Pharsalus 48 BC

Background

Pompey vastly outnumbered Caesar, especially in cavalry. He had 11 full strength Legions and 6700 cavalry whereas Caesar had 9 Legions and only 1000 cavalry. Many of Caesar's Legions were woefully understrength, especially the VIII and IX Legions which had suffered serious casualties earlier in the campaign.

To balance the game and make it manageable I decided to scale the Legions down to 5 on each side with Pompey's being full or over-strength and Caesar's being under-strength. Caesar had thinned his Legions out in order to keep the same frontage as Pompey so this seems a reasonable way of representing things. Scaling the Legions down by half still gives the visual impact of a lot of troops but does not mean you have to paint up thousands of figures. Having scaled the legions down by half I then decided to use a scale of 1 stand representing a cohort of roughly 400 men, or 200 men in the case of understrength units. Caesar stripped out his third line to provide 6 cohorts to support his cavalry. I chose to represent these with 3 stands.
Caesar's legions were all hard bitten veterans. Although Pompey had some experienced Legions, including 2000 evocati (re-enlisted veterans), his ranks were swelled by relatively untested non-Italian allies along with the survivors of Crassus' Syrian army.

Although Pompey was said to have 6700 cavalry but only 3600 are named in the sources these are:
  600 Gauls
  500 Cappadocians
  500 Thracians
  500 Gallic and German auxiliaries from Egypt
  800 'Shepherd Slaves'
  300 Gallatians
  200 Syrians
These were all deployed on Pompey's left flank. He may also have had some Pontic Cavalry on his right. The 'Shepherd Slaves' are sometimes interpreted as Patrician cavalry. Whatever they were I have interpreted them as raw troops given the overall poor performance of Pompey's cavalry.

In order to balance the game (and assuming that the victors may have exaggerated Pompey's numbers) I decided to represent only the named units using a scale of 1 stand representing 300 men.

Caesar had 1000 Gauls and Germans. The Germans may have had light infantry attached to them. To further bolster his cavalry, Caesar detached a number of his fittest Legionaries and re-equipped them as light infantry (antesignani) to work alongside the cavalry. I also chose to give Caesar a completely unattested unit of light cavalry on his left flank, simply to balance the game.