Clash of Spears - Small Actions rules for Ancients/Medieval

[Gallahad]

I'm first and foremost a fantasy gamer, but I really enjoy ancients and most of my figures are on the low fantasy end of the spectrum.

I'm very excited for these rules. I'm always bothered by the lack of fatigue in games.

I can't wait for an excuse to pick up some of the wonderful Victrix ancients in plastic.

[seldon]

Well,

I must confess that the first playtest of Clash of Spears, quite some time ago was with...

fantasy

[guitarheroandy]

I posted a reply on the similar post in the Medieval board, but on reflection thought it would be better here: I have been reading Jeremy Armstrong's book on early Roman warfare and I reckon your rules would be just perfect for a project I'm working on involving 4th/3rd century Romans and their enemies - The Armstrong book really drives home the fact that warfare in the later Regal era and the early Republic was very likely not, as previously assumed, Greek-like Phalanx warfare, but small scale warfare raiding for booty with lots of open-order combat and relatively small forces. Reading your posts here and your examples from the blog reinforces how well-suited your rules would be for that. The size of forces also looks perfect, as I'm wanting to paint myself a 4th century Roman force plus a Samnite force to fight it. Needless to say I shall be keeping tabs on your progress with the rules and will be giving them a go once they are released!

[seldon]

Yes, sounds like a perfect project...

Early Romans vs Italian tribes would be awesome..

Victrix has beautiful samnite figures.. and Aventine has some late etruscans that could be combined !

That is why the lists that we have cover a rather large period 4th to 1st BC because one could interpret that at this scale of actions some basic common fighting techniques could be similar.

Many of the changes happen at the large army level.

That is one of the reasons we went into this project. There are many interesting books, some of them fictionalized, about raids and small actions in ancient times and we wanted to play that ..

The other being painting 28s for ancients and not having to paint 200 !!  Or at least not 200 for one single army, we all know we end up having many armies..

Undeniably others will follow, there is talk of Saga ancients, how long before Warlords does something.

So what we promise is that by being fully dedicated to this project this is more of a traditional style wargame aiming to reflect the period and reaching a good balance of playability and accurate period feel. There are zero, no game specific elements such as cards, board, counters, we will certainly aim to provide tokens that help game play but you can play it using standard color chips and standard D6 dice and it plays exactly as intended. It is better if models are individually based but the rules work with round, square or whatever basing you might already be using.

We will start with this book and develop the expansions and additional variants at a reasonable pace.

And once again, flexibility and fun !!

Francisco

[Cyrus the Great]

I,too, like what I'm seeing. I'm following this with a lot of interest.

[Jjonas]

It sure seems that "introductory scale" ancients is all the rage- your games look very nice, in fact much nicer than some. There seems to be a hoplite fad going on.

[seldon]

But the time has come for the Scutum and Caetra fad !!! 

Thanks for the positive comments...

[NickB]

I am excited for this!  A couple of requests:

1. Please include an index.  A big, complex, comprehensive index!!!!
2. Please allow for 15mm figs as well.

[has.been]

...& a Quick reference sheet. Preferably on the back so that it can be photocopied
without wrecking the book.

[Arrigo]

...& a Quick reference sheet. Preferably on the back so that it can be photocopied
without wrecking the book.

or include it as a separate sheet, or have it for download...

[seldon]

so...

index is tricky, it is not an easy process... we’ll do our best to include a good one, .hopefully you’ll cut us some slack..

QRS independent or available to download.. of course...

we’ll do our best to get a good one but with QRS everybody does their own... we’ll present the final QRS coming from the final playtesting rounds and then we will follow up with community support if there is a need to change it... fortunately the game is not heavy on tables... there is only two tables that need to be consulted often and you momorize them quickly ( how much fatigue you accumulate based on terrain and armor and how fatigue affects your troops stats )

the rules are different and mechanics are fun but a bit original so we expect a lot of support on early launch to help players... not afraid to do that..

this is a game for small actions but it is not a beer and pretzels game ( even if we all love to play those every now and then )...

[NickB]

Not expecting perfection with an index.  But any index is useful.  And I am sure your playtesters will agree, and even volunteer.

[Antonio J Carrasco]

Agreed with an index. It is worth the effort.

[seldon]

Ha ha.. you are overestimating the good will of playtesters ..

But we will try to add an index, we have a couple of indexing servicing/alternatives identified.

It is the last step of course for obvious reasons.

Francisco

[Whitwort Stormbringer]

Sounds really interesting! I'll have to give the rules intro blog post a read later, but I'm intrigued. Until now I've just planned on using GW's Lord of the Rings for ancient skirmishes, until something better came along. I'll try to keep up with developments.

I just perused the thread - are there plans for any kind of "campaign" rules? i.e., will warbands be able to accumulate wealth/xp/recruits over the course of multiple battles, or is are the rules just for one-off games?