I am having some trouble assembling my army for Ancients. I'm playing the Greeks, specifically looking at the time period around or just after the Trojan war and the Mycenaean age. I have lots of hoplites with short spears (I'm using the earliest hoplites to try and keep the time periods as appropriate as possible given the miniatures that I have) that I have assembled to go in a phalanx formation.
The issue arises with the command groups. In the army bundle I received 3 command packs. Each contains one hero on foot, one hero mounted, a banner and 2 musicians.
All the research I've done concerning hoplites and the phalanx formation has had little mention of banners or musicians. It seems the Greeks would perform celebrations and sing war hymns before going into battle (with the exception of the Spartans, who did have musicians following alongside the phalanx). This means that the phalanxes were not actually accompanied by a musician, even though I have 6 musician models. I also haven't seen a single word about banners. I saw a picture of a phalanx with some dudes running along the side, one of whom may have had a banner, but it was hard to tell.
As I see it the phalanx command structure consisted of having hardened fighters in the front rank leading each column of men, with the superior fighter on the left front to lead the charge, and his second on the right to support the weak side.
This is followed by rows of standard hoplites, and a few rows back would be another set of veterans to keep structure in the ranks.
I can easily paint up certain hoplites to represent this structure, but have no idea what to do with the command models.
On top of that, I have three mounted heroes, but my army contains a single, very small unit of cavalry (not including the chariots of course).
I don't believe it reasonable to have runners on horses, considering the phalanxes move slow enough to have runners on foot.
I could build command bases which would operate independently, but don't really have an in game use for them. I could build runners on quarters with a banner and musician and field them beside my units. Alternatively I could just build them and put them into the units, throwing accuracy to the wind for the sake of gameplay, but then what rank should each component go in? Would the banners and musicians be at the back, front?
I'm hoping somebody could lend some advice here, be it from your own knowledge of the history or simply an opinion that helps make the game mechanics work as well as possible. Also, there's no comment limit, so feel free to start a conversation in the comments (just in general, not that my post is so awesome it deserves more comments).
The banners and command models would make a sweet upgrade for a phalanx...I don't know about the Greeks but the Romans (Republic at least) kept musicians and banners at the back. This is first A) common sense cause the fucker with a trumpet doesn't actually like to fight with it and B) this sort of unit command existed mostly as a signalling and morale tool, which was quite useless in the dust and chaos of the fight.
ReplyDeleteThose mounted bitches I have no idea. I think they're supposed to be your general unit personally, mine is three bitches on horseback too.
Okay. I had a pretty good conversation with Jed and I'm thinking of mounting the banners and musicians on coins and making them into runners. Ultimately I get nothing out of the extra bases because of how the numbers work out. I like the idea of runners and am tinkering with rules for them. I get that they are there for morale and issuing commands, but it doesn't make sense to have them ranked up tight with the rest of the unit. I have models enough to fill up the units anyways and I think runners in 1s and 2s would look awesome.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm just going to amalgamate the cav into a unit of 5. Whatever.
ReplyDelete