Re: [DS] Hidden Units and Recon by Fire

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
>