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NOT re-inventing the wheel

As I’m sure you are aware by now, the coming weeks will see a veritable horde of new rules for gaming Ancients descending upon the wargames community (I’m aware of at least 4 sets due out between now and summer)
One of the sets which will not be making an appearance at Salute this coming weekend is the Polemos Ancients set of rules from Bacuss6mm. Pete Berry’s latest news posting explains why.
As part of that posting, Pete did note that he has added new army deals to cater for the upcoming rules – you can find these here.
The one thing that did encourage me about this was the fact that, if the army packs are anything to go by, the ‘standard’ army for Polemos Ancients is going to be very similar in size to a 300 – 400 point army for Impetus.
This I find somewhat refreshing. Why?
Well, in these days when everyone is trying to put their own ‘stamp’ on various rules, and it seems that each set that is produced (despite protestations to the contrary) have their own ‘ideal’ unit basing, which is:
  • Different to yours                     and
  • Different to any other rules system (except for some obscure rules set from 20 years ago)
It’s nice to see that here, at least, I have a set of rules that I can buy and use my existing army without even having to think about re-basing, or even buying extra figures!
Having said that, I don’t like Mr. Berry’s army packs – simply because they don’t quite fit in with the figure ratios that I allocated for my armies when I started using them for Impetus / Basic Impetus.
Peter defines all his close order infantry units as 3 ranks, whereas there are two different types of close order infantry in Impetus (FP & FL) – I use 3 ranks for FL and 4 ranks for FP (which means that a Roman units is 48 figures, 1:10 ratio for a cohort – which appeals to my sense of aesthetics)
I also tend to use more skirmishes on a base (12-16 individual figures) and my Heavy Cavalry (CP) have 12 figures, to differentiate them from Medium Cavalry (CM).
So actually, whilst I will still end up buying my armies by the unit, rather than these new army packs, the balance ends up in Mr Berry’s favour, as I will actually require more figures, and thus spend more money.
I’m sure that will make him very happy.

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