Fumbling my way around the world of Ancients

For quite some time now I have been contemplating building and painting an Ancients army but have always stopped short of actually doing anything.  That was until I decided to back a Kickstarter campaign by Forged in Battle for some of their beautiful 15mm figures.

It was actually the Dark-Ages kickstarter that I backed in the end, due to my procrastination, but I used my credits to buy figures from their Ancients range.

After some time a rather heavy box landed on the doorstep and without hesitation I eagerly opened it, and then left it tucked away under a table to gather dust.

Fast forward to now and I once again feel the itch to do something with Ancients.

So what did I get in this box of delights?

With so many options to choose from, and this being my first venture into Ancients I decided to go for something that I hoped would be relatively easy to research.  Who better to choose then Alexander the Great.

But what to choose for him to fight against?

I looked through the images of the Forged in Battle website and decided it really came down to either Persians or Classical Indian.

In the end it was the ability to have both chariots and elephants in large numbers that swayed me towards the forces of India.

Having no prior experience in this field it just felt that the forces of India with all its archers, chariots and elephants would be the complete opposite of the massed Macedonian Phalanx and Companion Cavalry.

So many options.

Looking at my shelves of books that I had collected when I first thought of dipping my toe into this I pulled out a few likely candidates.

My first thought was Warhammer Ancients.  I know they were popular some time ago and I am reasonably familiar with the basics of Warhammer Fantasy, or at least I was.  Sure the rules are really designed for larger figures but I could get around this by multi-basing them.  Maybe 4 models to a square base?

I know I want the armies to look suitably large on the table and multiple models on each base could help with that, especially with casualty removal.  Basically each base of figures would be the equivalent of a single figure in 28mm scale.

My second thought was Hail Caesar.   I love that there is no individual model removal, as that can be a bit of a pain sometimes and would allow larger armies to be used and still have the games played in a reasonable timeframe.

I also have Clash of Empires which at first glance looks similar to Warhammer Ancients but I have not really read into that rules set much.

I’d be interested to hear other peoples thoughts and ideas.  Any suggestions at the moment would be very much appreciated.