Finally,
ArmyCalc works sufficiently stable so we decided to open new users registration.
Feel free to invite Your friends to play with AC...

Frequently Asked Questions

The Forge is an electronic wargaming management tool that assists in the creation of army lists for your favorite wargame(s). The point is to make this process quick and easy. I originally created The Forge so that my friends and I could create army lists without having to lookup points, etc. when we wanted to go play a game. It is important to note thought, that The Forge will not replace your gaming material, but insteads adds to it. Therefor you should have a good understanding of the rules before you start assembling an army.
The Forge relies on a data file to supply specific information on any particular wargame. These lists have been made by fellow Forge users and can be found on the internet. You can also use the tools, within The Forge, to create your own data files or edit existing ones. I would like to package tons of data files with the installation program, but <insert your favorite gaming company> would probably kill me :)

The Forge is free and I hope to keep it that way! All that said, I hope you enjoy the program.

British agents foiled a desperate German plot to monitor troop movements just days before D-Day, according to newly-released MI5 files on the Nazis.
During the Second World War, Iceland became tactically important for both sides and Germany sent a series of spies to gather weather information about the area to send back to the Luftwaffe.
But by May 1944 they had become convinced that any naval assault on their forces would be launched from Iceland, MI5 files released on Tuesday by the National Archives in Kew show.
The Germans put together a hurried plan to send three spies to the country to monitor troop movements in a bid to foil Allied attempts to liberate France.
Three Allied forces agents, named Miller, Hoan and Frick, were having dinner in their hotel in Seydisfjordur, Iceland, on the evening of May 5, 1944, when they got wind of the scheme.
A seal hunter had spotted three strangers behaving suspiciously near Borgarfjordur.
The agents tried to alert an Allied ship anchored off the coast in that area but were told it could take hours before it got up enough steam to sail, by which time the men could be deep into the Icelandic wilderness.
So they persuaded the seal hunter to be their guide, borrowed a boat and in the early hours of the morning landed near where the men had been seen.
They hiked across the snow, through the night, following the faint trail left by the spies until finally, at 6am the following day, they spotted them.
Their report notes: ''We cocked our pistols and quickened our pace.''
They surrounded the men, who very quickly confessed to being German soldiers, but claimed they had been sent only to gather meteorological information.
Ernst Fresenius, an avowed Nazi loyalist, was in fact the only German. The other two men, Hjalti Bjornsson and Sigurdur Juliusson, were Icelanders who had been hired as mercenaries by the Nazi military.
They were frogmarched to a farmhouse two miles away where Miller and Frick kept them prisoner while Hoan went back to find the radio transmitter the men had hidden.
A search revealed that the men had £9,000 of sterling, dollars and German marks on them.
It took six interrogation sessions back in UK to establish that the arrested men were in fact trained spies looking for information on troop and naval movements and ships in fjords.
They had attended a special school in Oslo where they learned secret writing, code and sabotage.
The two Icelanders were happy to talk freely about who ran the school, what they learned and even draw diagrams of each room, hoping that they would be set free to return home.
But the German Fresenius was a harder nut to crack and withheld his secret radio call sign from interrogators right until the very end in a bid to stop them sending double-crossing information back to his German masters.
Despite his efforts, British agents did manage to send a message to German control purporting to be from Fresenius and discovered a second radio transmitter he had hidden in the Icelandic hills.
The file notes that it was a badly planned expedition and so rushed that the three enemy spies had barely been given a cover story. They were told to admit to being German spies looking for meteorological information but to keep back the true aim of the trip in a bid to conceal German concern about a naval attack.
Even an examination of their wireless transmitter by British experts found that it had been hurriedly put together without proper parts and valves - which was taken as a sign of increasing equipment shortages in the German forces.
Any hopes that Fresenius, Bjornsson and Juliusson had of returning home or of a dramatic rescue by their spymasters proved hollow.
All three were handed over to the American forces and their file ends with a report from the interrogation camp. It concludes: ''There is a vague suggestion that the Germans would be sufficiently interested in Fresenius to arrange for his return from Iceland in a U-boat. My own view is that the Germans will abandon these unsuccessful spies and that any attempts to arrange for a submarine will be doomed to failure.
''In my report of 22.5.44 I said the decision may well be that this man should be court martialled and shot. Today I see no reason to depart from that view.''

Poland: At the Westerplatte peninsula, the site of Nazi Germany's opening assault on Poland, Polish political and religious leaders recalled the sacrifices their countrymen made in the struggle against the overwhelming forces of Hitler's Germany. Photo: AFP

Polish leaders have marked the 70th anniversary of the Second World War in a dawn ceremony on the Baltic peninsula where the conflict began.

Later in the day, European and American officials are due to meet in Gdansk for other ceremonies to pay tribute to the tens of millions who lost their lives in the conflict.
At the Westerplatte peninsula, the site of Nazi Germany's opening assault on Poland, Polish political and religious leaders recalled the sacrifices their countrymen made in the struggle against the overwhelming forces of Hitler's Germany.
"Westerplatte is a symbol, a symbol of the heroic fight of the weaker against the stronger," President Lech Kaczynski said. "It is proof of patriotism and an unbreakable spirit. Glory to the heroes of those days, glory to the heroes of Westerplatte, glory to all of the soldiers who fought in World War II against German Nazism, and against Bolshevik totalitarianism."
Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, echoed that praise, but also warned of the dangers of forgetting the war's lessons.
"We meet here to remember who started the war, who was the culprit was, who the executioner in the war was, and who was the victim of this aggression," Mr Tusk said.
"We meet here to remember this, because we Poles know that without this memory, honest memory about the truth, about the sources of World War II, Poland, Europe and the world will not be safe.
"We remember because we know well that he who forgets, or he who falsifies history, and has power or will assume power, will bring unhappiness again, like 70 years ago."
With red and white Polish flags fluttering in the breeze, those gathered then placed wreathes at the foot of the monument to the defenders of Westerplatte as an honor guard looked on.
The ceremony began at 4:45 a.m.local time, the exact hour on Sept. 1, 1939 that the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled a tiny Polish military outpost on Westerplatte, where the Polish navy's arsenal was housed, in the war's opening salvo.
Within less than a month Poland was overwhelmed by the Nazi blitzkrieg from the west, and an attack from the east by forces from the Soviet Union, which had signed a pact with Hitler's Germany.
It was the beginning of more than five years of war that would engulf the world and see more than 50 million people slaughtered as the German war machine rolled over Europe.

From the mid ninth century, these hardy nomad warriors were valued troops of Muslim rulers throughout the Middle East. Many of them were purchased as slaves from the Central Asia or the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus. But these were no ordinary slaves, powerless chattels to be ordered around. From an early date, these slave soldiers, often known as mamelukes (which simply means slave or owned man) began to acquire power and influence. In the Ghaznevid kingdom which flourished in the area now known as Afghanistan at the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, we hear of a regular system of education and promotion of these nomad recruits. According to the great Seljuk vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, writing in the 1080s, the system worked like this:

After a young man [the word used is ghulam, another word for slave soldier] was bought he was obliged to serve for one year on foot at a rider's stirrup ... and during this year he was not allowed to ride a horse in private or in public. If he did so and was found out, he was punished. After a year the tent-leader spoke to the chamberlain on his behalf and he was given a small Turkish horse with a saddle in untanned leather and a plain bridge and stirrup leathers. After serving for two years with a horse and whip, in his third year he was given a belt to gird on his waist [perhaps with the implication that he now carried a sword]. In the fourth year he was given a quiver and a bow-case [and presumably a bow] which he put on when he mounted. In his fifth year he got a better saddle and bridle with stars on it, together with a handsome cloak and a mace which he hung on the mace ring ... In the eighth year they gave him a single-apex, sixteen-peg tent and put three newly purchased young soldiers in his troop. They gave him the title of tent-leader and dressed hin1 in a black felt hat decorated with silver wire and a cloak made at Ganja [a town in the Caucasus].

Eventually, the writer goes on, he might be an Amir and governor of a province.

The account is certainly idealized and it was most unlikely to have been as systematic as Nizam al-Mulk claimed: he was after all, presenting a model to his master, the Seljuk sultan Malik Shah (1072-92), rather than writing objective history. It does show, however, how a young man from a Turkish nomad background could be brought up and groomed to be both a military leader and an urbane court functionary. All such boys, it is implied, started from the same point. As chattel slaves, they had no tribal or family connections and promotion was based on merit and talent. It was indeed a real meritocracy in which advancement depended on ability and hard work.

There was another side to the employment of these Turkish boys. With their round moon faces and black hair and eyebrows, many sultans and amirs found them sexually desirable. The cruel beauty of the slave boy, whose eyebrows were like bows and whose eyes flashed like arrows, was a key image in the emergent Persian love poetry of the era. In this complicated world, such a Turkish boy might at one and the same time be his owner's slave, his soldier, his bedfellow and, in the game of love, his cruel master.

All these Turks entered the Muslim world as individual slaves. From around 1040 however, a new pattern began to emerge. At about this time Ghuzz Turks of the area to the east of the Aral Sea (modern Kazakhstan), led by the Seljuk family began to migrate westward en masse, women, children, flocks and all, in search of grazing. They were impoverished and desperate and asked only for space. The then Ghaznevid sultan dismissed their entreaties with contempt and they were virtually forced to confront his army. At Dandanqan, near Merv in Turkmenistan in 1040, this ragged band of nomads defeated the largest and most effective army in the Middle East. Now the defences were down, they swept on through Iran, taking Baghdad in 1055.

The year 1040 marks the point at which the settled governments of the Middle East lost control to the Turkish nomads on their borders. From this point until the consolidation of the Safavid Empire in the sixteenth century, nomad warriors dominated the political life of the eastern Islamic world. It was, in a real sense, the heyday of the nomad warrior.

The strengths of nomad armies were demonstrated once again at the battle of Manzikert on 24 August, 1071 when the Seljuk nomads under the command of the sultan Alp Arslan (1063-72) - 'Hero Lion', a wonderfully evocative name defeated the Byzantine army led by the emperor Romanus IV Diogenes (1067-71) in eastern Turkey to the north of Lake Van. Unlike many battles of the period, we have full descriptions of what happened at Manzikert, notably an eye-witness account by a Byzantine official, Michael Attaleiates, travelling with the army. Thus we can see more clearly than usual how a nomad force, though probably smaller and certainly less well equipped than their opponents, could none the less humiliate them in battle.

The Turkish mercenary soldiers employed by the Abbasid caliphs in the ninth century were housed in the garrison city of Samarra, about a hundred miles north of Baghdad, to minimize conflict with the local people. The walls of the Great Mosque of the mid ninth century clearly show the military nature of the city.

The Muslim empire was created by one group of nomad warriors, the Arabs, but in the military sphere, it came to be dominated by another, the Turks. In modern usage the term Turks is used to described the inhabitants of the republic of Turkey, the vast majority of whom are, of course, settled townspeople and farmers. In the longer sweep of history, however, the term is used to describe a very different people, or group of peoples.

Like the Huns, the Turks originated in the vast steppe lands and grass plains which lie between Russia and Iran in the west and China in the east. In the South these lands are bordered by the Gobi Desert and the Takla Makan, in the north by the Siberian forests. The climate is characterized by hot summers and ferociously cold winters. These lands have always been the home of nomad populations, since the land is not fertile enough, and the climate not temperate enough, to encourage permanent settlement.

The Turks appear quite suddenly on the stage of world history. In 552, in circumstances which are now obscure the Turks replaced a mysterious people called the Juan-Juan as rulers of the steppe lands. Where they came from is uncertain, though the early Turks may have been connected with iron mining and smelting in the area. The ruler of this power took the title of Kaghan which, in various forms (Khan, Qa'an, Khaqan, etc.) was to be the generic title of rulers of Central Asia down to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the late sixth century this new power established diplomatic relations with the Byzantine Empire in an effort to bypass Iran and break the Sasanian stranglehold over the silk trade.

Despite divisions and fierce tribal rivalries, the Turkish Empire survived until 745. As with Arabic among the Bedouin, an element of unity was provided by a common language which enabled people from all parts of the vast empire to understand one another. The language, and some of the history of these early Turks, is recorded in a remarkable series of inscriptions found in the valley of the Orkhon River, now in northern Mongolia. They also seem to have had common religious ceremonies, including human sacrifice at funerals, and probably a common lifestyle. The Turkish Empire may only have lasted for a couple of centuries, but it brought the Turks to the notice of the world and from then on the peoples of Inner Asia and their language were generally known as Turks and Turkish.

The Arab conquerors of eastern Iran had come into conflict with the hardy Turks of Central Asia. With the breakup of the Turkish Empire, Turks began to be recruited as professional soldiers in the armies of the caliphs, ultimately displacing both Arabs and Iranians as the military elite. It was their quality as nomad warriors which made them so valuable to rulers. In the mid ninth century, when the Turks were a comparatively new military force, the Arab essayist and commentator, al-Jahiz (d. 868), produced a short treatise on 'The Excellences of the Turks' in which he describes a discussion about their particular virtues as warriors. This is worth quoting at some length because it provides a contemporary, eye-witness explanation as to why these nomad warriors were so highly valued as fighting men.

One of the features which al-Jahiz notes is their physical endurance:

When a Turk travels with a non-Turkish army he travels twenty miles for the ten other people do. He cuts off from the army to right or left, racing to the summits of peaks or penetrating the bottoms of valleys in search of game. At the same time, he shoots at everything which creeps, steps, flies and lands. When a journey lasts a long time, travel becomes hard, the camp site is far away and midday is reached, then fatigue becomes intense. People are overcome with weariness, they grow silent and do not speak because their preoccupation with their own hardships keeps them from conversation. Everything wilts from the intensity of the heat or perishes from numbing cold. Even the strongest traveller longs for the earth to swallow him up. When he sees a horseman or spots a flag, he is cheered up by that and is happy in the thought that he has reached the camp site. When the rider eventually arrives, he dismounts and walks bow-legged like a boy needing to urinate. He groans like a sick man, yawns, stretches and lies down. At this-time you see the Turk, who has already travelled twice as far as anyone else and whose shoulders are weary from pulling the bow, galloping after a wild ass, gazelle, fox or hare.

AI-Jahiz records the observation of a colleague on the behaviour of the army of the caliph al-Ma'mun (813-33), at a time when Turks were beginning to be recruited for the caliphs' armIes:

On one of the campaigns of al-Ma'mun I saw two ranks of horses on both sides of the road near the camp, a hundred Turkish cavalrymen on one side of the road and a hundred non-Turks on the other. They had been lining up to await the arrival of the Caliph. It was past midday and the heat was intense. While all except three or four of the Turks were still sitting on their horses, all except three or four of the non-Turks had dismounted and were lying on the ground.

The relationship between the Turk and his horse was remarkable:

The Turk is more skilled than the veterinarian and better at teaching his mount what he wants than the most skilled trainer. He bred it and raised it as a foal. It followed him when he called and galloped behind him when he galloped ... if you sum up the life of a Turk, you will find he sits longer on the back of his mount than on the surface of the earth. When the Turk rides a stallion or mare and sets off on a raid or a hunting trip, the mare and her foals follow him. If he is unable to hunt people, he hunts wild animals. If he is unsuccessful in that, or needs food, he bleeds one of his horses. If thirsty, he milks one of his mares, if he wants to rest the one he is riding, he mounts another without touching the ground. There is- no one else whose body would not rebel against a diet comprised entirely of meat. His mount, on the other hand, is satisfied with stubble, grass and shrubs. He does not shade it from the sun or cover it against the cold.

Of course it was their prowess in battle that attracted most attention. One of the participants in the discussion contrasts the Turks with the Kharijites (Arab Bedouin rebels against the caliphs): If a thousand Turkish horsemen attack, they shoot a single volley, felling a thousand horsemen. What would remain of any army after this sort of attack? The Kharijites and the Bedouin are not known for shooting from horseback. The Turk shoots at wild animals and birds, at the birjas (a target on a spear), people or any other target. He shoots while his mount is galloping backwards and forwards, right and left, up and down. he shoots ten arrows before the Kharijite can notch a single one ... his lasso is unbelievable, the way it reaches the horse and seizes the rider in one throw ... They taught horsemen to carry two or three bows and a corresponding number of strings ... the spear of the Kharijite is long and solid, the spear of the Turk is short and hollow. Short, hollow spears are more penetrating and lighter to carry:

With this toughness and military ability, went a certain sort of amorality. One observer noted:

We can see that the Turk does not fight for religion or dogma, or to acquire political control or the land-tax, or because of group spirit, for zeal for the sacred and sacrosanct, out of anger or enmity for his fatherland or to protect house and wealth. He only fights for plunder. He makes his own choices. He does not fear divine retribution if he flees or hope for divine favour if he fights bravely [unlike the Muslim warrior in the jihad or holy war].

The picture al-Jahiz presents is precise and familiar from the much more sketchy accounts we have of the Huns. These themes were to be taken up by later commentators on the Mongols. The Turks were remarkable for their hardiness, their relationship with their horses (which were not just mounts but a source of emergency supplies, so dispensing with cumbersome baggage trains) and their skill as mounted archers as well as with the short spear and the lasso.