Not broken??
The Greek list was broken.. it has been fixed over and over but never to
a complete satisfactory fix until WB2.
Oracles were slightly broken--- the many years of no errata was
confounding and frustrating. Basic game tenets were exacerbated by the
lack of coherency in the special rules. This compounded other WAB issues
in old lists.
For instance- it took years for them to release errata that figured out
that a heavy armored hoplite commander f'ed up the whole army-- and then
they realized that a 25 point addition was needed for a Spartan general
who is simply Stubborn and Drilled, in order that he did not F up his
army.... why 25 points?? That was crazy.
They never bothered to ever issue any direction of what happens when a
general breaks from a Sacred Band (He has to check but the unit
doesn't--- it's a weird special case that has ramifications-- or it
would be better to fix the rules- which they never did.)
They never allowed a General to ride a horse... which precluded the
ability to make some Greek variants. The Composition values made it
almost entirely impossible to field Thessalian/Thracian or Theban
cavalry.
They never fixed it so oracles could not affect skirmishers... thus
making Greek skirmishers the best anti-elephant troops in the world--
even if they feared them, they could drive them off with a +2 oracle..
not to mention the fact that any player at any time could use an oracle
to have his lowly psiloi destroy expensive enemy skirmisher units since
they were not allowed standards.. this was a ridiculous "double
standard".
There is no credible reason why this should have been allowed. It lead
to savvy players using peltasts as their supreme troops. Why have
cavalry when peltasts are three times cheaper and twice as effective?
Large units of peltasts would infiltrate the enemy line, reform and then
hit the enemy flank, add in a +2 and wham-O how come peltasts aren't
more famous than hoplites? Oh yes, the hoplites, just place them in a
solid line on your 5 foot wide tournament table sandwiched by your two 1
foot wide each obstacles that you were able to pre-set on either side,
and place your line of slingers and Cretans firing "overwatch"... then
if the enemy penetrates tot eh sacred band or the Spartans, you can
hammer them with the peltasts....
Or worse watch the 20 figure peltast unit in column blast through
cavalry with oracles.... and if they lose, they simply FBIGO...
Not all these problems were problems exclusive to Oracles, but the lax
rules about oracles gave players ways to create ahistorical tactics.
WAB2 has at least removed these other issues so I reckon that oracles
will now work better for both the Greeks and RoM lists because they can
no longer rely on a steady diet of loopholes and crazy antics to gain
advantages. WAB2 finally makes it more reasonable to have cavalry, and
units can no longer charge while in 3 wide columns, that helps remove
some of the most effective loophole tactics from the Greek army.
I actually do believe that the WAB2 rules will make the oracles work a
lot better, and the best thing is the removal of oracles affecting
skirmishers.
You all might have noticed that I never used a Greek army at Historicon
or any tournament-- precisely because these loopholes were not 'fun ' to
hoist on unsuspecting other players. I felt bad for the players in
England who had a very savvy Greek player winning all their cons, by
squeezing every trick out of them allowed by the holes in the rules.
JJ
I 100% agree with Mike here. The AoA Greek list is really capable of
bunches of different (historically supported) styles, and the list still
works well with WAB2. The only problem I see with it is distributing the
list to new players, since it's only printed in two discontinued books.
Ray
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