Enyalios!

DBx Bases: 28/177 + 7/18
15mm Spears: 75/451
DBA Corps: 1/16
Saga Points: 4

I read somewhere once that “In war, amateurs think of tactics. Professionals think of logistics.” And, when you come down to it, they’re not wrong. Without food, water, fuel, medical supplies, ammunition, etc, an army, no matter how ancient it is, grinds to a halt. Or at the very least, is severely weakened in the field.

But, generally speaking, we wargamers don’t really consider the logistics of our armies – its somewhat off board, and we only work out who shoots what, and not how they got a hold of that ammo. Its only in games of a larger scale – the larger grand strategy games that really take it into account. Heck, the only GW game I’ve seen consider logistics is Battle for Armageddon from 1992.

The DBx games also don’t really take detailed logistics into account either, but they do take the effect of they army’s base, the Camp, in account on how it affects their morale. In DBA, losing your camp is the equivalent of losing an army element. In DBMM, the camp provides a bonus to army morale. And it makes a bit of sense to see it this way – at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, one of the reasons Alexander had to break off his pursuit of Darius was to go back and plug a hole on the Macedonian left that was allowing raiders to loot his camp. If his camp had been completely sacked, the Macedonian Army would have probably disintegrated.

As a result, camps are represented on the board in DBx games. In DBA, they’re a single base, but in DBMM, you can buy multiple elements, all of which contribute to the morale of an army. Now, for DBA, I’ve seen people use a single unadorned base as their camp, but I’m always of a mind to do somthing a little extra. And then I found Baueda, or, more specifically, their camps. These looked perfect to me (especially the Egyptian one!), and it seemed like an excellent way to do camps for my DBA forces. Well, for my other forces – as mentioned earlier, my Athenian camp would consist of a couple of beached Triremes (from Xyston) – mounted on a 40mm x 120mm base to keep consistency with other camps I was planning on doing.

But one camp? No, that would be too easy. I also used the opportunity to do some DBMM tents (from Baueda) for the Greeks. Initially, I was going to do six tents, but I eventually figured to include a camp kitchen (also from Baueda) to act as a bit of a centrepiece. If you can make it look more interesting, why not spend a bit of extra time? I also used 2mm PVC bases for this, since I had a few spares sitting around.

I then also took the opportunity to rebase some previous camps I had completed for my 15mm Sea Peoples (tents are from Essex here), thus freeing up some magnetic bases.*

You may notice that the tents aren’t alone there – that’s deliberate on my part. Initially, I did have the tents sitting alone on their elements, but they ended up looking boring. Plus any camp is going to have some detritus scattered around the place, so a bit of baggage here and there seemed like a good idea – make the camp look used. Plus, it allowed the individual elements to look a bit different.

Finally, I put a full camp together – its technically a Hellenic camp, but I’m going to use it for my Nubians and Ancient Libyans instead.

But on the better side of things, what does this mean? Yes! My first corps is complete!

10 elements of Spears, 2 elements of Psiloi, one camp and one element of camp followers. One month after starting, and I’m ready to start playing games of DBA again!

Or at least once my club starts meeting again…(Damn you COVID!)

So, phew – that’s a good start. Now I have to get working on a few upgrades for the next corps.

*Note – I use magnetic bases from Shogun Miniatures to mount my DBx stuff. Unfortunately, because Shogun uses USPS for delivery, and USPS doesn’t currently do services to New Zealand, I can’t restock my supply. I have enough bases to get through this project, but having some spares that I can either use or cut into the needed size is useful.

For the PVC bases, I glue magnetic tape to the bottom, which allows me to still use magnetic storage for them.