A 54mm Triarii from Irregular Miniatures

In playtesting I found that the abstraction worked better than the reality.

I needed to represent four lines of Romans: the Velites, Hastati, Princeps and Triarii. Each figure represents a century. According to, say, John Warry's Warfare in the Classical World, the legion would have fought with an unspecified amount of looser order Velites followed by two lines of Hastati, each line one century deep; followed likewise by two lines of Princeps, and then by a single line of Triarii.

This meant that a legion, assuming it was at full strength, would be represented by two Velites bases in front of two Hastati bases in front of two Princeps bases in front of a single base of Triarii cut into two!

This gave it a very small frontage and a very big depth for a typical evening battle of 500 points. Very vulnerable flanks!

Far better to make the Velites relatively independent, and then abstract the three lines into a line of six single bases. I would suggest that the Romans would expand their line in the same way when faced by numerically equal or superior opponents.

Petrus, who had raised the query originally, replied:

Thanks for replying. I have to agree with you, I thought of the same thing!

In DBM I also experienced that nobody used their Roman army historically because of increased depth with very vulnerable flanks. Without abstraction the only way this can work on a gaming table is by playing at very high points, say 1000 points and upwards! Then the Romans can deploy 4 lines deep and it may work.

Therefore, I will rather play the rules as it is now, with the abstraction, because there is no way that I can regularly play at such high points, time always being against us!

Players are free to use either method of representing the post-Camillan legion.

Another question I often get asked is why the Velites are OO not SO. Here's my reply:

I thought long and hard about how to grade Velites before finally plumping for OO.

My reasons? Well, IMHO they were not true skirmishers in the same way as, say, Cretan archers or Gallic javelinmen were. For a start, they carry heavy spears. How do you skirmish with a heavy spear? Secondly, if you look at the way they fight, they don't swarm forth in an uneven mass, but fight in lines very similar to the Hastatii and Triarii. They aren't really for pinpricking the flanks of the enemy, they are more for holding them in place whilst the serious boys behind them get ready to engage.

To my mind, they were a sort of half way house for the Romans. They were more than peasant slingers or spear chuckers, but less than the Hastatii/Triarii.

Hence OO not SO.

This gives them the ability to (i) beat enemy skirmishers and (ii) hold heavier enemy infantry in melee; and also gives them the speed and rough terrain ability that the Romans lack with their other foot and lack of cavalry.

They are, in fact, wicked in combination with the hastati/triarii!