The nice mailman brought my copy of Hail Ceasar and also a copy of Crusader's aptly named rules.

Still reading through all these rules but at least initially they all seem quite workable. I also ordered Clash of Empires but that hasn't arrived yet. Now I see ads for War & Conquest and I'm already starting to get very confused... argh!

As for the three rulesets already under serious evaluation (WAB, Hail Caesar and Crusader), I'm mostly trying to to figure out how my figure collection fits the rules. This provides an interesting comparison because these rules all have distinctly different approach to army composition.

The trusty WAB is an old school figure-based rule system, i.e. each figure is counted individually. This naturally imposes the most strict requirements for figure counts (unless you resort to proxies, imaginary figures or some such).

Hail Caeser is unit-based. Even though the rules make a big number of figure counts and rank requirements, the game is actually played with units. It doesn't really matter what's on the base as long as the frontage is correct. Base depth does have some impact, but isn't really all that important. In reductio ad absurdum you could just stick one figure on a correctly sized base and the game would play just fine. It would look really cheap and stupid, but it would play just fine.

Crusader is somewhere in between with its stand-based approach. Thankfully we are not talking about DBM-stands here! Units are composed of four to twelve (commonly six) square stands. Stands are intended to mount multiple figures, but the exact amount has no real rules impact.

Getting back to realities, I have a roughly 6' by 4' table. Because part of the table is semi-permanently taken up by a pile of hills that apart from having no name also have nowhere else to go, it would be really good if games fit on a 4' by 4' section of the table.

Now, my better ancients armies are both roughly 150 figures strong all based on 25mm washers. You'll have to excuse me since I don't normally use archaic measurement units all that much, but the last time I checked 25mm pretty much amounted to one inch, and there were twelve inches to a foot. Thus six feet amounts to 72 inches.

So in my tiny, unfit for most games, armies I have enough figures to deploy a double line , shoulder to shoulder all the way from one edge to the other. This is not enough?

I understand that you need to have several distinct units to have some meaningful tactical options, but at the end of the day it still needs to fit on the table. To decrease the real estate requirements of a figure-based game, you basically have to either use smaller bases (and rebasing is definitely off the list) or compose units of smaller figure counts which may play havoc with the rule mechanics.

Stand and unit -based games are more flexible with regard to reduced footprint amendments. We'll have to see how this goes.

And maybe I should order War & Conquest just in case....