How Many Sides?

Onward with designing an ancients game-system!

Let's start with some big decisions.

What scale? 

Ancients games suffer a conundrum -- unlike most modern games which you can play on a 1:1 scale if you want, there are usually more men on an ancient battlefield than any sane person would want to paint.  If you go for a really small scale, you get a more realistic proportion.  If you go for a large one, like 28mm, then you have a more colorful but rather thin-looking battle line.  In either case, each stand or figure will probably represent more than one actual soldier.

I think I will design for 28mm, which is big, colorful and fun to paint.  But, honestly, all that really matters for the game is the footprint of the unit on the table.

Fancy Random Number Generators?

Next up, what kind of dice (or cards or scapulae or spinners or whatever) do I want to use?  Personally, I think there's no reason to use anything other than standard 6-sided dice. Everybody has a metric crap ton of six-siders, which are cheap and easily available.  I find that not much is gained by using a larger die type, like a d10.  If I want more than 6 possible results, it's a lot easier to roll 6-siders twice, in various combinations, than to fiddle with the number of sides.

Plus, psychologically, there is something that's really nice about rolling a handful of dice.

6-siders, it is, then.

I Go/U Go, or Something Fancier?

Most older games are I Go/U Go systems, in which players move and fight with their whole force before ceding the initiative to their opponent.  Many newer games have an alternating system of activation, where one player chooses a unit to move or shoot, and then the other player may do so instead.

The advantage of I Go/U Go is its stately consistency. Players can predict movement across the field and plan reactions in advance, without worrying about actions taking place out of order, or a unit being stuck out of action by a quirk of the activation rules.

The advantage of alternating activations lies in the chaos and simultaneity it brings to the battle.  In the fog of war, you can never really tell where units will be and who will get the jump on whom.

In balance, for an ancients game, I think I prefer the predictability of some variation of the classic I Go/U Go.  In a modern combat game, it is much easier to imagine small units surprising each other and stealing movement on their opponent, than in some huge battle where ranks of men march across an open field.  I think in an ancient battle, you probably could tell in advance where most units would be marching, and plan for it.

Ancient battle relied on the steadiness of battle-lines and of mutual support.  In a alternating system, it's really hard to keep your little dudes lined up, and very easy for a unit to be caught out by itself.

So I intend to use some type of turn system in which players can keep their forces together and in which movement sequence is relatively predictable, although I may introduce some variation to a strict I Go/U Go.  For example, I might allow both players to alternate all their movement, then all their shooting, then all their melee resolution.