Slitherine

Hi,

With the success of FOG is it possible that Osprey will produce better books for our period now? I mean to say we can get books on Latrine Diggers on Guadacanal and Chef Hats of The Wehrmacht Catering Korps. It's about time that we got a decent coverage of our period. For example, doesn't Carthage deserve it's own book?

Given this new strategic alliance maybe it's time Osprey created a series aimed squarely at us. I pick up a lot of the new Ospreys and open up to a colour page of saddles or axe heads! I want uniforms not extraneous info. I organistional info. Orders of battle.

You've got their ear now Slitherine do something with it.

John

Well I osprey will go where the market is, but have you looked at what Osprey offers:

http://www.ospreypublishing.com/

Myceneans
Roman infantry tactics
sarmations
Several different romans from repulibc to imperial
hittites
Teutonics
byzantines

They got tons of stuff.

I'm well aware of what they have but it's a hodge podge of titles from a wide range of periods. Some of the info in the books are of questionable value to wargamers. I'd like to see a whole new range aimed squarely at us. I'm sure Slitherine and this forum could come up with guidelines for such a series. Lets see the definitive guides to this period - uniforms, organisation, orbats, maps. No reason it couldn't be done.

malekithau wrote:I'm well aware of what they have but it's a hodge podge of titles from a wide range of periods. Some of the info in the books are of questionable value to wargamers. I'd like to see a whole new range aimed squarely at us. I'm sure Slitherine and this forum could come up with guidelines for such a series. Lets see the definitive guides to this period - uniforms, organisation, orbats, maps. No reason it couldn't be done.

There's every reason - the lack of reliable information being the major one. It's easy to find information on Army Boots of the Korean War but a lot harder to find out what was the colour and appearance of Illyrian warriors or what was the OOB of the Celtiberian Army. There's definitely room for a book on Illyrians, for instance, and probably a more comprehensive book on the Dacians, and an Osprey series on the Successors, but getting the information you want across the language divide and from 2000 years ago is very difficult. We need more ancient/medieval military historians who take more interest in this field and are prepared to write about it. Then we need people to buy the books.

I've included all the Osprey books I can in my FoG bookshop - which has a sepaarate listing for every army in the first 5 books of lists - but you are right, there is a limited amount of them available - I was pleased to get to 4 books about the Illyrians for example!! and included a potentially made up fact to pad out the dearth of history on them as well. But for some armies there is almost nothing available anyway, from any publisher - as someone said, the content is simply not there to include.

Also worth bearing in mind that lovely people as they no doubt are, you will hear a reasonable proportion of wargamers criticize Ospreys as being inaccurate or "history-research lite" (especially some of the older titles). No-one is going to say not to more books on our period, and Im sure Osprey are looking with a commercial eye at the success of FoG and thinking they need to do more books to address this market - but they are not the only books out there by a long way.

tim
www.madaxeman.com/FoGshop.htm

The problem with making books about some of the more "useful" armies of the ancient world is that there is almost NOTHING available in terms of reliable data. The sole remnants in some cases are broken bits of pottery, foundations of crumbled buildings, and a few rusted lumps of metal which were weapons, armor, or tools at one time. The best data we have comes from their opponents, and that is often unreliable, if not completely fabricated as negative propaganda. We don't even know for certain what color an Imperial Roman army tunic was; we have NO CLUE what many of the other ancient armies actually wore or looked like. Artistic depictions of armies and battles on walls or pottery generally show the "elite" units at their optimal parade best, not the bulk of the army as it actually fought.

Trying to find out how many troops were in a given battle is also a matter of much speculation, since there are only a few examples of "orders of battle", and even these are rather vague and only relate to a specific event (one "detailed" example of a Greek OB lists how many troops each city was to contribute, but gives no "breakdown" as to how many Hoplites, how many mounted, or how many light troops made up each contingent, or whether the cities actually sent the numbers requested - and any numbers for the opposing army are pure guesswork). For many ancient battles, the only reasonably reliable info we have is that one army is recorded as having fought another, and we can't even be certain of the outcome, since both sides would generally claim a victory, even in the case of a complete disaster.

The neo-nazi and socially marginal brigade are far more interested in "Jock Straps of the Third Reich" than material on ancient and mediaeval warfare!

Adrian

Some of this stuff should/could be covered in army list books, as in the page or two of painting guides we get in FoW books. Our period needs a disclaimer of "nobody can be sure, but we think they looked like..." perhaps even suggesting a few different paint schemes according to current academic schools of thought. OOBs should be reflected by the army list itself anyway so would only need to be detailed when discussing a specific battle where the OOB is known (or can be projected with disclaimer). Ultimately a lot of this info can be found in other sources, but getting it in an Army List Book would be a value-add to the product.

I was very impressed that Elite 082 Samurai Heraldry had a two pages of "info for miniature wargamers" although (to be fair) the same details are available in most current Osprey books - they just don't distill it into two pages for us!

tamerlane wrote:The neo-nazi and socially marginal brigade are far more interested in "Jock Straps of the Third Reich" than material on ancient and mediaeval warfare!

Yeh, but they can hardly read and are probably just stealing the books so they can drool over the pictures.

tamerlane wrote:The neo-nazi and socially marginal brigade are far more interested in "Jock Straps of the Third Reich" than material on ancient and mediaeval warfare!