Battling the Ancients

I have always found ancient warfare to be quite interesting and strategically thrilling. Forces were rather simple and similar so it really came down to the ability of the commander to guide his forces and to keep them encouraged in the face of certain death. Due to a painfully small budget I do not have the chance to invest in rule books to sample and so I turn to the internet. Luck was with me when I happened across a set of rules for ancient battles that runs along a similar vain of the Napoleonic games, an easy transition for those younger siblings.

The rule system I am currently working with is called Hoplon 3 and though dense and a bit coded when you first get into it, it rather straight forward and seems to pride itself on the lack of book keeping that is needed to play the game. I have spent the last couple of days reading through the rules, understand the concepts and trying to run the system through my head a few times and for the most part it seems like a pretty straight forward system. Hopefully I will be able to get some games going here in the near future so that I can see if the rules really are as simple as they seem.

The one hitch I am running into at the moment, at least in my eyes, is the number of stands that is required to run a standard force. The rule set comes with a series of army lists spanning the biblical era to the medieval era and should prove to be amazing for transitions and those laughable clashes of civilizations separated by hundreds or thousands of year. Hey, if Age of Empires can do it, why can’t I? Anyways, the hitch is that I will have to make all of the pieces needed to field a small force and at last count that would be about fifty four pieces.

Obviously I will be making these pieces in the same fashion as I did with the Napoleon ones as I am mainly interested in cheap, fun war gaming until I can get a disposable income to support this wild little habit of mine. I shall keep you posted with units as I develop a good way to create and label them.