So as not to de-rail the original thread, I'll continue the thread concerning WOTR and ancients here.

A millenium ago I used to game with 25mm ancients using WRG rules, then due to price and storage switched to 15mm and the DBA, DBM range of rules.

Now with my eye-sight not as good as it used to be and 28mm plastic ancient models being released seemingly every month and making 28mm affordable again, I now have large Roman, Celt, ECW and am now assembling Hoplite Greeks, I needed a new set of rules.

I love the SBG system so all my ancients were based on 25mm round bases which could then be transfered to WOTR trays for large formation battles. My WOTR 'Light' is no more than dumping pretty much all of the majic leaving just a few 'spells' available to Celt Shaman. Most of the units are lead by your generic captains and a few of the hero profiles renamed for characters of the period such as Boadacia.

Without all the mega-hero combinations to choose from the game became much easier to play than before as there is not a fraction of the rules and skills you had to remember, the game worked a lot better for me. Some like the task of building super-units to conquer all, thats fine, but its not for me. WOTR also lacked the ability to have skirmish units for ancients and mixed armed units for ECW.

Unfortunately, I still found the game to slow to play (maybe its because of the lack of super-power behined units?) so looked for more sets to take WOTR place - there isn't any. I want stands of units taken off rather than individual models - so no WH Ancients. I wanted realistic ranges for 28mm models - so no DBA or their latest clones with 4" bow ranges. I did not want buckets of dice or just one to decide a combat - so have written my own first for the ECW which worked very well and am now currently amending them to cover my ancient armies.

I've not played The Art of War.

Thanks, something to think about. Most of my friends play ECW, ACW, or DBA, so I get enough big-battle formation play. But I do find those rules either slow or too abstract.

I have played WRG long ago.
Hoplite Greeks_ My younger I brother is the geek expert. I like Dark-age.



I hoped you had come up with something to address that in WOTR light.



It really does not leave much choice but to write your own set.

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I couldn't come up with anything to represent light skirmishers effectively, the problem being is that units can be in combat in turn 1 leaving no time for skirmishing, so any unit of Cretan archers or Balearic slingers just become a unit of archers with low Fight value. I suppose if you fought with 6-8' deep tables they could work which would allow skirmishers to fall back.

One way to model skirmishers shielding formed troops is to give the formed unit an extra short range ballistic attack. WotR already has rules for thrown weapons, this could suffice.

DBA is a lot of fun. I suppose if you like its rules you could just scale up for 28mm models and adjust the shooting ranges.

A GW game that has some similarities to WOTR is Warmaster and Battle of Five Armies. The rules for Warmaster are free on the GW site. It does use 15mm figures, but you could scale it up. Even if you don't like the game, maybe it will give you some ideas for your own rule set.

Skirmisher, how about.
To represent the loose order of skirmishers only 4 models represent a unit.
Skirmishers can be deployed 6" further in than the rest of the army.
If a charged is declared on them they may immediately evade directly away from the charge at their charge rate.
Skirmishers can infiltrate through friendly units.
Skirmishers ignore any move penalties for terrain.

@hithero - Your idea sounds good, I certainly hope GW introduce something like this into the game if they release a second edition.

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TO9G - 2010 Isengard

Have you tried the Warhammer Ancient Battles rule set? That's what I use, and I have a large Roman army and am working on a Medieval army. The second edition was just released last week.

http://warhammer-historical.com/acatalog/Warhammer_Ancient_Battles.html

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My WIP Thread: http://www.one-ring.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17771

I've had a look but was not that impressed, I wanted something simpler and models removed by the tray rather than individually.

How interesting...

I was just talking to my main game buddy who likes ACW. We were looking at using WoTR for it. We didn't see skirmishing as a big deal for that period, just a half company (4 models) per base. Litko makes a base that looks like it would work, though I haven't bought any of them.

I didn't think about ancients

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