Yesterday was quite fun - we went up to Carlisle to celebrate my father's 83rd birthday. He was having one of his more lucid days, and seemed to enjoy himself. We went for lunch out, in a nice little cafe in Brampton - it's a regular haunt for my parents, and so they're known there - meaning that the staff cope well with my father and his dementia. Brampton is a friendly little place. And then we went for a walk, which he also seemed to enjoy.
In the early evening, after we left my parents' place, we headed towards the western end of Hadrian's Wall - not least because of the 'Wall of Light' event, but also because my daughter has never seen where the wall ran (there's next to nothing extant on the ground) when it got towards its far Western extremity, and because the Solway Firth is a beautiful, magical, sort of place around sunset and into the evening. Despite being pretty busy, it was a memorable event, and the views on the Solway lived up to their billing.
Anyway, that was yesterday - today: megalomania and cost/benefit analyses... This afternoon, in between watching snatches of the rugby we (Tim and I) missed yesterday, we've been doing some planning for the Rome versus Epirus project (which needs a catchy name!). We started by thinking about a 'standard' consular army - two legions, plus two allied alae - or 16,800 and 2,400 cavalry (legions only had 300 cavalry, but alae had 900), and the force Pyrrhus brought to Italy - 20,000 phalangites, 2,000 archers, 500 slingers, 3,000 cavalry and 20 jumbos. That's a lot of troops!
We started out by considering doing the thing at 1:60, or thereabouts. Hmm. Need a fairly big table and an even bigger mortgage. Despite having made a fair wodge of money lately by selling some stuff, it did seem a bit excessive... And, even by my standards, painting a phalanx of 330 figures seems a bit daunting - but it would certainly look impressive! 1:100 seems more sensible. But is it mad enough for a megalomaniac like me? It's certainly more affordable.
At those sort of scales, I don't think one could use 'scale' maniples for the Romans - two figure units look silly. Plus moving all those tiny units around individually would take forever - an army of two legions and two alae would have 120 units... So I though that, if we just used single units of Hastati, Principes, Triarii, etc for each legion or ala, we'd end up with a mere 12 units of heavy infantry in the army. That would be enough for a fair-looking 'chequer-board' formation and to 'play around' with manipular tactics, and would probably look good, whilst being quick to play with.