Actually, that sounds like an army list change, with the "description" of the Bad Horse in question including that "such troops were a mixture of foot and mounted, and should be represented <blah blah blah>" or similar. The only problem is that is a set-up for the parenthetical army list form I par...

I just don't understand why shieldwall troops (Spear) can run down rabble when hoplites (Heavy Foot) can't. I understand all of the others since they are faster, more capable, have ranged weapons, etc. I just don't see sheildwall chasing down panicking rabble. Are you referring to the fact that rab...

"Hamippoi, 0 pts: For every Javelin Cavalry stand in the army, you may replace a stand of Rabble or Light Foot with another Javelin Cavalry stand, and for each Bad Horse stand you may similarly replace a Rabble or Light Foot stand with another Bad Horse stand. Both the original and the new mounted ...

I'm struggling to find anything right now, but in the past I've read someone suggesting that in the oldest manipular legions, being an 'hastatus' was a prestige status, and that 'principi' were just the 'principal' (most numerous) type of troopers- however, their relative position at deployment seem...

Thank you Andreas, lots of food for thought in your answer. So if I understand correctly, there might be grounds for a couple of (entirely optional) battle cards, covering bad horse with intermingled rabble (hamippoi), and light infantry hitching a lift (velites). However, the sources are so vague t...

IIRC, something similar (cavalry-skirmisher assistance, or perhaps cavalry-rabble assistance depending upon classification) is attested for some of the Greekies (called "hammipoi"?) Right, the hammippoi... Yes, they are usually referred to as light infantry closely cooperating with cavalry, but we ...

In his Ab Urbe Condita Libri CXLII (often called "Historiae"), book XXVI, Titus Livius famously describes the first time Velites were employed against Carthaginian cavalry (at Capua in 211 BC). Small and agile legionaries were chosen to 'hitch a lift' with equites, dismounting just before contact wi...

I don't claim any expertise on this, but I was born in Bologna, and a few of the scrabbles involving Matilda (spelled Matilde in modern italian for some reason) happened close to my home town, so I've heard about them. None of them were pitched battles involving fully deployed armies... The Battle o...

It's not completely clear where we ought to express it. There are a large number of upsides to having online army lists, but a few downsides exist. One of them is cases like this, where the complexity of the information being expressed by the army list is not intuitive, and normally would be expres...

David Kuijt wrote:Must help a LOT in combat!

It might seem to help, but it's an almost irrelevant boost when compared with my superior tactical genius.