I decided I wanted a Roman and an Egyptian army so I could play out some skirmishes around the siege of Alexandria and the Battle of Actium. I figured Rome and Egypt were probably pretty popular armies, and a cursory search online suggested that there would be lots of miniatures to choose from. So I saved up, planned a few scenarios, thought about paint schemes, and finally started shopping. And that's when it all fell apart. It turns out that historic wargaming can be harder than it looks. However, it's not impossible and, I think, it's actually really rewarding. Here are the five things you need to know about historical wargaming.
Finding the right miniatures for historical wargames has been more difficult than I'd expected. There are lots of variables, it seems. The first hurdle has been availability. Maybe historic wargaming isn't as popular as I'd thought, or maybe I'm just being surprised again by living in New Zealand (as I do). Every historic miniature I could find had to come from overseas, which meant that shipping was frequently at least a third of the cost (but usually more like half).
I ended up finding a local service that offered resin 3d prints of STL files. Seems easy, right? Well, I guess it made it possible for me to get some miniatures on the table, but the brave new world of digital miniature delivery turned out to be more complex than I'd imagined.
First of all, you have to endure resin.
Secondly, there's that old spectre of sizing. This can theoretically be corrected by just scaling the STL source down but in practice it seems imprecise. Maybe it's just the printing service I used, but my Roman soldiers are comically riding ponies instead of horses, judging by the height of their mounts, and the soldiers don't fit. (I think the printer scaled the horses but forgot to scale the riders.) I could have sent them back and demanded a re-print, but by the time I'd noticed the mismatch, everything had been painted and I was just about to glue the riders onto their mounts.
And finally, there's style. Maybe this is common for historical wargamers, but it was basically impossible for me to get complete-ish armies from the same sculptor. So my Romans are by one artist and my Egyptians are by another. It works out alright, I guess, but the Egyptian soldiers are dynamic and fluid and exciting, while my Romans are stiff and blocky. It feels a little like taking Lara Croft and dropping her into Minecraft. It definitely requires more imagination than, say, pitting Space Marines against Aeldari, both designed and produced by Citadel.
I specifically wanted Roman Imperial and late [late, late] Egyptian armies, but I guess Octavian's pursuit of Mark Antony isn't really a popular match. I couldn't find the combination I wanted from any single vendor. I could sort of find Roman armies (although it seems Roman Republic armies are more common than Imperial), and I could find some Egyptian armies but never from the Ptolemaic period.
I ended up deciding that it was the theme that mattered the most. So my Ptolemaic Egyptians look a lot like New Kingdom Egyptians, and my Roman Impeerial legion looks a lot like an army from the Republic.
Most importantly, though, they're identifiable as Roman and Egyptian armies. I learned a lot from researching what armour and weapons I should be buying, and then threw it all out.
It turns out that historical wargaming isn't just about armies themed around ancient civilisations. Real historical wargamers want rules that reflect the way historical armies fought. Hoplite armies need phalanx rules, with benefits and bonuses for moves that a phalanx would have made. Roman legions ought to have rules that expect battle lines and maniples. And so on.
When I started, I didn't have rules that rewarded or encouraged any kind of behaviour. Then again, my rules were designed to be very generic, which I've found to be universal enough for me to play my armies as historically accurate as I can or, when I prefer, as a generic army with a Roman or Egyptian theme.
Before trying to play one, I'd seen photos of historic wargaming, and I noticed that the bases were often square, and large enough to hold an entire squad. I mistakenly assumed that this was a historical aspect of historic wargaming. In other words, I thought the photos of historical wargames using square unified bases was the old-fashioned way of wargaming, and that the world had since moved on to individual round and oval bases.
That was incorrect.
Historic wargaming uses big unified bases because certain units move together, and a big unified base makes that easy. Base size also effects movement, and a lot of historic wargames are written with the assumption that you've based units on unified bases and commanders or special soldiers on individual square bases.
You can always work around differences in how miniatures are based, but that does mean extra work. Once again, my generic ruleset has proven to be advantageous, but it also means that strictly speaking, I'm not really doing historic wargaming.
Aside from the painting and gaming part, the most fun I've had with my blithe foray into historic wargaming has been the research. I've always counted myself as a fan of both Rome and Egypt, but if you'd have asked me about either one of them up until this past winter, I'd have summed them up a few token mentions of Caesar and Tutankhamun, and I'd have guessed that they probably existed basically at the same time. Maybe you would, too. But Tutankhamun was pharaoh in the early 1300s BCE, and Caesar was usurping power in the Roman Republic in the 40s BCE. How about Cleopatra (the famous one, I mean, not the six Cleopatras that preceded her)? Well, yes she and Caesar were lovers, so they were concurrent.
This is all stuff I didn't know, coming into the game, and there's lots more. I know what a contubernium is, I know a maniple is a Roman formation and not just a fancy word the Adeptus Mechanicus uses for their battle Titans. I understand that Egypt lasted for thousands of years, and that clothing style and beliefs changed over those centuries. I understand that the "bronze age" ended in the 700s BCE, and that the people living then didn't know they were in it. The Greeks preceded Rome by a lot.
Again, this is all stuff I really didn't understand before deciding to try my hand at historic wargaming. I went to school, believe it or not. But I guess you don't think about the details until you need them. And historic wargaming encourages you to focus on the details. Whether or not you manage to find the miniatures that match them correctly, you still learn about them, and as you paint and play your games, you think about those little historical details. And sometimes, in the thick of battle, you have the fleeting thought that you should have become a historian, after all.
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