Ancients
Decline Back to my Periods of Interest
My first wargames period was "Ancients" and my earliest wargames army was a Caesarian Roman Army of 20mm Airfix Romans.
I came into the period (and hobby) as the change over to WRG 6th Edition Ancient Rules was happening in New Zealand. I didn't get enough playing time to get any good at the rules and pretty much flagged things away for a while after some major defeats.
Rules from the 'Wargames Research Group', or WRG, have dominated the "Ancients" period since 1969. WRG's Ancient rules went through seven editions. When I came back into Wargaming again in the mid-eighties, 7th Edition was the current rule-set.
Casualties were still worked out as fractions of a figure under 7th Edition, but some radical concepts, such as ditching the reaction test and its list of factors, were being introduced that foreshadowed the De Bellis family of games.
There were aspects of WRG's 7th Edition I enjoyed, though I didn't play a lot of games with these rules as I was more interested in Role Playing games at that time.
My second Ancients army was a 15mm Italian Condotta army (figures were by Tabletop Games, or TTG - manufactured locally under licence by 'Military Miniatures' who are now sadly defunct) which was bought for 7th, and painted in a weekend of madness before the North Island Wargames convention, which, that year, was held in Mt Albert, Auckland.
And then a few years later, a good friend introduced our group to Armati. Armati is a great set of rules, and handles the Classical period very well (apparently the original simulation was set up to model the Punic Wars). Armati became the game of choice in our wargames group for a good few years as we played a series of Ancient, Medieval (War of the Roses), and Renaissance/English Civil War campaigns.
Armati went through a bit of a hiatus in the late '90's. The rules were out of print and a new edition took longer than expected to be written. Eventually Armati 2 came out but, I fear, the damage had already been done. With no rules available for about two years, and little support material, the Armati community stagnated. A2 revived interest, but numbers still seemed to be down at the main conventions in the United States and United Kingdom, according to feed-back on the Armati Yahoo group. A number of pivitol people have moved on or dropped out of the scene and various acrimonious slanging matches on the main Yahoo discussion site have driven more people away from actively promoting the game.
One hopes all these things will pass.
The Warflute site is back up and running after a change of personnel and hopefully will continue to be the great resource it has been in the past.