POLL: How Suitable is Warhammer Ancients for Tournament Play?

Therein lies the problem with historical tournaments. If you game "in-period" then the tournaments would be fine. But I highly doubt that any person with a Spartan army would like to deal with a Mongol army in a tournament. You could call the game "300" but the meaning would be the number of times the Mongol player rolled the dice to shoot down the poor Spartans who could never get close enough to cause any casualties before dying to a man. I agree with Polynikes – it is like Henry V versus the Luftwaffe – or even GrossDeutschland to make it a land force versus a land force so at least the English had something to do other than just die. They might actually inflict a casualty on the Germans that way.

If you were to call Warhammer Ancients just another point based system for fantasy games – and everyone understood that before the tournament – fine. Then you could say to the complaining losers who brought Samnites or Hittites to the tournament that it was a fantasy to think that they had a chance of winning it. Mis-matches in army lists can completely gut a game and turn it into a turkey shoot. No system can really prevent it and claim to be remotely historically accurate.

Any game system where point systems are used are also broken to some degree – it just takes a while to find the cheese by digging through the special rules and the army lists to build the best list for competitive play.