Baccus Greeks v Persians — BIG battalion style! Part 1

There are many people who — often without actually reading it — have classified my magazine as ‘old school’. I’m sure that Pete Berry of Baccus is familiar with this kind of pigeonholing situation, when untutored folks say that 6mm figures are ‘nasty little blobs that are impossible to paint’. Well, there’s something to be gained for both of us, then, when I reveal that whilst I do, indeed, enjoy a bit of 30mm fun with games played by the rules of “Charge!” or “The War Game”, I’m equally at home with other forms of wargaming, scales of figures, and periods remote from the mid-18th century.

It just so happens that I’ve loved the ancient period since the days of, crikey, WRG 5th Edition. Something about the wars of Greece and Persia intrigued me: there seemed to be a kind of ‘purity’ about the fighting styles, and a huge range of battles ranging from small skirmishes up to the famous landmark battles like Marathon, Thermopylae or Platea. Stretch things a bit further into the Late Achemaenid and Alexandrian periods and you have the challenge of huge phalanxes of pikes facing not only the Persians, but Indians too. But it’s the 5th century BC that is my first love, so for some time, I had been contemplating replacing the armies I sold off (at bargain-basement, pre-eBay prices!) many years ago.

Battlegames readers may recall that issue 1 featured a lovely piece by Harry Pearson about his own Greeks v Persians rules: “Marathon 490BC”. The sight of serried ranks of old-style 25mm Minifigs filled me with nostalgia, and I began scanning the lists on their website. But, at around this time, I also met ancient and medieval specialist Dan Mersey for the first time, and we became friends and started meeting occasionally for games.

It just so happens that, like many young folk in the south, our Dan is hampered by the ludicrous house prices round here and lives in conditions more cramped than he or his girlfriend would like. The effect of this is that he has limited space for his hobby, and whilst he enjoys his visits to the Battlegames ‘Loftwaffe’ for games on my 8’ x 6’ table (which can also be extended), he cannot contemplate amassing sizeable armies of 20–30mm figures. For him, therefore, skirmish games with a handful of figures have been the norm for some years, together with some Dark Ages forces in 15mm for DBA.

It seems, however, that Dan had been eyeing up Pete Berry’s little beauties — I mean his miniatures, of course — for some time, and when Rob Broom at Warhammer Historical sent me a copy of Warmaster Ancients to review, it seemed that fate was pushing us inexorably towards our decision to take the plunge. Canadian micro-gaming whiz Barmy Bob Barnetson (forgive me, Bob, it’s a term of affection!) has also had a hand in this: his piece in Battlegames about the Teutoburger Wald, for which he seemed to spray out painted micro-minis faster than a Gatling Gun, showed just what can be achieved with a little application and a desire to display ancient warfare truly en masse.

The final tipping point was Dan reviewing the new Baccus ACW figures recently. It had to be Baccus. I saw the glint in his eye, and decided “What the heck? Let’s go for it!”

So, we shook hands and agreed that each of us would collect our favourite opposing armies. He’s dithering about whether to amass Romans and barbarians, or Saxons and something else Dark-Agey, but I already knew what I wanted. Greeks; Persians; and a lot of them.

Pete Berry wasn’t surprised when I called — he knew I was micro-friendly (that doesn’t mean I go “ping!” every five minutes, I’m not a household device) and that, following conversations we’d had at shows, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed to his wares. Nor, indeed was he taken aback when I said that I’d looked at the Warmaster lists on the site, but I wanted twice as many per unit! “Ah,” he said, “someone who wants to do it properly!”

And so, when the box of beauties arrived (it’s always slightly alarming, it has to be said, that a couple of thousand figures can fit into such a tiny box!), I of course began with a small parade of the new arrivals. I just had to see what those hoplites looked like, ranked up in whopping Warmaster-size units. I think you’ll agree that, even in the naked pewter state, they look pretty awesome. “Oohh,” was Pete’s comment on this photo, “looking at it, that’s an awful lot of lead! It looks unstoppable, but wait till you get the Persians out…”

Now, as you can imagine, as a chap running a major magazine single-handed, I’m pretty busy, and I have other projects on the go too, so when Peter suggested that I run this as an online project, I thought it would actually be a good idea to help me maintain momentum as I paint the eyelashes on a thousand hoplites (it’s okay, really, I’m kidding, honest…). I haven’t gamed with 6mm stuff since 1980-something, at which point I was using Heroics & Ros, so I have no preconceptions about how I’m going to achieve this monumental project. How monumental? Well, I’ve bought 1,000 point armies to begin with, but I want to fight REALLY big battles in due course, so I’m sure I will treble or quadruple what I’ve got so far.

So, from time to time, I’ll drop in with an update, revealing what I think has gone well, and what I think I could have done better, and perhaps even asking for suggestions when I think I’ve gone seriously astray!

Right, now, where’s that one-hair brush…

Henry

Why I’m rubbish at Warhammer

It’s true. For some reason, though my generalship in historical wargames is usually impeccable, my friend (and Battlegames Fantasy & Sci-Fi Editor) Guy Hancock regularly trashes me every time I trot out 2,000 points-worth of Warhammer anything. The number of times I’ve beaten him can be counted on the fingers of one thumb, and since he’s pretty much abandoned historical gaming altogether, this means that I’m not even getting any chance to redress the ego balance anytime soon.

The most recent drubbing was last Saturday. “Come on round,” he said, “let’s have a fun game and a bit of a chat.” I should add, perhaps, that I had just proposed to my long-term partner Ann, and was feeling the warm glow of the fact that, even after 16 years of putting up with me already, she has agreed to make an honest man of me sometime next year.

And so I dutifully packed my box with a mighty army of Bretonnia (that’s the medieval knight-looking lot for those of you unfamiliar with them) and set sail to meet the foe.

When I arrived at Guy’s, he’d already set up the terrain, a 6′x4′ arrangement, a few low hills and a couple of woods surrounding a small farmstead that was about a third of the way in from my left flank. After just four moves, the terrain looked much the same, apart from all the dead, singed, mashed, pummelled and generally minced Bretonnian bodies. What had achieved this? Some mighty horde of giants? A ravening mob of deadly Chaos warriors? A doughty Dwarven gunline, perhaps, backed up by thundering artillery?

No.

A bunch of little ratmen, a smattering of Skaven.

Okay, admittedly, these were no ordinary Skaven. Guy’s a great one for collecting ‘themed’ armies, and this furry mob hied from Clan Eshin, which is about as menacing and sneaky as a Skaven can get, this being the ‘ninja’ tribe of the squeaking warriors. Though they don’t look like much, these little critters are trained assassins of one grade or another, well tutored in the art of sneakiness, armed with poisoned whatnots and, worst of all, equipped with a gun-line of long-barreled jezzails, the most deadly, accurate and reliable of Skaven weapons.

Well, all I can say is that my brave Bretonnians blundered into the most withering storm of sustained fire, both long range and short range, that you can possibly imagine. Guy was having to throw so many dice each turn that the neighbours must have thought there was a hailstorm.

First, those jezzails, which if not powerful enough already, carry the additional bonus of being armour-piercing which gains them an additional bonus. And what do Bretonnians wear a lot of? Yup, armour.

Next came the slings used by night- and gutter-runners. Tolerable at their long range, though there were lots of them. But at close range, the little blighters got to double the number of shots. Facing several dozen dice throws each turn is not, I assure you, a pleasant experience, in spite of the Bretonnians’ armour affording them some hefty saving throws. You just know, the longer it goes on, the more the dice luck is going to tip in the Skaven’s favour.

And then, even closer, the poisoned wind globadiers, who chuck their nasty little stink bombs that, naturally, render armour ineffective and leave the wearer suffocating in his tin skin.

Oh, don’t let me forget the poisoned throwing stars, shiruken with attitude that cause automatic wounds, armour no object.

And yes, I know you’ve been waiting for me to mention the Skaven favourite, everyone’s wacky weapon of choice, the warpfire thrower. Before the damn thing blew itself to smithereens (taking half a dozen of my spear-armed men-at-arms with it) it managed to fry some of my pegasus knights, which I deem both a horrible thing to do to some of my most expensive troops and, frankly, cruel to animals too.

And finally, after watching all those little cubes bounce across the table to decimate my ranks, there were the warlock engineers armed with warpfire lightning thingummies, particularly efficient at zapping, as you might guess, anything wearing metal armour.

That’ll be my boys, then.

Now, as if this isn’t enough, Guy seems to induce some kind of mind paralysis in me when we’re playing the Games Workshop way. To be fair, he’s a pretty darn good general these days, and certainly gets to practice his skills at Warhammer far more frequently than I do. But it’s more than that. I think it has something to do with the alternate move system. Whilst I’m perfectly comfortable with simultaneous move systems, whether using written orders or not, when it comes to alternate moves, it’s as if my brain somehow dislocates, and I end up making the most stupid errors time after time after time.

For example, the huge benefit of Bretonnians, besides their tough steel exoskeleton, is that when they charge, they can use a formation known as “the lance” which allows them to pack an almighty punch on a very small frontage, enabling them to ride down pretty much anything in their way.

But only, and this is important, if they charge.

So numbnuts here, with alarming regularity, manages to leave his gallant knights hanging just within charge reach of HIS troops, which completely negates the lance formation and leads to an ugly, close-in slugfest where the horsemen have to rely on their thick plate to save them from the ignominy of the position I have left them in.

Doh!

Skaven are utter rot individually, but pack a lot of them together – and, oh boy, there are a LOT of them – and they really take some killing, even by handsome knights on big, stamping warhorses. It’s like a slow mincing machine, and you get the feeling that the mincing machine is going to win.

Guy is also extremely good at making the most of the points allocation. For example, I got suckered, Lord knows why, into taking an expensive Paladin battle-standard bearer who proved to be Sir Percy the Prat, incapable of pulling up his own socks, let alone dealing death and destruction to the furry foe. Seriously, he seemed to attract the longest run of the most pitiful dice rolls, demonstrating what Guy calls “rubber axe syndrome” so convincingly that I felt like crying.

Oh, and then there was my mighty general, armed with a deadly morning star and mounted on a mighty Royal Pegasus, fully ten percent of the points value of my army or more.

Talk about ending up with EasyJet when you wanted British Airways First Class. On move two, a lone assassin emerged from the woods, slaughtered the winged horse, bringing my general to his knees, and then performed a non-anaesthetised disembowelment on the hapless monarch whilst my army looked on helplessly, listening to a throng of chittering rodents squeaking “easy, easy, easy…”

The thing is, after the event, in fact in the car on the way home, I was besieged with realisations of all the things I should have done. How I should have deployed differently, manoeuvred differently, chosen different targets for my (modestly successful, as it happens) trebuchet. But, most especially, how I should have kept my beautiful knights in a position to charge and scythe their way through his lines.

But on the day – and that, unfortunately, is what counts – my archers ran away, my knights ran away, my wizards ran away, my trebuchet crew died to a man, accompanying my general and three quarters of my knights to the afterlife where, I imagine, the mockery of those bloody vermin is still ringing in their ears.

Unfortunately, watching Guy’s warfire team explode in a ball of fire proved very cold comfort indeed.

So, where do I go from here? Should I just pack it in? Well, no, that’s not the kind of guy I am. And, as it happens, I already have the solutions in the wings.

You see, like so many of our kind, I’m an inveterate butterfly when it comes to my wargames purchases, and I already have in my possession an army of Empire troops, and another of goblins, that I can trot out in the requisite kit to face ritual humiliation on the table. I keep hoping that, one of these days, I’ll find an army that suits me, that somehow brings out that spark of generalship that I know is lurking inside me somewhere.

Maybe it will be the doughty boys of the Reik – after all, for many years I was a landsknecht re-enactor, so I feel right at home with all that puff-and-slash and polearms. And I feel positively excited about the possibilities of a mighty artillery train and a reliable line of handguns and crossbows.

I feel completely different about the greenskins: I think they’re a laugh, there’s loads of ‘em, and with classic dafties like squig hoppers and doom divers, (if you don’t know what they are, imagine a green kamikaze Leonardo da Vinci on drugs) they’re going to raise a smile whatever happens, like a tide of tickling duckweed.

Which is just as well, because the man commanding them may never learn to be anything other than rubbish at Warhammer.

Hello world!

This blog is for me, as Editor of Battlegames, to write in an ‘unofficial’ capacity about what I’ve been up to lately and ideas I have for the magazine on a more frequent, though irregular, basis. It’s also an opportunity for Battlegames readers to give me feedback on certain topics from time to time.

I’ve thought long and hard before starting a blog, but I have come to the opinion that it’s a good way to separate the ‘official’ stuff to do with the magazine from my tendency to ramble on, which I can now confine to this site. It’s also somewhere that I can keep you updated about the various projects I’ve undertaken, and an incentive for me to keep ‘chipping away at the rockface’ on them. As Greg Horne has discovered with his ‘Grand Duchy of Alzheim’ blog, there’s nothing quite like the glare of public visibility to keep you honest! And the redoubtable Phil Olley has used his own site to spring a number of wonderful surprises, giving us an insight into the mind of a master project planner.

I hope you find something to enjoy here. If you find anything interesting, let me know; if not, well, just move along, there are countless other blogs out there!

Henry