Alexander's Macedonians, by Paul Forgette

On a regular basis we will post player's suggested army lists for use with Classical Hack. Here is a fine piece of research by Paul Forgette and I might add that Paul also submitted his piece in HTML which is impressive. Forgive our tinkering Paul.

When I was in high school, my favorite reading was The Iliad, by Homer. I still own a copy of it today. The individual heroism, the armies and the lifestyle of the ancient Greeks was extremely fascinating to me. I read more about the Greeks and then discovered Alexander. This later Greek period of Alexander the Great was different and covered a larger part of the known world. My favorite movie, one that I have seen dozens of times, was Alexander, staring Richard Burton. My first ancient army was not Greek, but Palmyran. That was by circumstance rather that choice. But while I battled with the Palmyrans, I was slowly painting the Alexandrian Macedonians, an army that I grew to love and played with for many years.

The introduction of Classical Hack was an exciting time for me, because it allowed me to concentrate on a specific period for my army. I put together an army using Army Lists-Book One-3000 BC-75 AD, by Wargamers Research Group as my reference. (List 36. Alexanderian Macedonian., 355 BC to 330 BC.) The list is shown below:

Concluding Notes

The basic Macedonian Phalangite unit was called a speira and consisted of approximately 256 men. Four speira made up a chiliarchy, 1024 men. Using a scale of 1-50 you would get a unit consisting of 20 figures. I found, however, that using 16 figures per unit worked out better for both maneuvering and combat.

In establishing the sizes of the other infantry units, I used the same procedure. Establish the historical size, set up the unit on 1 1-50 scale and play a number of games. This gave me a feel for the rules and also helped set up what I feel are realistic unit sizes.

The Companion cavalry was divided into squadrons called ila. The number in each ila varied from 200 to 300, the more prominent size probably being about 210. Using the same scale of 1:50 this would allow for about 16 figures. Once again, play testing found that 12 figures worked out best.

Thessallian and Thracian cavalry work out to the same unit size. Other Greek cavalry would be 6 figures per unit.

The light infantry should not exceed 12 figures per unit.

When the army is set up on the table top there are 258 figures totaling 1877 points. When using 25mm, as I do, this is a very impressive sight. Add to that an opposing army like the Persians and you have a sight that would warm the heart of any gamer. This is a nice size army to handle and easy to use with the Classical Hack rules. I am able to use the army much like Alexander did, with Parmenion as the anvil and Alexander with the Companions as the hammer.

A Special Note On Conversions to Second Editon

Since Paul first wrote this the rules have made some changes in regard to creating units. For the most part I have simplified them by going to a simple D-10 system. Paul's costs for units should be converted by placing a decimal point one place to the left. So the Thracians costing 66 points would convert to 7. We arrive at this by placing a decimal point and then rounding up or down . In this case 66 becomes 6.6. As .6 is more than half of a whole number you round up and this adds 1 to the 6 to the left of the decimal point creating a Unit and Morale Value of 7. This is faster than recomputing everything.

If you have any questions please e-mail me and I will attempt to make this more clear.