Designing using unit strength numbers that matter.

[acarhj]

From this thread viewtopic.php?t=15653 I got to think about making units of appropriate strengths that make some sense. Using the methodology from Phil Sabin's book "Lost Battles" , you can make some generalizations about how strong a unit should be.

Units should be divided into broad categories of "heavy" and "light". Light troops are skirmishers mainly while Heavy troops primarily melee.
Infantry units should be twice as strong in number as mounted troops. With that in mind, you can make some general categories of strength. For the sake of argument, I'll set the base number of infantry at 2000 and the base number of cavalry at 1000. Light infantry and cavalry take up about twice as much space as the heavy counterparts. So if anything is classed as light, count it as half as much per unit. So light infantry would be 1000 per unit and light cavalry would be 500 per unit based on my example numbers.

So I set about making a Zama scenario based only on the histories written by Polybius. Romans do their fighting in pairs of legions. 2 Roman and 2 Allied legions make a consular army. We know the regular strength of a legion and based on this fact alone, the Roman army at Zama was probably had 17000 infantry of which about 5000 would be light infantry. This would yield 6 units of Superior Legionaries and 5 units of velites. 1 heavy unit would be a Triari General...perhaps Elite. The Numidians would have 6000 infantry and 4000 cavalry on one flank. I tried making everything light but that did not give the Numidians any staying power. So they have 2 medium foot units and 2 skirmish foot units making up the infantry and 8 light cavalry units of which one would be an average ally general. There is also about 1500 Roman cavalry. I made them Superior and actually rounded up to 2000 or 2 units.That yields a believable 29000 troops total.

Tha Carthaginians are a different matter. Polybius says that the first line is made up 12000 mercienaries including Ligurians, Bruttians, Celts, Bealeric and Lybians. The latter two would be light and make up roughly 4000 men in that line. 2 units of slingers and 2 untis of javelinmen. The others are 2 HF for Bruttians 1 MF for ligurians and 1 MF for Celts. To the question fo the rest of the numbers, I take Polybius to mean that each line is 12000 men. What good would longer/shorter lines be in this formation anyway? So there would be, in the second line, 6 Punic infantry protected and poor. In the third line there would be 6 Veteran infantry armored and superior with spear. You might make them Swordsmen+ as an experiment just to see how they do. There were "more than 80" elephants spread across the front of the entire army. You can't make elephants poor and although 20 feels like the right number for a unit, I'd consider doubling this for the scenario to dilute the effectiveness of the unit. So they would go from 4 to 2. At some point before the battle, Hannibal was said to be riding at the head of 2000 horse. 2 units of punic horse probably downgraded to average. The numidian numbers in hannibals army are unknown but are said to be less than the Roman allies so maybe set the numbers at 2000 as a wild guess. That's 4 light horse. Hannible should be with one of the veteran spearmen in this battle. That should yield 40000 infantry and cavalry and 80 elephants.

I fought this one twice last night. the computer did a bad job with the romans and did not keep the roman heavy line together. they were ground down. As mentioned before, that battle had Numidians as all light infantry.

In the second battle, I played the Romans. I was able to grind the Carthaginian first and seond line down easily and pounded it out with the third line.

If the computer would stay together in they would do much better. as usual though, it does a bad job of taking advantages of opportunities.

The map BTW, was a flat 20X20 arid map.

I did a Marathon Battle based on the same scales, giving the persians 5 Protected average spear, 4 unprotected bow 1 average cavalry general and 1 poor cavalry. One of the medium foot was the C in C. The Greeks got 5 average armored Hoplites. It was a close fight and I lost a couple of times but it played well.

The map was 10 wide and 20 deep. I think 20 deep is key so that units don't get driven off the map so easily. Bay of marathon is on the right and the rough hills on the left. A road leads south to north west.

I'll post a battle report soon.

John