of ancients rules defy the law of physics in places so aren't worth the paper they are written on as far as I'm concerned. I have tried writing my own but didn't come up with a bland set based on our standard fall back Fire & Fury. So have bought more books and doing a lot more reading before I retry.

Elite, impetuous, light heavy, Warband with heavy throwing weapon and force field, may be mounted on circus elephants equipped with naptha siphons?

Frankly, all wargames rules play fast and loose with reality, Ancients no more than any other as far as I can see.

[steve_holmes_11]

And alleged ancients gamers ignore facts even when we have them. How many Scipionic legions have you seen on other wargames sites armed with gear four or five centuries too modern?

I know.
What do they think they're playing at.
Utterly undermines the credibility of the hobby.

My own, of course, are wholly authentic.
Being based on that reliably textbook "Asterix in Carthage".

[steve_holmes_11]

Elite, impetuous, light heavy, Warband with heavy throwing weapon and force field, may be mounted on circus elephants equipped with naptha siphons?

Frankly, all wargames rules play fast and loose with reality, Ancients no more than any other as far as I can see.

Later rules make a greater pretence of realism.

[BKC Grenadier]

it's hardly surprising.
Compare with some popular alternatives.
* Napoleonics: 26 Years (Max), 7 big combatants. Well recorded timelines, alliances and orders of battle.
* ACW: 5 years, 2 main combatants, well recorded timelines, battle accounts from all ranks, fairly standard orders of battle.
* WW2: 7 years (More if you insist on including Sino-Japanese conflict), 6 major combatants and a number of brief contributions, well known timeline, extremely detailed order of battle and weapon stats.

Now let's do ancients:
4500 years (90% of history).
500+ army lists.
Difficulty aligning even the major timelines among the oldest lists (eg Bronze age eastern Med).
Few surviving military treatiese, some of those vague, or the work of fantasists, (or self promoters who would make Patton blush).
Very few surviving battle reports.
Dubious orders of battle.
Magical thinking by "historians" of the day.
Army reconstructions based on ceremonial art (eg sarcophagus engraving).

No wonder it's confusing.
I'm coming around to the idea of treating it in the way we do imagi-nations.

Bravo Steve, couldn't have put it better. In addition what T13A (Paul) said clarifies it even more clearly, for me personally.  The rules quoted, TtS & FK&P,  provide for all of it IMHO.....a good realistic balanced game with understandable forces (read manageable) and actually finish it in a sitting.     

" I think Steve has summarised the issues with 'ancients' extremely well. If you approach ancients wanting the same level of information regarding troop types, unit organisation etc. that we have for WWII (for instance) then it is going to be difficult if not impossible. Can you have interesting and enjoyable games? Certainly, and I am a big fan of both 'To the Strongest!' and 'For King and Parliament', both of which have (IMHO) a good balance of playability and realistic results and a bonus is that 95% of the time we actually get to finish a game properly! That said my group use dice and 'chits' instead of playing cards."