Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[scott holder]

I can hear the collective groan at the thought of classing Roman legionaries as
loose order!!!.>>

We actually looked at this for Marians, but there simply was not the evidence
and much evidence to the contrary. We will relook again when we get to
Classical. That's a list book away, but I did want to point out that we are not
averse to what the possibilities might be.

>There came a point when we looked at the end result for an army, namely how is
should be best represented on the table. The "problem" with a game system like
Warrior is that the individual mechanics in the whole process of developing a
troop type can often lead you astray from the targeted end point. Or that the
mechanics simply don't enable troops to act in such a way as we interpret they
did historically. FHE list books to date are chock full of this stuff (the
Anti-Elephant Parties and the Swiss are two that come to mind) where we start at
"the end" and work our way backwards and if the extant mechanical system doesn't
give us what we want, wah lah, list rules. To reiterate, we didn't want "the
process" as written in stone in the rules to take us places where we didn't want
to go.

>Enter the Romans. As Jon indicated, the Marian legionaries were LHI in the IW
draft for the longest time. Why? Well, there is the one citation about
Sertorius (as mentioned in the Huckleberry & Clarke lists). Plus, modern
commentators (namely Peter Connely) discuss spacing between single legionaries
as being something that would approach our perception of "loose order" infantry.
However, one citation of one instance and some modern analysis, while cogent to
the evaluation of the troop type, wasn't enough to counter balance the fact that
Roman armies of this period strove to deploy their legionaries in clear terrain.
If we went with some form of loose order for them, then we would expect players
to take advantage of those capabilities and fight Marian legionaries in brush,
woods, etc. And that was clearly NOT what we wanted. And creating a whole
nuther layer of list rules to keep that from happening didn't make any sense
when we went back to the limited citations on this in the first place and
determined that they weren't enough to suggest that a) Roman tactical doctrine
uniformly applied and b) the legionary as a weapons system was designed, nay
optimized, to do this. Hence, it was dropped.

>And this is clearly different from the Swiss who moved thru crud and were at
home tactically in crud. Moreover, there is little to suggest that Roman
tactial doctrine changed all that much from the Marian to the EIR period. In
fact, there's the obvious "look" to an EIR army that legionaries were even more
inclined to be close order foot because of the way the weaponry subtely changed
and how auxiliaries became an important component in a Roman army. They filled
a void that in my mind, existed as a result of the Marian reforms.

>The use of "loose order" legionaries to me is more of a decision by an
innovative commander to use his soldiers (as opposed to the weapons system they
make up) in circumstances they're not accustomed to being in. That's because
the commander has confidence in the skill, training and morale of the soldiers
he's asking to do something "odd". This isn't any different than Alexander
using chosen "phalangites" in the occasional urban situation or assaulting some
hilltown fortress in modern day Afghanistan. Because he did that, does that
mean the phalanx as a weapons system was adopted to do that? To me, clearly
not. Instead, he called upon good troops to do something that the local
sitatuion required. He was not calling upon the phalanx weapons system to do
something it wasn't developed to do.

>That's one reason why Romans remained close order foot and will most likely
remain that way when we get around to the Polybian list.

scott