Reply To: the Phalangites of Ur

[Steve Burt]

There’s lots of cultural bias in wargame rules.

The ‘Celtic Warband’ is one example; many of the Roman/Celt battles featured the Celts holding out for hours in dense formations, not wildly charging.

The ‘impetuous knight’ is another; while knights could sometimes charge off without orders (Nicopolis I guess is the canonical example), mostly they didn’t.

But as others have pointed out, many rules treat a Sumerian phalanx just like any other phalanx, so I’m not quite sure what the basis of the original complaint is.