Ancient Greeks and Large Units

[twinehtc]

Can anyone advise me on why Hail Caesar restricts Greeks to standard size units. I would have thought that a phalanx by its nature needs to be large. A large unit would also be unwieldy as opposed to a unit with the same flexibility as a Roman cohort.

Of course I may have missed something !

[Ran The Cid]

A large unit is really a bear to play with on the table - if that's what you want, its rather easy to re-compute the units for large size. The contemporary Republican Roman lists are built around units of small size, which would provide the movement flexibility you're comparing the phalanx to.

Historically, there may be plenty of support for units of standard size. The Spartans certainly organized their troops into discreet units. Battle with allied troops would have deployed by city. Athens had its 12(?) tribes which could have easily also been used as a deployment/control method on the battle field.

[twinehtc]

Thanks 'ran the Cid'.

For Ancient Britons and Celts we have a house rule which requires that any division with 3 warbands must merge two of them into a large warband at 320mm frontage. This has addressed the balance where we found Rome lost most encounters. Also we believe Greek ( though not Macedonian) phalanxes and warbands were not generally in standard-sized units.

I would appreciate any historical evidence for the size of Greek phalanxes, though I appreciate that the city states had smallish populations so 'standard' would be reasonable. I assume that some could also be viewed as small. I have various text books on this but they are pretty ancient ( one is 1910) but nothing appears conclusive. More recent books such as Connelly adopt an idealistic position where all cities are apparently adopting a common regime which is unlikely.

Cheers

Tim

[Ran The Cid]

Check out Lost Battles by Sabin. Its 1 part game, 1 part academic study. With in the book are a number of 'orders of Battle' for a variety of ancient battles. See if you can convert Sabin's lists into HC.

[twinehtc]

Thanks Ran the CID. Oddly I have this very book in front of me now! Luckily Sabin provides an email response address with his game/book so I may cheat and use that!

[Idoites]

Most wargamers don't understand the hoplite phalanx. Yes, the Athenians had "tribes" and the Spartans had "mora" but these were administrative units much like modern NATO regiments - it's the subunits (the battalions) that deploy. Same with the Atenian "Tribe". If the force being deployed needed 1,000 hoplites, there was a "draft" of 100 men from each of the 10 (geographic) tribes. It was probably the same in Sparta. There was only one full mobilization in the whole of GreacoPersian wars (479 BC). Remember - you keep reading about how the Spartan males all ate at a "Regimental Mess".

Go to the bookcase and take out your Thucydides, open it at random. Chances are someone is making a speech. Go back or forward a page or two until the great historian is naming the generals making the speech - there are always three (3). On both sides. A Left wing, a center and the army commander on the right . In fact; the Army Commander stood on the Extreme Right; he was the corner guy, and everyone guided off of him. If he hit a tree and stopped, the entire army would kind of wave to a stop.

In my humble opinion, Hoplite armies should only contain one really large unit, OR (this is how I run my WAB army) 3 semiequal units of hoplites and other units supporting. The problem is; in most wargames rules; it's a recipe for disaster. Flank the one-big-unit with a unit of lowly levy spearmen and the game is over. Put your C-in-C on the etreme right and everthing left of 12 inches routes. And in HC, the 2 extra die for being "Large" don't come near to competing with the dice EACH of your opponant's units get.

Somewhere I read that When making "Alexander the Great" Oliver Stone couldn't make the "Wedge" work the way the sources said it should. It's the same with hoplites. Part time citizen soldiers ruled the battlefields of the Med for 400 years, but on a wargames table can't beat an army of cavemen unless allowed to use independant subunits and generals in the center mass, etc. It's sad....

[Gandamar]

Hoplite warfare is one of the biggest nightmares of every ancient rules writer. Their resiliance and lack of maneuverability is quite hard to reflect correctly in a rules set which aims to cover a wide time period. Reality is, there were a LOT of changes in warfare from the Graeco-Persian Wars to the Crusades (and to the introduction of gunpowder, as some rulebooks cover), so the most logical thing to to would be to create a rulebook focused only on a narrower period of time, which would leave room to add all kind of details about the fighting style of the troops of that period. But, of course, no one wants to be forced to learn on rulebook for Biblical chariot warfare, another for Hoplite warfare, another one for Roman Maniples and Cohorts after that, and yet another one for the Dark Ages, and so on.

Given this situation, some compromises must be made for a game to work well as a GAME, hurting its simulation quality in the process. But in the end, what really matters is that we have fun with what we do. After all, we're nothing more than "grown men playing with toy soldiers"

Now, regarding the "large Hoplite units" issue, in HC, being the "Sandbox-type" wargame that it is, making such changes is quite easy (and even encouraged by the authors if you don't like something), just try a few small encounters with both unit sizes, and then you can choose the one that "feels right" in your game. Remember, this is NOT a tournament game, so things aren't carved in stone (and that includes the army lists).