Slitherine

Following on from our discussion at Ascot, I couldn't find the thread regarding the Spartan Hippeis.

I still believe these should be elite under the rules.

While I concur that the Hippeis would deserve a classification of "Elite", there were only 300 of them. AT best you would have a very small BG of rather limited utility.

sounds like a two stand battle group like those being discussed for the nik. byzantines.

I was more concerned about historical accuracy than game usage.

I have not seen the list but dependant of date 300 is quite a resonable proportion of the Spartiates.

Are you talking about replaying Thermopylae? Or a typical Spartan army?

The main thread on this is here viewtopic.php?t=5076

I think the problem is that people are getting hung up on the terms superior and elite rather than the relative performance of the troops in question in the game. Have a read of the other thread and feel free to kick it back into life.

I think there are really three issues here : Troop Quality, Game Balance and Numbers.

The spartan Hippeis was formed from the best of the spartiates, consequently are better than your 'average' Spartiate. Looking at their battlefield performance then one can note on the two occassions where things weren't going there way the fought to the last. I am not sure how many times Roman legionaries 'choose' to do so let alone the same cohort. Consequently they should be Elite.

I noticed the comment regarding 18 Elite Romans, people seem to forget that they lost a lot of times. In a hoplite battle there would be no competition between the Spartiates and the Helots. What happened when the Romans fought slaves .... they lost repeatedly.

The Hippies represents between 7%-40% of the spartiates between 480 and 371 BC. How many 'elements' do the Sacred band get? I can see Nik's point about having putting a general with them but then you could have quite a 'big' battle group of them.

Regarding it being a game . . true.

Dford666 wrote:
I noticed the comment regarding 18 Elite Romans, people seem to forget that they lost a lot of times. In a hoplite battle there would be no competition between the Spartiates and the Helots. What happened when the Romans fought slaves .... they lost repeatedly.

Well done Dave, you've managed the usual not comparing like with like

1. The Romans who are represented by the Elites in the lists did not lose loads of times - other Romans not so classified did that.

2. the Romans who lost to the slaves were most definitely not the elites so making a comparison of them to spartiates and helots is meaningless.

To add a touch of, dare I say, academic reality to this rather than wargamer myth I would note that in his recent "Lost battles" Phil Sabin comments that the performance of the usual Roman conscript armies of the period covered by the FoG Mid Republican list was on a par with the Spartans. Personally I have a great deal of respect for Phil Sabin and his knowledge on this so for me this carries great weight.

The Spartans, and especially the spartiates, were by far the best hoplites in Greece - and as Superior Drilled ar so in FoG, however, lets not get carried away.

I am not an expert on the Slave revolt but I thought they defeated a proper Roman field army at some point. I would also say that the performance of the army is differant to the performance of its constitant parts.

I know of Phil Sabins book but haven't read it, is he saying that Roman conscripts are as good 'quality' wish as the Spatiates. Interesting I must look into this.

Not having the lists, which roman army gets 18 elites - Trajan?

Ceaserian 13th Legion?

As a matter of intellectual curiosity I have just plugged the numbers for 3 files of superior spear hitting 3 files of average the result was quite suprising.

The average spear will be disrupted 33.28% of the time to the superiors 14.41% and the average will be fragmented 2.97% of the time compared with 0.15% for the superiors. I have checked my sums and think they are right but this is a very significant advantage for the superiors.

If you do the same sums with elite vs average you get

Average disrupted 41.67% and fragged 3.89% vs elite disrupted 7.24% and fragged 0.05%

The long and short of it is that Spartan spearmen are more than good enough to get the correct effect against their historical opponents as superiors and if they were elite they would be soooo good compared to their historical opponents that they would IMO be wrongly modeled.

I can understand that, essential the grading is bases on game mechanices (though there is nothing wrong with this).

Out of interest how do the figures work out for these elite legionaries v's there historical opponents?

Excuse the spelling, I was working till 4.00 last night and up at 7.00 this morning so a bit shattered.

For the elite legionaries the question is what do you consider their historical opponents. To be honest the most likely opponents are more Romans and as the norm for Roman legionaries is superior the elite legions have to be better than them assuming that they were infact better which if you believe the histories certain legions were.

Elite legionaries will tear Gauls or Britons to pieces but as they cost more than twice as much then from a game POV that is reasonable.

Given that I don't know what the Elite Romans represent I can't guess on their opponents.

I think that from the modelling perspective the points cost isn't a consideration, thus would the model correct that these elite legions would simply destroy their opponents.

is this all a bit of a DBM hangover
Blades are a bit better than spear, so Bd(S) elite legions (if DBMM lists are to be believed) will lock up against Spear S and not a lot will happen for a long time, with the Bd having a bit of an edge in the long run.

the impact foot / Offensive spear classification is a bit more complex.
Superior impact foot are really going to have their work cut out to face Spartan spearmen, and are likely to be beaten if they are not lucky on impact.
Elite Impact foot might actually have a chance.
so backwards translating - superior impact foot legionaries are closer to DBM bd(O), they need to be Elite to be 'superior blades'

makes sense to me

basically Armoured Offensive spearmen are better than DBM Spear (O)

Dford666 wrote:
I am not an expert on the Slave revolt but I thought they defeated a proper Roman field army at some point. I would also say that the performance of the army is differant to the performance of its constitant parts.

Nobody has said they didn't defeat Roman armies, however, those Roman armies would not be considered FoG elite grade troops.

Dford666 wrote:
I know of Phil Sabins book but haven't read it, is he saying that Roman conscripts are as good 'quality' wish as the Spatiates. Interesting I must look into this.

Yes - their tenacity and fighting ability.

Dford666 wrote:
Not having the lists, which roman army gets 18 elites - Trajan?

Late Republican - think Caesar's tenth and such like at the end of his Gallic campaigns.

BTW in all of this we must remember that Dave started with a reference to the hippeis and not the whole of the Spartans.

IMO there is indeed an argument that these could have been represented by a small BG of Elite troops - it was raised during the list development process and, I'm afraid, I can't recall the reason it was rejected

From a purely "histroical" approach I thought Elite should be an option for part of the spartan army.

However I think a key consideration for the rules designers, which I reluctantly agree with is to model the overall effectiveness of the troops as a whole. Elite offensive spear would be too good, they would be able to beat pike etc that historically they did not tend to beat.

Same thing with pike they are very good as they are but if you allowed armoured as an option they would be unbeatable. Part of the way through his campaign Alexander replaced all his phalangites armour with top notch metal suits, it should from historical perspectives be enough to class them as armoured, (they certainly had better armour than mid rep roman hastati who are allowed to be armoured in the lists) but from game mechics point of view it would imbalance them

These are game balancing fixes and as such I think are good things. I don't think anyone really wants one army to be far superior to all the others, it would spoil the game.

Instead for "comptetition" purposes I would like to see a significant REDUCTION in the number of elite legionaries you are allowed to take. The list allow you to take virtually an entire army listed as ELITE which is ludicrous, and anything that isn't elite will certainly be superior. I could live with the OPTION to have all superior and maybe up to 8 elite, but the current 18 elite is way way too much. Fine for a specific historical game rather than a typical points game.

The problem we have now is that against armoured, elite, drilled, skilled swordsmen, your typical gallic or germanic warband has absoloutely no chance on earth of achieving anything. IMHO

Andy

What would the definition of Roman conscripts be>. In most other periods of history professionals are generally better than conscripts.

The only potential time that Elite hoplites would face pike to my knowledge was the sacred band are Chaeronea, I know little about the specifics of this battle apart from them being surrounded at destroyed. Did they actually fight the pike.

I am currently researching into the battle of Leuktra, a very interesting engagement. Which looks like being quite a close run thing, given that the Hippeis were disordered and the king killed early. Being pro Spartan I think the Thebans would of really struggled if this two events hadn't happened.

Ok this isn't pike but it is a 50 deep formation.