Re: [DS] Hidden Units and Recon by Fire

DBA was a little competition game written for a meeting. It was fun but
I 
would not consider it especially realistic.
DBM was an attempt to turn DBA into a real WRG style wargame. DBM has
been 
popular but suffers from having no morale rules as well as the WRG 
obsession with 'troop types'. There have been so many modifications that
it 
is difficult to keep track (the errata alone is colossal).  The current 
best type, I am told are light knights that cream everybody. DBM is the 
competition gamer's choice but warhammer ancients is making big inroads

WRG 7 was the last big game in the 1-7 range (although they were not a 
continuous development). It was really bad and is largely unlamented 
(unlike 6th edition which is still played). I agree WRG Ancients is
dead.

J.

At 21:56 02/04/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>DBA is an evolutionary offshoot of  WRG Ancients (7 total editions, or
is 
>it 8 now ?) and its very persnickety army lists. DBA was explicitly 
>designed to be a very realistic wargame given its very high level of 
>abstraction and to avoid all the tournamenty aspects of 7th Edition.
And 
>it's a fast play system - exactly 12 stands per army, balanced against 
>their historical opponents; and there are 180 armies listed.  DBA is to

>7th Ed Ancients as FT is to SFB. Then they did DBM, which is a full
sized 
>game, but retaining the simple mechanics of DBA.
>
>With 12 stands per side (fewer than chess I'll point out) you can do an

>amazing amount of flanking work on a 2" by 2" table. It scales down
bigger 
>games very well. You usually have one block of infantry, maybe two, and

>flanking units. This lets you do battle planning with minimal
distraction 
>in detail. Roman and Carthaginian armies come down to how the infnatry 
>action in the center turns out. 100 Years War armies shatter quickly
(100 
>YW games take about 45 minutes once the terrain is set).
>
>WRG Ancients seems to be at a dead end from my limited perspective, and

>DBA/DBM has taken off nicely.
>
>Roger Books wrote:
>
>>On  2-Apr-02 at 21:27, John Atkinson (johnmatkinson@yahoo.com) wrote:
>>
>>>Stupidly popular, but some serious flaws in the way
>>>they think. Of course, when your goal is to produce a
>>>tournament ruleset so that you fight ancient Egyptians
>>>against medieval Koreans (who happen to have Aztec
>>>allies).  Armies line up from one side of the table to
>>>the other, with no room for flanking maneuvers or any
>>>sort of more complex thinking than "Run forward and
>>>die."  You can't tell the difference between Viking
>>>raiders and Roman Legions.
>>
>>That's odd, the DBA rules I just picked up specify which
>>armies may fight.  They all look like historical matchups.
>>They dispense with this in tournaments?
>>
>>Roger Books
>>
>

Dr PJD Lambshead
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