Dienstag, 29. September 2015

DBA 3.0 Army List relations chart: Biblical

Another chart of opposing DBA 3.0 armies, this time for Biblical times and armies. As usual, please click to enlarge.


Sonntag, 27. September 2015

DBA 3.0 Army List relations chart: Ottoman Empire / Persia

A lot of my vacation reading was the e-version of Miniature Wargames, and somehow I stumbled across and, after tha vacation, promptly bought a copy of the latest edition of De Bellis Antiquitatis, DBA 3.0 (link goes to Amazon UK, apparently the only source for this version of the rules).


One thing that always fascinated my about DBA was the idea to put together simple campaigns, following the historical conflict lines indicarted by the long lists of Enemies that are part of each army list entry. In DBA 3.0, the army lists are even more fun because they have a lot of variation and even some historical notes to describe the armies and Empires behind the units in the lists.

However, the lists of enemies are very hard to work with because the printed army lists only list the IDs and not the army names, so it's hard to get a real historical or geographic picture who is pitted against whom. I've always wnated to sort this out in  a graphical way, but on paper it is really hard to anticipate which armies need to be placed where to show all the relationships properly and use similar amounts of space for each.

Inspired by my other piece of vacation reading, a brilliant history of the Middle East, I have started to put together a picture of the Persian and Ottoman army lists for the 14th/15th centuries and their opponents.

Here is the result - despite just being painted with Powerpoint, I quite like the clarity it brings. As always, click on the picture to see a larger, readable version.

DBA 3.0 armies IV/55b (later Ottoman) and IV/42 (Islamic Persian) and their enemies

Highlighted in blue are the armies I consider putting together (even if it is on pure cardboard bases with no minis for a start) for a mini campaign. The only sad thing is that there are no obvious Arab or Afghan opponenst, but apparently at this time these regions were fully dominited by the Ottoman Empire, the Mameluks and the various Eastern nomad hordes depicted by the Timurid and similar army lists in DBA.