Sumerian Variations

After a brief sojourn in the XVIth century for the most recent posts it is time to pick up the Sumerian thread again and look at improvements to Neil Thomas' rules in "Ancient and Medieval Wargaming".

After we played the last game a number of suggestions for enhancing the experience were discussed. As the actual evidence for Sumerian combat techniques is limited the debate was long on opinion and short on facts. However we still felt that there were some changes that could be made based on self-evident weaknesses in Neil's rules.

Neil adopts a fairly strict interpretation of defensive armour values. Troops in full plate rate extra-heavy armour, those in mail with big shields rate heavy armour, those in linen/mail/leather armour rate medium armour and everyone else is light. These classifications apply across all periods and so are a fairly blunt instrument as they don't take into account the offensive power of weapons. Iron is an improvement over bronze, & steel is an improvement over iron.

In the Sumerian & Akkadian lists everything is classed as having light armour except for the chariots that are medium (we'll come to shields later) and this doesn't seem right. It takes more to stop a draft animal than a person and so the chariots should have more resilience than infantry so that's good. However formed infantry should have better resilience than light troops. Taking all this together we end up with a slightly revised troop listing:

	Type	Armour	Morale	Missile Weapons
Spearmen	Biblical Infantry	Medium*	Levy*	N/A
Battle Carts	Light Chariots	Heavy	Elite	Javelins
Skirmishers	Light Infantry	Light	Levy	Javelins
Slingers	Light Infantry	Light	Levy	Slings
Archers	Heavy Archers	Light	Levy	Bows

 
* For units with shields this increases to Heavy if they don't move in both the current turn and the preceding turn. They also test morale as Average if attacked from the front, shielded, side.

Next we had a look at the Hand to Hand combat table. This has been modified slightly, mostly to make the Battle Carts more effective against lighter troops.

	Biblical Infantry	Light Infantry	Heavy Archers	Battle Carts
Biblical Infantry	1	3	2	2
Light Infantry	1	1	1	1
Heavy Archers	1	2	1	1
Battle Carts	1	3	2	1

Note that we are also playing the revised Battle Cart movement rules from Slingshot.

Ideas that haven't made it through to the wargames table yet include:

1) Shielded units fighting with half their bases
2) Slings being more effective against battle carts
3) Adding light troops with bows

All things together I think there's more fun to be had with this period.  So much so that I'm planning to double the amount of infantry I have.