Periodicity

What makes a wargame period?

Conventionally, we see a certain set of wargame periods:
Ancient and medieval: 3000 BC – 1500 AD
Renaissance: 1500 – 1700 AD
Horse and Musket: 1700 – 1900 AD
Modern: 1900-2000 AD

As a broad sweep of history, I suppose that this is all right, but it is painting in broad brush strokes and on closer investigation starts to look a bit dubious.

Take, for example, the end of the medieval period. This is set as 1500 AD. Why? Did things change suddenly at the end of 1499? I think not. I suspect that the real reason is that original wargame rules went to 1485, which was regarded as the ‘end of the medieval era’, closing the War of the Roses with the Battle of Bosworth and ushering in the ‘modern’ Tudors.

Now, of course, we know so much better, and are no longer so hidebound by arbitrary western historiography. So the date has shifted from 1485 to 1500, which is, after all, a nice, round, number. Political correctness is satisfied because we have removed ourselves from a specifically Anglophone viewpoint, and everything is spiffy again.

Well, not quite. Those poor Italian War wargamers are going to be a bit confused, what with their actions falling on both sides of the boundary, but you can’t please everyone. The fact that muskets become alarmingly more effective in most rules after 1500 is just an artefact of perceptions and the unfortunate consequence of writing rule sets. We all know that there is continuity across the boundary, but we busily ignore it because, well, there isn’t much else we can do.

The eagle eyed among you will have noticed (should you have read it) that the Christmas day post put the Polemos: Polemous date range as 490 BC – 330 BC. Why, you might have asked, is this? Similarly, when (or if) the Imperial Rome rules see the light of day, it will be noticed that they cover first century BC to second century AD. In the light of what I’ve just said about the boundaries being arbitrary, hadn’t I better start justifying myself, and quickly?

To some extent, of course, I cannot do any justification. Any boundary in dates is going to have a degree of arbitrariness to it. Take 330 BC. Why choose this date? More or less, it is the end of the Persian Empire, and the triumph of Alexander the Chancer (I beg your pardon, I mean ‘great’). With that, perhaps the world did change, if only a little, and so it seemed a reasonable, if entirely arbitrary date. It might be argued that it is better than, say, 323 BC, which only marks the death of Alexander himself. While on the ‘great man’ theory of history this is the terminal date for the period, the collapse of Persia could be regarded as being a little more important.

The beginning off this time span is marked, of course, by Marathon. While, it is true, Herodotus does describe a few battles earlier than this, they are not presented in enough detail for even the most imaginative wargamer to be able to reproduce the action. Marathon is about as early as we can go with a decent description. You could argue that we can’t really reproduce Marathon, but we can at least have a go.

The upshot of this is, of course, to merely redefine the arbitrary boundaries to dates other than those of conventional wargames usage. While covering a much narrower time range, the terminal dates are no less sudden. You could argue, quite correctly, that Chaeronea in 338 BC marks a reasonable turning point when the Macedonians defeated the Greeks. The pike, it could be claimed, thenceforth dominated over the spear armed hoplite.

Alternatively, you could argue that the period should be extended to the end of the second century BC or 168 BC when the battle of Pynda marked the end of anything approximating to the Alexandrian Macedonian Empire. But even that is dubious, because the Ptolemys ruled in Egypt until Cleopatra. History is made of continuities, not of disjunctions.

Perhaps it is best to define rules actually as having a core period and a peripheral one. For example, many of the rules describing themselves as ‘renaissance’ in fact have quite well developed English Civil War rules, and maybe one other period, depending on what the author has been reading. For example, some rules do quite good French Wars of Religion, or Italian Wars, or even Williamite rules, without quite getting, say, Poles against Muscovites or Ottomans right. In this case, ECW or FWoR are ‘core’ periods to the rule set, while the Turkish Wars or Time of Troubles are peripheral. The rules might work OK, but they might not. Caveat imperator, eh?

So for the Polemos: Imperial Rome rules we can say that they should work OK for what most people think of as the wars of the Roman legions, while those who try to push them back to Pynda or forward to the Sassanid Empire do so at their own peril. And I suppose that the Polemos: Polemous rules will work the same way, with the core being the Greek – Persian rules and the Greek – Greek ones, with everyone else having to take pot luck.

So perhaps, instead of a paradigm troop type for a rule set, we should have a paradigm set of interactions, or possibly just a single interaction. For example, hoplite vs. Persian infantryman would be the paradigm. Everything else is assessed relative to this interaction. So, was a lightly armed man better or worse than a Persian infantryman? How did Persian cavalry rate against hoplites? And so on. As the net spreads wider, so the accuracy of our comparisons get poorer. Eventually, they must land up distorted, or we would be answering the question of how a Hittite spearman rates against an SA80 wielding SAS man, or at least a Roman legionary against a dismounted French knight from the Agincourt era. And we wouldn’t want to do that, now, would we?

Considering Cavalry

I’ve always thought that Persian cavalry were the elite of the Persian forces. Thus the puzzle of why they seemed to do little at Marathon, and various attempts over the years to explain this fact away. For example, some have argued that that had already re-embarked for the descent on Athens; others have suggested that maybe Herodotus was wrong and there were no cavalry with the Persian force, or only a token number for scouting. Again, Krentz has argued that they were still deploying when the Greeks hit the Persian infantry, so they played no part in the battle.

I’ve not finished reading Herodotus’ account of Plataea, but there the Persian cavalry don’t seem to have played a major role in the battle itself. In the build up to the action they were significant – disrupting the Greek supplies and seizing the well that lead to the Greek withdrawal, which then bought on the battle. But when the battle is described, the Persian cavalry are mostly absent.

This passage in an earlier bit of Herodotus is interesting in this respect:
So they [the Scythians] used to watch for whenever they [the Persians] were gathering supplies of food and carry out their scheme. The Scythian horsemen would always rout the enemy cavalry and the Persian horsemen would retreat until they met up with their infantry, who would come to their assistance. At this point the Scythians used to turn back, because they were afraid of the Persian infantry, despite the fact that they had hurled themselves at the Persian cavalry. (Herodotus 4.128, tr. Waterfield, Oxford World Classics).

Now, given the warnings I’ve already made about the dangers of the lone passage out of context, what can we learn from this paragraph?

Darius’ Scythian campaign was in around 515 BC, and proceeded as most armchair strategists would expect, with the nomads refusing to engage in battle and the conventional forces wandering around achieving little. In this context, Herodotus’ passage makes a lot of sense: it describes classic hit and run tactics. The Scythians hit a foraging party which is forced to retreat until it finds some supports.
So far, so good, but the next part of the paragraph is that the Scythians always routed the Persian cavalry. But the Persian cavalry were armed with bow, spear, shield, nice curvy sword so beloved of ‘The Arabian Knights’ and so on. In short, they seem to have been regular cavalry of the ancient period. So why could they not withstand the Scythians?

There are two alternatives that I can see. Firstly, the Herodotus is wrong here, and they could. The second is that the Persian cavalry was fairly useless tactically.
The Persian infantry was armed with bows, and we know that, in general, foot archery was better than horse archery. So it makes a good deal of sense for the Scythian horse archers to avoid the Persian foot. So Herodotus does not seem to be wrong here, in this aspect at least.

So, the evidence from this passage is that the Persian cavalry could not stand against Scythian light horse. Now I’ll grant that Darius is unlikely to have sent out his elite cavalry to gather food, and that the Scythians were probably the best light cavalry around at the time. But this passage does seem to suggest that the Persian cavalry was below average.

If this is the case, then the absence of Persian cavalry in the accounts of Marathon is fairly easily explained. They may well have been there, but had not noticeable effect on the outcome. Similarly, at Plataea, their mobility in a grand tactical sense caused the Greeks problems, but not in the toe-to-toe stick poking that decided the outcome.
I’ve noticed this before in the ancient world. The much vaunted Sarmatians were defeated by a legion in the first century, for example. It is somewhere in Tacitus, but I forget where, although he does claim that they were weighed down with loot and fighting dismounted on a frozen lake at the time. Nevertheless, for much of the ancient period, cavalry was not up to much. There may well be exceptions, like Alexander’s companions, but mostly, before, say, 300 AD, cavalry wasn’t that much use.

Cavalry, then, seems to have been to the ancient world what artillery was in the seventeenth century. Useful to have around, but you could get by without it. The Greeks certainly managed to do as at Marathon, after all.

So where does this leave us, rules wise? Well, Mr Berry has already noted that the Imperial Rome rules are not going to please cavalry addicts. So be it. Ancient cavalry were not in the business of charging steady infantry from the front. Then again, I’m not sure cavalry of any age were quite that suicidally stupid. Cavalry have their uses, but mainly this is to protect the flanks of their own infantry and threaten those of the enemy. Strategically and grand tactically their increased mobility has significant advantages, but in battle, the Persian and most other ancient cavalry seems to have been fairly weak.

Another Go At Rules

This week, a return to pondering rules. I’m going to try to fix the issue there was with ‘a second stab at rules’.

Let us again take as our paradigm soldier the Persian infantryman, and give him a 3 in our system.

The Greek hoplite up against him, when 8 ranks deep, should win, so lets give him a 4.

In the centre at Marathon, the Greeks were thin; say 4 ranks deep so pick up a –1.

The Persians get a +1 for being ‘the best’ and another +1 for their initial shield wall.

Thus, in the centre, the Greeks are at 4-1, the Persians at 3 +1 +1 making 3 vs 5. However, the Greeks did charge into contact, so should get at least +1 for doing so, making 4 vs. 5 and, all other things being equal, a slow loss for the Greek centre.

On the wings, the Greeks would be 4 +1 against 3, making 5 vs. 3 and a quicker win for the Greeks.

Two issues arise here. The first is why do the Greeks only get +1 for charging?

Well, the more I’ve read the more doubtful I’ve become that a full-blooded charge could be carried out by a phalanx. This starts to get complex. Some authors would argue that a phalanx was much looser in 490 BC than we assume, but I’m not going there as I don’t see how a bunch of shield and spear armed heavy infantry are going to make progress in a loose formation. The point of a phalanx was that it was rather coherent. This is why police lines tend to hold against demonstrators, after all. So phalanxes cannot just rush at the enemy willy-nilly.

On the other hand, there has to be some bonus for getting to grips. In the case of Marathon, the Greeks would eventually have got disrupted by the Persian archery, so it was worth their while, once in range, closing. So I’ve made a perhaps rash assumption that the +1 for the Persian shields cancels out the impetus from charging / advancing into contact.

Comparing with the first stab at rules, the centre in that came out as 4 vs 4 in the first round, followed by 2 vs 3 for a slow Persian win in the second and subsequent rounds.

This week, we have 4 vs 5 in the first round and 3 vs 4 in the second and subsequent, again making a slow Persian win.

In the wings it should be a slightly faster Greek win.

So does this make any difference?

Well, the Persians still come out a little ahead when they are counted as the paradigm, but not as much as I initially thought. They get a slight advantage on the first round of combat, getting a 5 rather than a 4. This would get cancelled out if I gave the Greeks a +2 for charging, of course, so the two systems would then be equal.

However, there is a ‘but’.

Here, I’ve assumed that the outcomes would be based on the difference of the factors, and that alone. This is the normal route with Polemos rules, at least the ones I’ve written.

If a DBA style combat outcome were used, then the outcomes could be significantly different. As I’m sure most of you know, the DBA style outcome is defined by the ratio of the scored – less than half and less but more than half.

The Polemos system uses a difference of scores – 0, 1, 2, and so on.

In the ratio (DBA style) system, the higher the initial factor, the less likely an opponent is going to double the score. If both sides have a +1, and one rolls a 1, then to double, the opponent only needs to roll 3 or more. If both sides have +4, and one rolls a 1, then the opponent has to roll a 6 to double the score. I’ve not done the numbers and statistics on this, but it appears to me to be slightly non-linear.

The difference (Polemos) system is linear. No matter what the factor, the difference is the same. So a Greek vs. Persian match up at 2 vs. 3 is the same as 3 vs. 4.

So perhaps, while there may be a little bias depending on the paradigm troop type, it is much more limited in the difference system than in the ratio system.

Or, maybe, I’ve got my numbers wrong (again).

Nasty Dilemmas

I’d like to try to consider two slightly different but parallel issues in wargame rule writing this week.

The first is this: my reading so far suggests that the early Greeks were not terribly good generals. Greek generalship seems to have consisted of marching up to near where the enemy are and making camp. Having done that, at a suitable point, you march your soldiers out of camp, line them up, and make an inspiring speech. You then place yourself in the front rank, shout something like “That way lads, at them” and, hopefully, everyone charges off in the right direction, destroying the enemy and winning victory, fame, glory and so on.

So what is the problem with this?

Consider this: you arrive for your wargame, set up your phalanx, set them going according to the rules and then, apparently, you have absolutely nothing else to do for the rest of the evening while your little lead heroes battle it out.

Beautifully historically accurate, but it could be a bit dull for the player.

I remember reading a long time ago in, I think, Arquebusier, about a wargame where a French 16th century army had faced an imperial one, Lansknechts and all. Of course, the Landsknechts had a skirmisher unit out of those blokes in slashed sleeves with huge great swords. These clashed with the French crossbow / handgun skirmisher unit, and routed it.

So far, so good.

A bad dice roll then ensured that the French support unit routed too. Oops, chuckle. But then the rot set in and unit after unit of the French army joined the rout. Eventually, the French player, seeing a third of his army running away, conceded the game.

How accurate! How interesting! But what a dull wargame. A minor unit had succeeded in putting a whole army to flight. ‘What a waste of an evening’, is another way of putting it.

Historical accuracy does not necessarily a decent wargame make.

The second issue is with troop types. In Aristotle’s Politics, (Book VI, para 7 1321a5 – 1321a27 for those of you into these sorts of things) four troop types are identified: cavalry, heavy infantry, light armed troops and the navy.

Discounting the navy, we have three troop types, attested by Aristotle. Yet a quick check of some popular rule sets suggests that the Greeks had far more variety than this. Where are the light horse, the Thracian peltasts, the bowmen?

According to what I’ve read so far, an early Greek army in Polemos terms would be 20 bases of hoplites, and that is it. As noted above, the general would simply point them in the right direction and let them go.

So now we arrive in the realm of trade-off and compromise that bedevils wargame rule writing. How do we keep something reasonably historically accurate while keeping the game interesting?

In this instance, do I allow Greek generals to do something other than simply fight in the front rank? If I do, and they start redeploying the phalanx to flank, then it would seem that we’ve lost historical accuracy to playability. Where do we draw the line?

On the other hand, we could quite easily argue that although Greek generals did not engage in fancy manoeuvres, they might have been able to but just did not need to, so I’m justified in allowing them to do so. This is an argument from silence, of course, and these are always dangerous (just because there is no record of alien space bats intervening, there is no reason to suppose they didn’t).

Similarly, we have a problem with the mixture of troop types. 20 bases of hoplites are a bit dull, after all. We could just about add some skirmishers (light armed troops), although they are specifically excluded by Herodotus at Marathon – the Athenians were unsupported by either cavalry or archers. If we regard Marathon as a special case, then we are again arguing from silence and the alien space bats are lurking.

So is the choice really between dull but historically worthy games and inaccurate but fun ones? Sometimes, looking at the wargaming world, it does seem to be the case. On the one hand we have tournament and fantasy games where anyone fights anyone according to a rule set which has to be fairly arbitrary to cope, while on the other hand we have painstaking models and simulations which seem to drain all the fun away.

Is that it? Are we, as wargamers simply impaled on the horns of this nasty dilemma?

A Second Stab at Rules

What happens if we change the basis on which we generate the rules? Following on from last week, where we took the hoplite to be the typical soldier against whom all others are measured, what happens if we change that?

Suppose we take the really typical soldier of the era, the Persian infantryman. A bloke with a bow, spear, maybe a wicker shield, and some sort of sword or long dagger. Again, we shall use Marathon as our yardstick.

Now, in our D6 based rule set, this chap would rate a 3. Opposing him, in the centre at Marathon, are 4 deep hoplites. Our Persian is elite, so gets a +1, and has an initial shield from the front rank, so gets another +1 on the first round of combat (assuming he doesn’t move into contact). So the Persian gets 3 + 1 + 1 = 5 on the first round.

The Greeks lost, so we’ll give them a 2, and then +2 for charging onto contact, giving them a 4 on the first round, and 2 on the second while the Persians get 4. The Greek centre should, on average, lose.

On the wings, the Persians rate 3, while the Greeks are 8 ranks deep, and so get a (say) +1 for that, and +2 for charging into contact. So in total they get 2+1+2 = 5. The Greeks should win on the flanks.

So, comparing this with last week’s numbers, in the centre we get from last week:

Greeks 3 –1 (for being thin) + 2 (for charging) = 4
Persians 2 + 1 (for being the best) + 1 for shields = 4

in the first round, and then

Greeks 3-1 = 2
Persians 2+1 = 3

in the second.

This week, we have

Greeks 2 +2 = 4
Persians 3 + 1 + 1 = 5

in the first round, and

Greeks 2
Persians 3 + 1 = 4

on the second.

What difference does this make?

Well, on the face of it, not much, but I’d be willing to lay a little money (if I were a betting person) that a statistical analysis of these numbers would suggest that the Persians have a bit of an easier time of it if they are the ‘average’ infantryman. That is, if the Persians are normative, they have a slight advantage, while if the Greeks are, they do.

On the wings the story is similar: The Greeks are 3 + 2 = 5 from last week, while the Persians are at 2. This week the Greeks are at 2 + 1 + 2 = 5, while the Persians are at 3. In other words, again, the Persians do slightly better (on average) if we take them to be normative.

In both schemes, the battle should be reproduced, more or less, on average. But the ease of victory, all other things being equal, the side which has been taken to be the norm does slightly better.

There doesn’t seem much to be done about this. As far as I can see, this is an inherent bias in the way the rules are set up. And I suspect that it isn’t just these rules, but pretty well any rule set. The designer, it seems to me, has to take some troop type as the basis type – English billman, Saxon huscarl, Union rifleman, whatever. But doing that, by matching others against this type seems to generate an implicit bias.

It is entirely possible that I’m wrong, here. Please do point it out to me if I am, but at the moment I can’t see it. Of course, there are many other factors apart from the raw numbers which come into play – the tactical situation, numbers of bases in contact, supports and so on, but it does seem to me that if the basis in inherently biased, the overall rules are going to be, however slightly and however much other factors might cover it up.

A First Stab at Some Rules

Lets try to do some serious thinking about rules and mechanics for the Greeks and Persians.

We’ve not got much to go on, but lets try with Marathon. I’ve just got Peter Krentz’ new book on the battle; I’ve not read it, but having it is nearly as good, isn’t it?

We know a few things about the action.

Firstly, the Athenians and Plateans were hoplites – spear, shield, body armour and greaves. Secondly, the Persians were infantry – bow, short spear, sword, quilted armour. We’ll leave aside the mystery of the Persian horse for the moment (at least until I’ve read the book).

We also know that the Greeks had a thin centre and normal depth wings (Herodotus Histories 6:111). The best Persian troops were in the centre. The Greeks broke the Persian wings and the Persians the Greek centre. The Greek wings then turned in and broke the Persian centre. The fighting was lengthy – this was no walk over.

So, how do we develop some rule mechanics for this?

Let’s start with the Greeks. Let a normal (8 rank) hoplite base have a baseline fighting value of 3, assuming we are using a D6 based rule set. This is actually quite an important decision, because it means that everything else is going to be based on the perceived fighting value of hoplites.

Now, it is clear that, in hand-to-hand combat, the hoplites had the upper hand against the Persian infantry (bow, spear, kitchen sink etc – what Phil Sabin calls in Lost Battles “the elusive heavy infantry archer”). So let us give the Persian infantry a basic 2. After all, Marathon is said to be lengthy.

Now what?

Well, the Greeks in the centre were thin, so lets give that a –1, and the Persians in the centre were said to be the best, so lets give the best a +1. So that makes the centre clash a 2 (Greeks) against a 3 (Persians). The wings will be 3 (Greeks) against 2 (Persians). It is also possible that the wing Persians were worse than average, so they could be an additional –1. But this sort of balance looks about right. On average, the Greeks should win on the wings and lose in the centre.

There is also the issue of the Persian shields. Now, the rumour has it that the Persians fought in depth with arrows, with the front bloke with spear and big shield thing, possibly stuck in the ground in front of him. What do we do about this option?

Rather than invent a new troop type, I think a +1 to the Persians with this, in the first round of close combat only, would cover it. Again, I’d guess that the best Persians would have this, so the centre battle becomes 2 against 3 + 1 on the first round.

Now, the other thing is about the shooting. The Persians were archers, and we know that the Greeks advanced rapidly to cross the ‘beaten zone’. There are significant arguments in the literature as to whether this was possible or not. Additionally, I presume that this means that the hoplites hit the Persian lines at a run, as the result of a ‘charge’ in all but name. Persian archery seems, in this instance, to have been fairly ineffective, possibly because the Greeks were armoured with metal.

So, the archery should have maybe a baseline 1. I suspect that as an English person, I have in mind the Hundred Year War archer with his machine gun. Persian bows were a long way from that (unless anyone has any evidence to the contrary?), so lets make them fairly feeble. The Greeks defensive armour would give them say a 3 or 4 against archery, and we can fix the combat results table so that they do not get ‘halt’ outcomes unless it gets really bad. Furthermore, the defensive factor against shooting would not depend significantly on the depth of the formation.

Hitting the Persians at a run should give a positive factor; say +2 in the first round of combat. So now, in the centre, we have the Greeks at 2 + 2, possibly –1 for being shaken, giving 3, while the Persians are at 2 +1 for being ‘the best’ + 1 for the initial shield wall, giving 4. In the second round, the Greeks will be at 2 while the Persians are 2+1. The Persian centre should be able to stand against the Greeks and ultimately, beat them.

On the wings, the Greeks are 3 + 2 for charging, maybe –1 for being shaken, while the Persians are at 2, assuming they have no front shields and are ‘average’ as opposed to ‘poor’. At 2 vs 4 or 5, the Persian wings should crumble quite nicely to the Greeks.

The only other questions are about command and control. The Greek wings were controlled and turned in by their commanders. I wonder how they managed that, and how we are going to make a stab at reproducing it. But that is, I think, for another week.

What do we Want from Rules?

What do we want from a set of wargame rules?

This is a slightly more complicated question than appears at first sight. Initially, it is obvious that we require rules that enable us to push toy soldiers around a table and obtain certain outcomes which are satisfying in a variety of ways. These ways could be intellectually, narratively or historically predicated.

By this I mean that the outcome of a wargame has to be intellectually coherent, that is, victory does not arrive via illogical outcomes or Alien Space Bats intervening. The game has to be coherent as a ‘story’ (I use the term loosely); there has to be some thread connecting the events. And the outcome has to be believable historically; if the French routinely stomp the English at Agincourt then most of us would probably conclude that there was something wrong with the rules.

Wargame rules can be regarded as the interface between a fictive world – that of the game – and the real world, that in which the players move, roll dice and eat crisps. A player states that he will make a move in the real world – ‘I will move the Imperial Guard to Hougoumont’. This speech-act triggers activity in the rules layer – how are orders transmitted, how far can the Guard move in a turn, and so on. Then, in the fictive game world, the Imperial Guard moves forward. The rules turn real world speech-acts into fictive world activity.

In this model, the rules are the transparent interface between the players and the game ‘world’. They provide the means by which the real world decisions of the players are interpreted in the game world. Of course, the interface acts the other way, as well, in that the rules transmit the outcomes of interactions in the game world to the players. If two bases collide in the game world, then the activity of the players is moderated by the situation on the table. The game proceeds by a complex of real world speech-acts, rules level interpretation and game world ‘activity’.

So, on this view, we want rules to provide the real – game world interface as simply and cleanly as possible.

Unfortunately, this desire for simplicity contradicts the desire for historical accuracy. Somebody once said that command and control structures in real life armies were to enable commanders to do things, while in wargame rules they were to prevent players from doing too much. There is a degree of truth in this as the rules strive to force or persuade the players to act (in the fictive world, of course) in a manner that can reasonably be interpreted as ‘historical’.

This of course, is where complexity kicks in. If I’ve learnt nothing else from re-enactors, I’ve learnt that controlling large bodies of men on battlefields is not a simple thing. A few people can interact and copy each other fairly straightforwardly. Even a corps de ballet can by lots of training and a bit of practice, do things in unison. But 500 men on a noisy, frightening, dangerous battlefield is a different thing. The problem then is, of course, that our intuition says one thing about the actions and reactions of the unit, while the reality of a large body of men is different. And then, if you put that into a wargame rule set, it is easy to get accused of historical inaccuracy.

So, I submit that writing wargame rules is not a simple or obvious activity, but one which attempts to convert one set of complex human experience – a battle – into another – a wargame. Having tried to write a few sets myself, I think that we can be forgiven for getting it wrong more often than we get it right.

And then, of course, there is that fact that a few hundred or so equally intelligent and well read individuals around the world will go through the rules with a fine tooth comb and either complain about inaccuracy or find a way of weighting armies to squeeze maximum advantage out of the rules, in ways not envisaged by the writers.

This is, I think, what ultimately kills normal ancients rule sets. Someone finds that Inca, or Vietnamese or something similar, exploit the rules sufficiently to be almost unbeatable on the wargmes table. I seem to recall that Inca in one of the DBM incarnations was unbeatable simply because no one could kill the bases quickly enough to win, while their own side was worn down by sheer numbers and the odd lucky dice roll.

That is not, I think, wargaming, but rules exploitation, and it cannot be laid at the feet of the rule writer. But, usually, the writer does get the blame.