Customer Reviews

Lost Battles: Reconstructing the Great Clashes of the Ancient World

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Philip Sabin has produced an original, insightful book. What we have here is a forensic laboratory to explore what happened in an ancient battle.The author thru his many years of teaching and research has sought to establish a set of general rules to explain how classical warfare took place. From this he established a "model", and based upon this model he seeks to explain thru simulations how other ancient battles; the "Lost Battles"(poorly or incompletely documented) took place. This is supplemented by web pages that enable you to actually experiment with the armies, their strangths and deployments, in the same manner as the auithor and his students did to develop their analyses.
The author sheds new light on the Spartan army, the engagements of Alexander the Great, the evolution of the Republican Roman Army and the veracity of Caesar's numerical claims. The key to victory is the quality of the troops and their general. Numbers are not as important as one may think, larger armies were simply deployed in greater depth due to problems of command and control; nor is the topography of the battlefield that crucial as generals preferred open spaces to deploy their troops. High quality troops of great repute inspired fear in their opponents thru their superior drill and discipline which gave them a noticable tactical edge on the battlefield.
One criticism of the book is at times one suspects that Sabin deals with his battles as Procrustes dealt with his victims... The bibliography and documentation is superb.
This book is a must for any ancient gamer or student of warfare.

Lost battles is a historical simulation of ancient warfare. With a structured approach by Phil Sabin, you can take the methodology described in the book and recreate any battle in antiquity. All of the rules you need are right in the book. Just add historical evidence and off you go!

Ok. It's not that easy. Lost Battles can be played as a miniatures game, a board game or an online game via Cyberboard. The battles are fought on a grid 5 squares wide by 4 squares deep. These squares regulate movement. There are rules for movement and combat. As you can expect, there is a random factor in the game to simulate the unknown factors of a chaotic battlefield.

The book is divided into 3 sections.

The first section describes the various parts of the wargame model and how they relate to the historical evidence found by the writings of various ancient historians.

The second section describes the battles and how the author went about deciding how to rate the various troop types. he gives a brief overview of each battle, breaks down the various troop elements and scales how large the battlefield should be. He leaves the operation of the model up to the reader to decide for himself. The reader can experiment with different deployments and different unit types or simply play the game with a buddy as a regular wargame.

The last section is the wargame rules themselves. They describe how to actually run the game/simulation. There are rules for movement, combat, morale, leadership and so forth. There are special rules for fatigue and special unit types such as the Phalanx, legion, and elephants.

So what do I think of the game? I really like the rules a lot. At first glance, I thought the game was quite simple and probably would not be rewarding past a couple of plays. After playing a game online with a friend, I found them to be far more rewarding and they did require some thought as to how to attack.

I also really like the versatility of the game being able to play it via different media.

My only gripe with the book is the way the rules are laid out. You have to skip around sometimes to find out how certain things work. Commanders abilities are defined in part in several sections for instance. It would have been better to have distinct sections and define everything there is to know about different aspects.

Minor quibbles aside, this is a fantastic simulation. It is well thought out and it encourages the reader to delve deeper into the subject to form their own opinions.

This book aims to develop a new way of looking at the warfare of the ancient world; to shine a light on the battles whose history has been lost to the moth, fire and decay. The amount of written ancient history that has survived across the centuries is small and is not really increasing; although archaeological evidence is helping. This means that for even the most important battles we can have partial histories from one or two historians, often based on other lost histories from eye-witnesses. These accounts can fail to agree on numbers, events and location. In some cases parts of each version appear unlikely and one often suspects special pleading on the parts of some or all of one's "witnesses".

Instead of despairing Phil Sabin has created a model of ancient combat based on the evidence of all the ancient battles that we have, and has turned it into a war game wherein the historian can test the various possibilities of the evidence in front of him. Did one side have 20,000 and the other 400,000? Well, now you can find out by trying it. Of course the author is not so unwise as to say that by adding together many battles about which we know little we arrive at one about which we know everything. Instead we arrive at a series of plots from which we can devise a line of best fit. This is not to say that outliers are wrong, simply that they are untypical. Phil uses as his touchstone the battle of Cannae in which a smaller army enveloped and destroyed a larger one (and led many a German general to his doom). He demonstrates how this seemingly unlikely result could have been achieved, and allows one to tinker with the solution. This is the strongest part of the model, its ability to be changed by the user to fit their views and then tested. If you belong to the camp of Xenophon, as I do, on how effective cavalry was then you can tweak the rules of the model and test away.

To the wargamer the model (a set of game rules in effect) is of medium complexity but with a limited number of units can be played quickly. Whether the general reader will be able to grasp the concept is another matter and it may be a bridge too far for many. However, the concept is one that is coming to the fore as part of modern history and this book is a valuable part of this trend.

Lost Battles, by Philip Sabin, seems to have a really good concept. Take a good war gaming plan and refight the battles of ancient history. Then, I thought, the author would explain how the results either confirmed or contradicted the historical accounts. Wrong.

The author does set up a very good war game that can fight these battles, but when he turns to the individual battle itself he explains how the war game has to be adjusted to fight that battle, or how the unknowns in the battle have to be confronted. There is no discussion of the battle itself in terms of what the war game either confirmed or contradicted in the ancient accounts. Don't get me wrong, he goes into detail about the ancient sources and what they said that can - or cannot - be confirmed; however, he has not fought these battles several times and then calculated the results with the most likely outcomes and drawn conclusions from them.

For example: the battle of Cunaxa in 401BC (a battle I know very little about) was Cyrus's attempt to seize the Persian throne and is described by Xenophon. The author states the account of the battle is 3,000 words long, and conflicts with other sources. He states the battlefield terrain is "fairly clear" but the numbers for each side are difficult to determine (100,000 infantry vs 20,000). Then the author describes the various kinds of shields and weapons used according to the ancient sources, and goes on to describe the battle as the ancient sources set it out with comments about how this or that would impact game play. After all this, he describes how "...our model provides an ideal vehicle for exploring this contest..." And that is the end of the discussion.

In other words, he does not describe his experience in game play and how it affected his view of history.

I have game played various battles in various wars on computers and on board games and it has made me aware of what was going on more effectively than just reading about it. For example, I war gamed operation Olympic, the invasion of Japan. I took the Allied side and invaded where the Americans had planned to invade. After a month (game time, hours in real time) of heavy fighting and horrendous losses - including many ships - I retreated and felt lucky to get my troops off Japan without suffering total losses. It was extremely hard to stop the suicide attacks. I felt the game I played was well designed and it gave the Americans tremendous combat power; however, the result was realistic because I could not hold up under the incessant pounding I was receiving from the enemy. Thus, a lot was learned.

Here the author does none of the above. One is expected to use the book to set up a board game and play out the scenarios for yourself. That is fine, if that is what you wanted the book for; however, the book description does not make that clear and that is why it is earning only one star from me. I expected an analysis of the battles not a book on how to build a war game.

Very disappointing.

AD2

Below is a 1 star review. His/her? complaint is this book builds up theory and reason for simulation; lays out the battlefield and troops; provides the rules; and then does not analyze the results of such simulations in reflection of how well the system works. I agree that would have been nice, but the book is already big enough, and such information is somewhat available across the web primarily in a yahoo group dedicated to the book, though not quite as academic as the book.

The book is uniquely interesting. It delves into the academic decisions and applications used to derive a historical simulation ruleset/game. From reading elsewhere the game appears dry but is very intriguing / nail biting at times.

I personally have enjoyed the book thoroughly so far. I may even try out the game system contained therein (note there is also a pending board game coming out mid 2011, though not inexpensive).

I would value this book strictly for its historical analysis of the battles. 35 of them, deployment dispositions, battlefield maps, etc.

First, a caveat. This is more a reference/text book than a work of "popular history". Unless you're already very familiar with ancient battles, it's probably not the sort of book you'd read on the beach.

The first 90 pages explain the value of modeling battles boardgame style and the reasoning behind the rules Sabin uses, with a step by step application of the rules to the Battle of Cannae. This is the most fluid and interesting part of the book.

Most of the rest of the book consists of applying the rules to a number of different ancient battles. This section is valuable, but has more of a reference feel to it. The descriptions of the battles themselves can be sparse and I found it helpful to first have a quick read about each of them using Wikipedia or another source.

Then we have the conclusion. Through modeling the battles, Sabin decides that a good deal of the ancient descriptions and figures are plausible. Given the communications and weapons technology of the time, only a portion of the opposing forces in a battle could have faced each other at any given time. This meant that well-led, veteran troops could defeat much more numerous but inferior quality opponents.

Finally, a number of appendices cover the rules and how to use the model. There are also plenty of maps and diagrams throughout the book.

All in all, some fine insights and a valuable resource for ancient historians and wargamers.