Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[scott holder]

After many years of the Day 1 / Day 2 terrain approach, this year I'm going to take a different approach.

All terrain, both days, will consist of nothing but gentle hills. There will be two notable exceptions to this:

There will be a desert board with one Dune feature. There will be one winter board with one is-frozen-or-is-it-not lake feature. Everything else on both those boards will be the geographic equivalent of a gentle hill.

This means there will be a lot of gentle hills on any given table. Much of that will depend on the number of players, thus number of tables and then number of available hill features in the preset terrain collection.

Why this change? Two reasons.

First, I'm a big fan of providing players a chance to run a variety of their armies and the last X number of years with the terrain approach has essentially frozen out part of the general army collection (see a recent thread on Wallachians for example). It's now time, at least for this year, to allow for that play style/army type to come back into the NICT.

Second, this idea came from comments Bill made to me last year which in turn triggered some staff rides I was on when attending the USMC Command & Staff College a lifetime ago.

Basically, when you look at most ancient battlefields (as best we can given the time lapse and subsequent change in the landscape), you see that there was basically nothing on most of them. Essentially undulating terrain. And it's also clear that such to-the-naked-eye inconsequential changes in height were seen by commanders as a real big deal.

Case in point (at the fear of an apples-to-oranges comparison), look at Sickles Union deployment forward at Gettysburg. In general, it's been criticized but if you stand on that spot, there's a little bit of elevation gain. My profs back in the day made damn sure to point that out, not to justify his actions but to highlight how generals viewed the tactical ground on which they fought and how seemingly meaningless differences in relative "altitude" factored heavily at times into their deployment and subsequent operation of the forces at hand.

So, the best way to do this in Warrior will be gentle hills. I'll toss in our one low rise. We have 3 knolls and I've used them over the years but quite frankly they don't add much.

So, plan accordingly as you mull over army options and possible warm up games.

scott