Been a bit of a mixed week. Firstly eldest daughter, husband and granddaughter came to visit during half term. Then we had Martin Wallace visit, and I played his new sort of Rome Total War boardgame which is under development. It's 2-5 player game with Seven Empires. For however many players you fall short of seven the remaining Empires are run by a game bot. We played two handed against five bots. Very interesting experience. I was then going to run a WW1 game on Tuesday for him and our usual group, but he had to leave earlier than expected, and then two of our players dropped out. This was going to be my first attempt to modify the FWTDR/IRFI engine for 1916-18 (tentatively called "No Man's Land is an Island") but I shelved it pending further work, and returned to Pike to Bayonet.
Pity really, as the set up looked quite good.
Anyway, back to Northern Italy and the French against the Hapsburg Empire.
Phil & Chris were the French, and I took the Hapsburgs. Simple set up with no artillery. The French were slightly more numerous. The Hapsburgs started in a defile that protected their flanks, and massed their cavalry on the left to gain an advantage. On the right I hoped to hold off the French horse with some resolute infantry. However, being me, I couldn't just sit still and wait for them to attack my strong defensive position, so I advanced.
Chris couldn't wait for me to attack him, and charged the end of my line. Luckily he only got the frontal charge in. The units on my right had to position themselves for an attack in the next turn, so I only had to fight off those to my front. Due to my superb musketry (read: good dice rolling) I did so much damage to the leading unit to my front that it routed on contact, as you can see above.
It was then my turn again. On my left I launched a cavalry charge against Phil's horse. The speed and skill of my cavalry meant Phil's flanking fire was ineffective (read: poor dice rolling).
More poor dice rolling meant the cavalry melee was inconclusive, and we both rallied back to our start lines.
On my right I'd been able to get into square and saw off Chris' cavalry decisively.
This is a double battalion square, which I've never tried before.
The French infantry eschewed the use of gunpowder all along the line, and went in with the bayonet. I held them in the centre, but elsewhere my line was pushed backwards, despite my defensive fire. The defenders not having platoon-firing capability makes this a much safer bet of the French.
I charged home on my left with fresh cavalry, and this time got a result.
This was some relief, as my infantry line was taking a real thumping.
Although as you can see, at least some of my infantry were "Winning".
And the infantry on my right were confident enough to reform their lines from the square.
My opponents by this time, however, were sure they were on the path to victory.
The previously inconclusive cavalry on my left re-engaged. Things favoured Phil, as he had his general in the mix.
However, some devastating dice rolling saw me triumph...
...and Phil's general was cut down in the combat.
The left wing was mine, and the right was secured. Shame about the centre. The French have a few units heading for home, and I've got some off my table edge too. I reckon I've got them at this point, as my cavalry will now turn their right flank.
In anticipation of a grand finale we paused and I put the kettle on.
Strangely enough, we never got back to the table. Chris was claiming victory in the face of the evidence, and we also had a long discussion about the DBA (F) testing we did last week. I had subsequently emailed the writing team with our comments, and had some to and fro with them. They are suffering from writing by committee, where everyone has their pet views, admittedly based upon playing a lot more DBA than I ever have. They have some circles that it is hard to square. Despite Phil Barker's claim that effectively the way troops perform in terms of function is consistent across the entire period up to 1520 that isn't really supportable by the practice of the various armies. Swiss pikes are not the same as Macedonian pikes in terms of their battlefield use, for example. The genius of DBA that crams a proper, historical looking wargame, into a limited space with limited figures inevitably means there's compromise in the design. That means someone's toes get trod on, depending upon the decisions made. Some of the problems can only be solved by doing something radical (e.g by making all Pike elements 8Pk because there really is no point in having pikes that aren't deep and do away with the second rank support rules) but that'll impact on the army lists and they really don't have the time and resources to do that. Plus the amount of flak they'd get from making people buy more figures to carry on using their existing armies is something they want to avoid, I'd guess.
The obvious answer is to split the rules into four time periods, like the army lists, and tweak the rules to bring out what is essential in each time period, but no one is going to do that.
Finally, for those of you who like this sort of thing, here's a picture of the starting positions for Martin Wallace's classical empires at war game I mentioned at the top of the blog:
Carthage is red, Rome purple, the Gauls green, Macedonians blue, Seleucids orange, Ptloemaic Egypt yellow, and the Parthians white. In this game I was Carthage and Martin was Rome. The rest were run by bots/automa. The Gauls and Parthians are always bots. Because of their board position they'd be too powerful as players.
We were doing a lot of development whilst playing this game, based on conversations and a game we'd played the day before. Both games were tight. In this one we tied, and managed to beat all the bots. Martin says the bots are dumb. They may be, but they are utterly relentless.
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