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Hello everybody, seeing as though Warhammer Fantasy is going in a new direction!

I would like to find a Historical that is set during the Middle Ages and focuses on block movement if possible (I saw Lions Rampart, which seems really fun but sadly is more skirmish style with 360 LOS)
I also have heard about Hail Caesar, but could not find any info online about how it plays and also I heard there is no point costs so I was confused as to how you would go about creating a game.

I welcome any responses and hope to find a great game, Thanks.

Wait for Soldier of God from Warwick Kinrade...

Though it is focussed on the Crusades, so may not suit.

In a historical game with no points values you would make a game by researching a real battle and collecting troops to match the order of battle. The difficulty of this is that many historical battles were unfair and also it is often difficult to get accurate numbers of the forces involved.

If you are looking for a block based rule set, I would recommend you take a look at De Bellis Antiquitatis, De Bellis Magistrorum Militum, Field of Glory, and Impetus.

Early editions of DBA are available free online, and Basic Impetus is a quickstart version of the Impetus rules. There many be a quick start of FoG, I am not sure. There certainly is for FoG Napoleonic.

The main thing with mediaeval block wargames is that you need to decide if you are going to base your figures on the "standard" established by WRG in the 1970s, which is a 40mm wide base for 15mm figures, or 60mm wide for 28mm. Nearly all modern rules use either this standard or the Warhammer Historical basing system. Once your figures are based, they will be broadly compatible with all the different rules that use the same base sizes.

 timofeo wrote:

I also have heard about Hail Caesar, but could not find any info online about how it plays and also I heard there is no point costs so I was confused as to how you would go about creating a game.

It's true that there are no points costs in the basic rules or book, but Warlord sell 2 supplements with profiles & points aimed at the more 'arcadey' historical gamer (of which I am one) who don't want to recreate anything, just go at it in a (roughly) fair way.

Edit: This would be the one you want:



http://store.warlordgames.com/collections/hail-caesar/products/hail-caesar-army-lists-late-antiquity-to-early-medieval

Clash of Empires and War and Conquest are both rather similar to Warhammer Ancients which was itself a version of WFB. You'll find a lot of familiar concepts in these two rule sets.

Personally, I play a lot of Hail Caesar. Its a great system for putting a lot of figures on the board for a fast game that produces a surprisingly realistic result. Riquende included a link to the army books which uses a basic points system for army generation. Army building is easily adaptable, you should be able to find a way to put your WFB figures to good use.

Big P wrote:Wait for Soldier of God from Warwick Kinrade...

Though it is focussed on the Crusades, so may not suit.

I do love the Crusades setting and I did see that game as I was looking, but my interest in it would be dependent on how it plays and how many factions (within the crusader side and the middleeastern side there are)

Kilkrazy wrote:In a historical game with no points values you would make a game by researching a real battle and collecting troops to match the order of battle. The difficulty of this is that many historical battles were unfair and also it is often difficult to get accurate numbers of the forces involved.

If you are looking for a block based rule set, I would recommend you take a look at De Bellis Antiquitatis, De Bellis Magistrorum Militum, Field of Glory, and Impetus.

Early editions of DBA are available free online, and Basic Impetus is a quickstart version of the Impetus rules. There many be a quick start of FoG, I am not sure. There certainly is for FoG Napoleonic.

The main thing with mediaeval block wargames is that you need to decide if you are going to base your figures on the "standard" established by WRG in the 1970s, which is a 40mm wide base for 15mm figures, or 60mm wide for 28mm. Nearly all modern rules use either this standard or the Warhammer Historical basing system. Once your figures are based, they will be broadly compatible with all the different rules that use the same base sizes.

I would most likely enjoy recreating real battles etc, however to get into the door I think point costs (from a warhammer perspective) go along way into making it an easy transition. I will look up those games and see if there is some example demos on youtube.

Riquende wrote:

 timofeo wrote:

I also have heard about Hail Caesar, but could not find any info online about how it plays and also I heard there is no point costs so I was confused as to how you would go about creating a game.

It's true that there are no points costs in the basic rules or book, but Warlord sell 2 supplements with profiles & points aimed at the more 'arcadey' historical gamer (of which I am one) who don't want to recreate anything, just go at it in a (roughly) fair way.

Edit: This would be the one you want:

Spoiler:

http://store.warlordgames.com/collections/hail-caesar/products/hail-caesar-army-lists-late-antiquity-to-early-medieval

Does Hail Caesar play with blocked units (everything I have seen suggests yes but still wanted to make sure) Also I have seen that it is suggested to play on a huge table for Hail Caesar, but can you play on say a 4x6 or a 4x4?

RanTheCid wrote:Clash of Empires and War and Conquest are both rather similar to Warhammer Ancients which was itself a version of WFB. You'll find a lot of familiar concepts in these two rule sets.

Personally, I play a lot of Hail Caesar. Its a great system for putting a lot of figures on the board for a fast game that produces a surprisingly realistic result. Riquende included a link to the army books which uses a basic points system for army generation. Army building is easily adaptable, you should be able to find a way to put your WFB figures to good use.

Hail Caesar is looking like the best option so far. The other big + about Hail Caesar when compared to some of the other games is that it seems like it will still be supported with rules etc.



Thanks for the responses everyone, I will look into the games you have suggested.


EDIT:

Field of Glory after looking online more also seems like a good system. A question I have is how would you guys compare Field of Glory and Hail Caesar?

Field of Glory was designed by extremely experienced tournament players. It is a solid set of rules with good support in campaign books that each cover a major historical period, for example Storm Of Arrows covers the later mediaeval time with knights in plate armour and lots lof longbows and halberds and so on.

I haven't played Hail Caesra but what I have read of it makes me think it is designed for fun first rather than simulation. There are some good battle reports on the forum that will give you an idea.

You can have fun games with either system I am sure.

I know Dues Vult is a Medieval game about the Crusades, but I am unsure of much more than that.

Hail Caesar is a fun game. However, keep in mind that you do nto control your troops in it the same way you do in Warhammer Fantasy. Instead, their are leadership roll-offs and commands that are given until your commander fails, with each subsequent order being more difficult to perform. Therefore, your little men won't always do exactly what you want them to do.

This is a very different experience from Warhammer Ancients and Fantasy battle. If you want total control, I would recommend FoG over Hail Ceasar.

Hail Caesar plays at any unit size - the two sides just need to be using the same sized units. I play infantry at 8x3 (160mm x 60mm), but it would play just as well with units half that size.

Unit movement is subject to leadership checks, but I consider that no more random that the combat break checks that WFB or WAB used. Once stuck into combat, units in HC tend to fall back predictively or break/be destroyed.

Dues Vult is a units based game which uses a lot of leadership/moral rules for combat. The games were fun, but seemed to take a long time. I always wanted to come back and play a few small scale games as it made light cavalry unpredictable (instead of the machine gun units they were in WAB).

Unit base size of Hail Caesar is apparently 40mm by 40mm for four 28mm figures in two ranks. This is basically WHFB (20mm square base for each figure.)

If you can play with any matched pair of armies, I would advise basing your figures for the WRG standard (40mm width for a 15mm figure element, 60mm width for 28mm figures) as this will give you the widest possible usefulness for your army.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Unit base size of Hail Caesar is apparently 40mm by 40mm for four 28mm figures in two ranks. This is basically WHFB (20mm square base for each figure.)

Not in the rules, not definitively. The only guide is that small units should be a certain frontage, medium units should be a longer frontage, etc. It gives you guidelines for what those frontages should be, but stresses that as long as both players have roughly the same the game should work. The game doesn't really care too much about ranks either from a rules perspective, they suggest 2 ranks for normal guys, 3 ranks for long spears and 4 ranks for pikes, but that's more a visual aid for the way those weapons work (and of course the units look more convincing on the table).

Then it will be fine to stick with standard WRG basing which is compatible with DBA, FoG, Impetus, Warmaster Ancients, etc.

What are the major differences between Field of Glory and Hail Caesar though?

Thanks

If you are sticking with DBx/WRG Basing (40mm frontages for 15mm, 60mm frontages for 28mm), then rather than the "Usual Suspects" of DBMM, FoG, etc.

Might I recommend a game by the name of Hoplon.

It is effectively a DBx based game, like DBA, or DBMM, but it uses Units instead of individual elements as the core units of movement and maneuver (but a unit can split off individual units to their advantage when needed - you are not LOCKED into ONLY using Units).

And, it allows for more detailed troop descriptions than DBA/DBMM.

DBMM uses troop types that break down solely into Drill (Reg/Irr), Troop Type (Sp, Bd, Wb, Cv, LH, Kn. etc), and Grade/ (I, O, S, F, X - with "Grade" being some perverse combination of morale, equipment, and behavior).

In Hoplon, the troops retain the Drill and Type, but the "Grade" in Hoplon is reduced to just [i]Morale (I, O, S), with all other aspects (and more) of the troop being moved to other features called Distinctives (they are what makes one particular troop "Distinctive" from another - I have been campaigning to have these just renamed as "Characteristics when/if the Rules ever get another edition, which I am working on for Fantasy - yet the Fantasy rules can be used for Historical).

The Distinctives are themselves divided up into some basic areas or qualities: Armor level (Vulnerable/Unarmored, regular troops, and Heavy Armor), Training (Untained, regular, or Professional), Role (which details if they are solely Melee - Shock - troops, or solely Missile Troops, or if they are dual-armed, but Primarily Melee - Shock/Missile - or Primarily Missile - Missile/Shock - Troops), Behavior (Are they Cavalry or Knights who fight in Wedge? Are they Cavalry or Light Horse able to fire Missiles on the Run like the Skythian?, Are they Fast troops?, Are they Spearmen or Swordsmen capable of fighting in a Shieldwall, or just Spearmen capable of fighting in depth during the charge, as Hoplites?, can they perform rank-relief as the Republican Romans and Imperial Romans did: Legion Maniple - LgM or Legion Cohort - LgC, etc...), and lastly their equipment (Bow, Sling, Javelin, Lance, Pavis, etc.).

That may seem like a lot, but when you see it listed collectively in an army list it becomes very easy to recall, and organize.

And. . .

The game provides a HUGE improvement in play over DBM or FoG (Field of Glory stole several mechanisms from Hoplon).

I have been using the rules for both Historical and Fantasy gaming for the last 12 years or so, and everyone I have introduced the game to loves it (some more than others, as two of the people are really Grumpy old gamers who say they hate everything).

It has suffered a bit from the fact that the rules are Free. PDF available in the files section of the Yahoo Group:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/AMS_Hoplon/info

Or, as the US Rep for the game, I can email you a copy.

But the rules are written in a clear, and easy to understand manner (which cannot be said for DBA/DBMM), and the group has a complete set of Army Lists for all major armies of the 3000 BC - 1485 AD periods (I am currently converting the lists to the newer Army List Format, which makes the pointing of armies much more straightforward than the older styled lists - as well as being more/better organized).

There have been some pushes to move the 28mm/30mm scale game to an 80mm element Frontage (all of my Fantasy Armies are mounted on an 80mm frontage, but my historical are currently all 15mm, so they are on 40mm frontages).

I think the 80mm frontage would work better going into the future, where larger miniatures would allow for the same element basing conventions (figures per element), which tend to be better than the solution of reducing the number of figures per element.

The conflict there arose when most 28mm lines created in the 1990s and early-00s were created with the specific aim of WAB, which used a 20mm figure frontage. Sticking with that frontage would seem to be preferable to altering the conventions.

Anyway... that aside... Try out the rules. They seem to be popular enough for at least two other rules sets to have completely ripped them off.

MB




Automatically Appended Next Post:
Addendum:

The Miniatures Page had a blurb about the new army list format.

http://theminiaturespage.com/news/?id=1466207761

MB

I cannot seem to access the files section of that page?

So I have come to find out that Field of Glory seems to be out of stock (as far as the expansions and such) also seeing as though the core book is 2.0 I imagine the expansions have not been updated to the 2.0 system (though I may be overthinking that)

The other thing is that with all of these historical's most do not have any good demos online besides Lions Rampart which looked fun but is skirmish rather than block formations.

As far as scale we are looking to use Warhammer models at first so a 28mm scale game is preferable.

 timofeo wrote:
I cannot seem to access the files section of that page?

So I have come to find out that Field of Glory seems to be out of stock (as far as the expansions and such) also seeing as though the core book is 2.0 I imagine the expansions have not been updated to the 2.0 system (though I may be overthinking that)

The other thing is that with all of these historical's most do not have any good demos online besides Lions Rampart which looked fun but is skirmish rather than block formations.

As far as scale we are looking to use Warhammer models at first so a 28mm scale game is preferable.

To access the Files Section, you need to join the group.

But. . .

Even saying that, I have had a hard time accessing the files section tonight, of a great many Groups in Yahoo_Groups. They seem to be having some sort of issue.

If you PM me your email address, I can send you the PDF for the rules.

If you are using 28mm figures based for WAB, then you will just need some sabots for some of your figures. The LO (Loose Order) and OO (Open Order) infantry have slightly different frontages than the Close Order Infantry (which has a 20mm frontage per figure for the alternative 28mm rules - elements are 80mm wide, or basically 2X the size of a 15mm element in all dimensions).

When I get around to doing 28mm Historicals, I will probably base my figures on the 80mm frontages, rather than the 60mm Frontages.

I hate to be grim, here, but Phil Barker will likely not be with us much longer, and the basing standards he created will probably be replaced, to a degree, by other gaming systems.

The basic ideas behind the WRG basing Standards are Sound. There are very good reasons why they were adopted, and why they became so influential (because they represent Actual Differences that exist in historical troops, making their identification on the tabletop easier).

But with the increasing size of 28mm/30mm figures, it became impossible to realistically retain the older WRG 28mm basing-standard. 60mm is just too narrow to comfortably use the basing-standard.

But 80mm works perfectly, providing the same space as found on the WRG 15mm basing-standard...

So... It should be simple to convert a WAB based army to the basing needed to play Hoplon in 28mm. You would just need to make sure to get the base-depth represented properly, because recoiling is dependent upon the base-depth of the loser in a Melee.

I wish that I had the resources to run demo games in Texas and California (technically, if I could get a freaking ticket paid, I would be able to. But I can't get the freaking court in the tiny west-Texas town to even answer their phone so I can find out how to pay the ticket), because odds are likely Hoplon would prove to be very popular at this moment in time (given what I hear people are looking for in a Historical Ancients/Medieval game).

MB

 timofeo wrote:

Big P wrote:Wait for Soldier of God from Warwick Kinrade...

Though it is focussed on the Crusades, so may not suit.

I do love the Crusades setting and I did see that game as I was looking, but my interest in it would be dependent on how it plays and how many factions (within the crusader side and the middleeastern side there are)

Errr.... Two.

Only two sides in the Crusades...

The Saga 'Crescent & Cross' expansion/game manages to find... 6? I think. Been a while since I flicked through it.

Also, 'the crusades' covers quite a wide time period with quite a few different kiingdoms that rose and fell over the period.

Big P wrote:

 timofeo wrote:

Big P wrote:Wait for Soldier of God from Warwick Kinrade...

Though it is focussed on the Crusades, so may not suit.

I do love the Crusades setting and I did see that game as I was looking, but my interest in it would be dependent on how it plays and how many factions (within the crusader side and the middleeastern side there are)

Errr.... Two.

Only two sides in the Crusades...

About six, surprisingly:

Franks (Crusaders/Outremer), who often were split into factions.
Turks
Egyptians
Assassins
Mongols
Byzantine Empire

The period offers a lot more interesting match-ups that is obvious at first glance.

I was talking of lists in the book...


Of which there is two.

However each has huge variety allowing you to theme your army in a manner of your choosing... after you first choose your 'Battle Plan'.

Timofeo,

Did you get the copy of the rules & QRS I sent?

I am also compiling the new Army Lists, and I can send you the PDFs of those.

If you have specific armies in which you are interested, I can get those army lists done next (We are moving the old army lists to a new format that is easier to use, and less confusing for new players).

So far, I have the early 1000 BC - 0AD army lists completed (at least the major ones): Hoplite Greece, Persia, Thrace, Skythia, Classical and Republican India, early Rome and Italy, Carthage, Gauls, Iberians, etc.

MB

 Kilkrazy wrote:
About six, surprisingly:

Franks (Crusaders/Outremer), who often were split into factions.
Turks
Egyptians
Assassins
Mongols
Byzantine Empire

The period offers a lot more interesting match-ups that is obvious at first glance.

The Hussites and Northern Crusades also demand inclusion.

 timofeo wrote:
Hello everybody, seeing as though Warhammer Fantasy is going in a new direction!

I would like to find a Historical that is set during the Middle Ages and focuses on block movement if possible (I saw Lions Rampart, which seems really fun but sadly is more skirmish style with 360 LOS)
I also have heard about Hail Caesar, but could not find any info online about how it plays and also I heard there is no point costs so I was confused as to how you would go about creating a game.

I welcome any responses and hope to find a great game, Thanks.

You may want to give my Sword & Spear rules a try.

Sword & Spear is a set of wargames rules for large battles set in the Ancients & Medieval period. They are suitable for any scale figures and any basing standard. The only requirement is that figures are organised into units of equal frontage. A typical game consists of about 12-15 units on each side and games take around 2 – 3 hours. The rules are designed from a top-down perspective, focusing on outcomes rather than detail.

The rules feature a clever and innovative system for activating units that creates interesting and challenging decisions, keeps both players involved at all times and has a lot of depth and subtlety. Each turn is split into phases, where players each receive a number of command dice, which are rolled and then used to activate their units. The number shown on each dice determines which units it can activate (with better quality units being easier to activate), what the unit can do when activated, and the numbers also determine the activation sequence. Certain dice also give bonuses to combat, movement distance or shooting range. So there is a lot to think about, and allocating the command dice well is the key to success (although rolling lots of sixes helps as well !).

You can find out more about them on my website here:
http://polkovnik.moonfruit.com/sword-spear/

Whilst there are no youtube videos, lots of players have written reviews so you can find out what other people think about them, rather than me telling you how good they are. You can read extracts from reviews, with links to the full reviews here:
http://polkovnik.moonfruit.com/sword-spear-reviews/

There is a forum to discuss the rules, which includes lots of battle reports so you can get an idea about how the game looks and plays here:
http://polkovnikproductions.freeforums.org/sword-spear-f4.html

I am also working on a fantasy version, which is something that may interest you if you are a WHFB player. I hope to publish the fantasy version this summer or autumn.