Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Saturday 28 October 2017

Bavarians - Paleontology


Very old figures, laid bare. After a rather longer spell in the stripper than I had expected, at last I have some real vintage castings cleaned back to the metal. Interesting. These three chaps are (from L to R): Hinton Hunt BVN4, Bavarian private charging, and then two versions of Der Kriegspieler model No. 175 - Bavarian infantry advancing. The DK models were originally sold in a bag, with a proportional mix of variations for elite (with helmet plume) and battalion (no plume) companies - examples of each being in the picture; HH did not produce an infantryman without a plume, so we are forced to assume that Marcus intended us to remove the plumes if we cared enough. All these figures will work for line or jaeger units, by the way.

That's all good. Let's not have a discussion about the obvious DNA connection between the two makes - it's very clear that one is the inspiration of the other. I am intrigued, though - the HH man has his feet firmly planted at the corners of his base - the DK boys have their feet in the middle of two opposing sides of the base. Considering the fact that the figures are almost indistinguishable, why go to the trouble of having a different base?

My sincere thanks, again, to Stryker and Wellington Man for their generous donations of vintage figures, and to Clive and to Chuck Gibke for consultancy services. All much appreciated. I am still working on obtaining supplies of suitable castings, but at least I now know what I'm looking for. Sometime soon I hope to paint up a unit, though the extra French division which arrived recently probably takes precedence, if only to get it out of the way. No - let's not say that - it may well be that after some heavy sessions retouching the French I'll really fancy doing some Bavarians for a break!

Friday 27 October 2017

Hooptedoodle #282 - Bump! - Gotcha!

Generic media picture of a minor accident, to grab reader attention
Well, the bad news is that the Contesse has had a minor accident in her car. The much better news is that no-one was hurt, the accident was not her fault (someone ran into the back of her car at a give-way at a T-junction - unless they reversed into you, it is pretty much a given that if you drive into the back of someone it is your fault), the damage is not very serious (a new rear bumper panel will sort it out, though it is a bit of a shame, considering the vehicle is less than a year old), the car is still driveable and everything should be sorted in a week or two. Things, in short, could be much, much worse; motor accidents can wreck lives in an instant, so we have to be very, very grateful, and it is a useful reminder not to take so many blessings for granted.

We have very few mishaps on the road, I am delighted to say, so we have little opportunity to develop any well-grooved procedures for dealing with this sort of situation. However, we have had the same insurer for 15 years or so now, we are quite happy with them (efficient, and very competitive charges) and we have a good idea of what you do if you have a bump.

The last time I had a vehicle off the road after an accident was two cars and six years ago when someone ran into my pick-up when it was parked (definitely not my fault, I was somewhere else at the time, Your Honour). The procedure was simple enough - I contacted my insurer (the same one as now), they booked the truck into a repair shop, who came and took it away, and lent me a courtesy car - a tiny, bright pink Ford Ka, with "Excelsior Coach Repairs" written on both doors in large black letters. It did the job, though the painted advertising does imply a subtitle: "KEEP AWAY FROM THIS ONE - HE HAS ACCIDENTS". The claim was settled, life carried on.

Generic picture of a courtesy car
This time more people were involved. A lot more. And there are a lot of added-value services laid on - if you expect someone else's insurer to pay for all this, it is tempting to just keep saying yes - why not? Everyone else does.

Interesting. The insurance company were efficient and businesslike, as ever, and provided the Contesse with contact numbers and details of the repair shop and the "car-rental company", who would be in touch. They also encouraged her to upgrade to a larger rental vehicle than the basic courtesy car on offer, which seemed surprising in an age when we are all trying to keep costs (and premiums) down. So she agreed to that, and, as promised, people began to ring up. Within a couple of hours everything was in motion.

The Contesse was not comfortable with the contact from the car-rental people, who asked her a whole pile of questions about the circumstances of the accident which seemed to be out of scope for their part in this deal. It turns out that they are not a car-rental firm at all, they are a credit hire company. They offer delivery to your home, and collection (which is attractive, since we live on the Dark Side of the Moon), they will obtain for you an over-spec vehicle, and the Terms and Conditions, legal small print and lists of fees and penalties run for screens and screens of the email attachments. With alarm bells clanging, she did some research online and found a lot of hostile client reviews - what used to be a minimal extra service provided as part of an insurance claim appears to have become a major scam industry. Apart from the wasted cost contributed by the insurers, the credit-hire firm and the rental vehicle providers all lining each others' pockets (yes, there are commission payments travelling upstream as well, so it was in the insurance company's interest to recommend a vehicle upgrade), details of the parties involved are also sold to the market, so that clients are subsequently beset by phonecalls from so-called lawyers, encouraging them to make further claims for whiplash, post traumatic shock, loss of earnings and that mysterious fungal growth in the lawn. It is, basically, a scam. A scam, moreover, which fits right into that much-loved British ideal of an industry which contributes very little, but generates income for an extra level of parasite. The courtesy car add-on associated with a car repair used to involve maybe two people to set it up, and cost very little. Now it involves about half a dozen people, who inflate costs and pay each other commission, and it just milks the system.


No wonder that:

(a) unemployment levels in this ridiculous, bankrupt nation are lower than you would expect, though our output in goods and genuine services continues to shrivel.

(b) insurance premiums are unnecessarily high, and lawyers are never short of a few bob.

(c) the insurance industry (in which I worked for many years) is so widely despised and mistrusted.

Anyway - the ending. After a fairly short period of consideration, the Contesse called the insurer, and also emailed them, and cancelled the courtesy car. They can stick it up their corporate bottom, though of course she did not tell them this. They were pretty sniffy about it, and not prepared to discuss their business relationship with the "car-rental firm". We have email confirmations, and names of the people she spoke to on the phone, at both the insurance company and the credit hire mob. If some poor chaps turn up with a big, posh rental car for us on Wednesday then we know nothing about it, and they may take it away. They can hardly charge for a service they haven't provided. We shall cope with the vehicles we already have - my wife can use my car for a few days, I'll use my van, and we'll write off any small inconvenience against the money we have saved everyone, and the illusion of a tiny victory against a dodgy system.

Watch out for insurance claim add-ons. I cannot believe this is a uniquely British problem, though we seem to have a remarkable talent for creating money-making scams of this type.



Thursday 26 October 2017

The Duty Marshal


Another new French staff unit, based to my new standard. The groups for Army/Corps level commanders are 60mm square, and have the general himself plus two staff; the base is bordered in the national colour - in this case blue.

This was going to be, very specifically, General (later Marshal) Suchet, but I had second thoughts. The next in the painting queue is the Duke of Damnation, Soult, and he has a very distinctive ADC, who can be spotted from the far side of the valley - "that's Soult," they will say. Now Suchet also had a recognisable ADC, with baggy trousers - plum coloured, as I recall - and this ADC's greatest claim to fame, of course, is that he appears in one of the Osprey books...


Sanity check - I could set up a whole series of celebrity generals to make guest appearances as appropriate - some of them wouldn't get out to play very often. Thus I have made this fellow rather more generic - the ADC in the blue and red (the guy with the horse, for the colour-blind) is wearing the regulation uniform for the ADC of a Marshal-who-is-not-a-Prince, and the man who is saluting is a visiting ADC for a General de Division, so it's all pretty much vanilla. I shall probably use this group as Suchet if the occasion suits, but otherwise other choices are available. Good.


This could get out of hand - I could have gone for the plum-trousered aide - I have figures which would work in this role. Then I would have to consider named groups for Victor, Jourdan, You-Name-It...

Mind you, Massena would be worth a shout - his group would probably require him to be in a carriage, accompanied by his teenage son, Prosper, dressed up in (white) pantomime ADC's uniform, and Old André's mistress, Henriette Leberton, who is reputed to have accompanied him on campaign dressed as a hussar...    [is it getting a little warm in here?]

Well, maybe - not sure what sort of conversion would be needed for a 20mm female hussar - suggestions welcome.

In the meantime, here is Marshal Suchet (let us say), looking fairly calm about  the job in hand. The black gloves worn by the aides were all the rage among the staffers...

The saluting ADC is from Hagen, whose range of staff figures is getting better and more extensive all the time, and the other chaps are from Art Miniaturen, sculpted by the wonderful Jorg Schmäling.

Monday 23 October 2017

Hooptedoodle #281 - Rats with Bushy Tails

sciurus carolinensis - introduced into the UK from North America in 19thC
 - doing very nicely, thank you
Visitor to our garden this morning - nothing particularly exotic, but a nice enough fellow.

I'm not saying that Neil the Ghillie used to shoot squirrels, mind you, but it is a fact that we never saw any here until he retired in June.

Are squirrels pests (I mean to farmers)? Maybe we'll find out over the winter.

Still haven't decided what we are going to do about our bird feeders this year. There's an experimental one attached to the kitchen window at the moment - sunflower hearts - no visitors yet; they must have given up on us. If we see any Magpies around the feeder it will be withdrawn immediately. Having said which, we've had Jackdaws for many years, and they don't bother with the feeders.

We'll wait and see.

Sunday 22 October 2017

More French Staff Figures


Just tinkering last night - some retouching, and rebasing to the new house standard. In my OOB, this chap (the one in the very silly hat) is usually Villatte or some such. The casting is Art Miniaturen's figure of Colbert, now discontinued. The regulation ADC (one for a General de Division) is a NapoleoN figure - for a while he had sky-blue overalls, which eventually I decided was a fashion statement too far, so I've toned him down a bit.

The General may be shouting, "Come on, chaps - for France and Glory!",
or he may be saying, "...no, I believe they are still chasing us..."
Next command groups in the queue are serious, 3-figure groupings on the new 60 x 60 bases (Army/Corps Commander) - I have both Soult and Suchet ready to go. This is really getting into self-indulgence territory now - Soult is certain to spend most of his time in the box, waiting for his big chance, though on the other hand his presence might encourage me to try some different scenarios - Armée du Midi stuff.

Friday 20 October 2017

Pilot Figures - pick up the brush...

Not much painting recently - I was doing quite well for a few weeks, but the Real Life situation took hold again; it's not so much that I have no time, it's just that there is a lot to think about and I find it hard to settle to get on with things.

My French general staff and ADCs will continue as a background project - no particular rush there. My new Bavarian project has stalled a bit - I need to order some more figures, and the batch in the strip-soak jar is taking longer than I expected, but I expect to make some serious progress with this over the winter.

Meanwhile I have come back around to an on-and-off idea that I've had for years. When I came up with a new vision for my Peninsular War armies, a good while ago now, I had enough spare figures to make up an extra division of the French army. They were mostly Kenningtons, but it seemed a good opportunity.

Didn't take it. I decided I had other things to do, and eventually sold off the Kenningtons, not least to encourage myself to get on with the ECW. So it goes. Anyway, as it happens I have now acquired some vintage figures which will make a rather more interesting addition to the French army. Since I am spending more time these days in the company of Baron Stryker's very fine Hinton Hunt armies, I am more inclined to think along similar lines. Well, the figures I have are not Hintons, but they are sort of similar - I have enough pre-owned Der Kriegsspieler and Alberken soldiers to make about 5 battalions, which is certainly a big dollop of the extra division.

Flattery by imitation? - not Hintons - the grenadier on the left is an Alberken product
(maybe a little disappointed to be converted to the Line?), and the fusilier is from
Der Kriegsspieler. I have tried to make them suitable for a variety of situations, so
they are sort-of-1809-ish - Danube or Spain. As a skill, I find retouching is a challenge
in its own right - you have to get consistent with how much imperfection you are comfortable
with, how much effort to put into the job. Diminishing returns set in very quickly if you are not
pragmatic about it. There will be a lot of these...
I always fancied adding Bonet's 8th Division of the Armée de Portugal, from the Salamanca period, but for some reason I find I already have a couple of units from Taupin's Division (the 6th) - I have a single battalion of the 17e Léger and the Regiment de Prusse - so if my newly-acquired chaps become the 22e and the 65e Ligne then I'm just about there for Taupin. The idea is that these new/old units should look sort of 1809-ish - that way they can fight the Austrians on the Danube, they can certainly fight the Spaniards early in the Peninsular War, and they can happily take their place in the later battles if I claim that they were a bit behind with their uniform supplies.

This is going to be a re-touch job, and a pretty big one, so realistic timescales are a good idea. This evening I got out the brushes, and had a test shot to see how they might come up - not bad at all. They are surely not going to win any prizes, but they will be most welcome in Marmont's army. I'm pleased with that - if I had merely managed to convince myself that this had to be a full strip-and-start-again job then I think I would just have shelved the idea.

OK - that didn't hurt very much. I'll try a bit more painting tomorrow night. Maybe the odd ADC? I'll get myself back into this - we've got a fresh load of logs for the stove, I've got some CDs I haven't had a chance to listen to yet, there's a box of French wine somewhere - what could go wrong?

Saturday 14 October 2017

Hooptedoodle #280 - One for Sorrow

Smart chap, but unwelcome - pica pica
Neil, the ghillie here on the farm, retired in June, and has moved to live in the town, at Dunbar. The ghillie is the man who keeps the wildlife under control, and on this farm a proportion of his work was also to look after the large numbers of pheasants, which are introduced in yearly batches to ensure that there is plenty of shooting around Christmas time. (Personally I do not care for the big shooting parties, so we try to arrange to go out somewhere else for the day when one is organised.)

A lovely man, Neil, generous and helpful but surprisingly shy - I shall miss him. In recent years there hasn't really been so much to do on the farm, so he has also been working part time as a driver for the local bus company.

Well, he's gone, and we are becoming aware that things are changing as a result. We never really saw or heard much going on - it was all quiet and behind the scenes - but we now have sightings of foxes, stoats, rats, and a few other things which Neil, with his traps and his shotgun, used to take care of. Rats and stoats are not good news - if you think that a stoat would be a delightful creature to have as a neighbour on a farm then you have never seen the havoc they can inflict on a chicken coop. Some years ago Neil's wife lost her complete stock of Christmas turkeys to stoats, which tunnelled into a closed compound and killed the lot - didn't eat them, just killed them, apparently for recreation.

Though related to the weasel, an animal which is weasily recognisable, the
stoat is stoatally different, as you can see
One further intruder we have now is the chap right at the top of this post - pica pica - the Common Magpie. Regarded as one of the most intelligent creatures around, they are also very vigorous predators.

One has to admire any animal which is so handsome and so successful, but we now have daily visits from a number of them, we've seen 3 at the same time in our garden, and we know that if they become permanent residents in our woodland then they will have a dreadful effect on our beloved garden birds. These things eat eggs and baby birds like popcorn.

OK - it's Nature - that's what magpies do. One immediate outcome is that it seems unlikely that we will be able to make much use of our garden bird feeders this winter, and that is a huge loss to us if it comes about. Our feeders are all well above the ground, and the microsystem we have has worked well - perch feeders make a bit of a mess, and the ground feeders clean up after them. That may not work any more - the presence of seeds and nuts in the garden will certainly encourage both the rats and the magpies. Much pondering required.

The magpie (in common with other of his relatives in the crow family) features extensively in folklore and superstition, usually as a bringer of ill-fortune. It may be because the carrion birds ate the bodies of hanged criminals on the gibbet; there are a number of interesting theories on this. I had a friend who always said "good morning, Mr Magpie" when he saw one - he was brought up with the tradition that it was bad luck if you failed to do so - he didn't necessarily believe, you understand, but he was taking no chances...

One for sorrow,
Two for mirth.
Three for a funeral,
Four for birth.
Five for heaven,
Six for hell,
Seven for the devil, his own self


***** Late Edit *****



Also loosely connected with change and sorrow, but this item not down to Neil, I think. Past visitors to Chateau Foy may well recognise this place - this is the only Indian (Bengali) restaurant in our village, and we are regular, devoted customers. Sadly, the owner, Mohammad, has decided to sell up for family reasons, and they will be closing down tomorrow - so there's something else we are going to miss. If we want an Indian meal in future, we'll have to go to Dunbar or Aberlady, which is not nearly so handy. The premises are to be redeveloped as a bistro wine-bar - I'm sure it will be very nice, but there are already 5 similar businesses in the village - did we really need another?

Progress, you see. Next, it really wouldn't surprise me if someone opened yet another gift shop in the village; anything is possible with entrepreneurial people who can think outside the box.

*******************

Thursday 12 October 2017

ECW - Rules Update


Further to previous - as from today, Version 2.68 of my CC_ECW rules is downloadable via this link. The link on the right hand top corner of the current screen should now also point to this latest version, and I believe all the documentation is consistent.

Revisions? Not so much, in the end - have gone back to Foot being able to move and still fire (a bit), have banned Stand of Pikes from being attempted in woods - in fact no pikes can fight in woods any more. Also another load of typos and dodgy wording smartened up.

If you can't get the links to work, I've probably screwed up the sharing rights - please shout. If you don't like the rules, that's perfectly OK - have a nice day.

My humble thanks to The Jolly Broom Man for his input and all his help.

Wednesday 11 October 2017

ECW - We Like Our Musketry Explicit

The gentlemen of the Sealed Knot being unpleasant at close quarters
This is going to be one of my ruminating sessions, I think, so if you don't fancy the prospect you have at least been forewarned. In response to my post yesterday, David sent a comment that touches on some of the key issues in the problem of how we try to represent warfare as a game we can play on the kitchen table. [When pressed, ruminate. That is the house rule here.]

So David is my guest writer for the morning. His comment included the following:

"...it is fascinating to think about how they actually went about the business of organised combat in the pike and shot era. Now I admit I have not downloaded your rules, so you may rightly ignore all I say. But one thing that always strikes me is how short a range they would be firing their muskets at (ignoring ill-disciplined premature popping-off by inexperienced troops); I get the feeling this would often be 100 yards or less. Which must have been terrifying, by the way. Now this makes me wonder, what is the 'range' of musketry in C&C, in hexes? And what distance does a hex represent? And how does that relate to movement distances?

Another thing that only now strikes me is, if taking up a firing position at 100 yards from the enemy and then using 'fire by introduction', it can't take long to close the range quite considerably; how much discipline did it take to maintain that measured fire and reloading, and how tempting was it to just give all that up and get stuck in to a melee?..."

I'd like to take a couple of detours before attempting to respond to this.

This doesn't look like rolling fire to me - it looks like a big Salvee
Firstly, since we are all shaped by our experiences, and since this includes the development of my own views on war gaming, I'd like to share with you a tale of a game I was once involved in. I would say this was about 1974. [I used to keep a huge file with notes and jottings and OOBs from all my war games - going way back - but alas I lost it during a house move 19 years ago, so approximate memory will have to serve now]. The main things are that this game certainly wasn't yesterday, and that it was from a period when we were all striving to make our miniature battles as realistic as possible. That seems like a very sad joke now, but I was as keen as anyone else.

The event was a very large bash at Quatre Bras - lots of borrowed troops on display - I can't remember how many, but there were a lot, and we used the WRG rules of the day. There were a lot of people involved, though, since the game lasted all day Saturday, all day Sunday and some of Monday evening, players were coming in to relieve each other, so there was never a time when everyone was present together, and some of the visits were brief and intended to show willing rather than make any major contribution. I recall that Phil Maugham, Alan Low, Dave Hoskins, Allan Gallacher (our host), John Ramsay, Dave Thomson, Keith Spragg and Forbes Hannah were all present at some point - a true marathon relay effort. I am less clear about the outcome - I think it was a sort of draw, though the Allies claimed they were leading at the end - you may recognise that kind of conclusion. Another, rather darker recollection is that only about 3 of the assembly are still alive, which just goes to show something or other (it probably shows that I was one of the younger participants!).

It took a long time afterwards to clear up the mess and sort out the paperwork, and two big messages feature most strongly in my memory. Firstly, none of us ever wanted to do anything like that again - in fact this was around the time that I first started looking seriously at what could be learned from board games, and trying to find ways to simplify my own miniatures games. Secondly, we were horrified (not to say incredulous) to learn that the total elapsed "battle time" amounted to around 35 minutes - that's all. Something like 22 hours had been spent "fighting" a battle which must have lasted a few hours historically, and the mathematical basis of the game accounted for only 35 minutes. So what else was going on at Quatre Bras? Were our rules incompetent? - well, possibly, though, like the players, the rules were well-intentioned. Did battles involve a lot of other stuff - waiting around, perhaps - which padded out this skeletonic 35 minutes? Is there something else at work here?

I've thought about this problem, off and on, ever since. There was something else at work. For one thing, there is something strangely elastic and subjective about the passage of time - Einstein said something to the effect that an hour spent conversing with a pretty girl was but a fleeting instant, but a minute spent sitting on a very hot stove was a long time indeed (stovists please don't bother complaining - get in touch with Einstein) - this is not something you can measure on a clock. I have read about this, but don't have much of a handle on it. More importantly, there are huge problems with our assumptions of realism in any kind of stochastic simulation.

I wrote a rather lengthy post on the concept of ludic fallacies on this blog - it seems it was 6 and a bit years ago. Goodness me. I was a windbag even in those days. If you wish to risk that old post then good for you - it's here - I haven't changed my mind since then, and I doubt if I could express it better now (more concisely, maybe...). The idea is that any kind of mathematical model of a real system is fundamentally flawed, unless the system is itself very simple and mathematically based. Thus, for example, we can analyse fully a game based on rolling dice - provided, of course, that the dice are "honest dice" and that the players don't do anything underhand (and these may be significant doubts, if there's a lot of money at stake!). Anything more complex and we very quickly find that the elements we can measure and understand and estimate (or think we can) are swamped by the things we do not understand, the things we have not thought of, and the interactions between these. [The original target of ridicule for the ludic fallacy was the world of finance, in which fund management and investment strategies are driven by mathematical models which are not only unreliable but dangerous if they are trusted beyond the bounds of validity (please supply your own examples...)]

War games are less scary in their implications than fund management, but an example I used 6-and-a-half years ago was the way rules all over the planet were suddenly "improved" after the publication of Maj. Gen. BP Hughes' famous Firepower, a semi-scientific study of the power and effectiveness of weapons. Hughes himself was very sensible and forthright about the limitations of both the data and reasoning in his fascinating book, but the guys who adopted it for rule writing almost all missed the point by some miles. Idealised 19th Century experiments to measure the power and hitting capability of (for example) canister fire are interesting as an assessment of the weapons themselves, but the official-looking analysis tables from Hughes have as much to do with the likely results of these weapons' use in real battle conditions by real soldiers - with real emotions and limited training - as the proverbial price of onions, so basing a game on them was more than a little naive. Sorry, chaps.

One of the misunderstood charts from Firepower
I can't be bothered checking for actual references, but a few of the earlier war games writers - notably Peter Young and Paddy Griffith, I think - made the point that game scales and exact measurements were all very well, but the most important thing was to have a game which works. If rifles are supposed to fire a bit further than muskets, let them fire a bit further in your game - exactly how much further is less important, within the limits of commonsense; in truth, no-one really knows exactly how much further it should be, anyway. Same with march distances and all that. If anyone tells you differently then he's bluffing, or he hasn't thought about it. Or both. The 1970s push for time-and-motion-study re-engineering of war games produced very little improvement in the observed realism of outcomes, and, as far as I am concerned, produced a colossal reduction in the enjoyment of the games themselves.

It will rattle some teacups, but I would contend that one of the attractions of the newfangled, non-Old-School, board game-style Commands & Colors game is that it is closer in spirit to the creed of Messrs Young and Griffith than much of the pseudo-science and detail that we have seen in the time in between.

I impose a ground scale on C&C to make sense of modelling battlefields, and especially for setting out fortresses, but some of the equivalences don't stand up to close scrutiny. If I assume 200 paces for a hex, then a unit in a hex 2 hexes away is somewhere between 200 and 600 paces distant. 400 seems a logical figure to use. 400 paces as an effective musket range is pretty optimistic in the Napoleonic Wars - the captain would not be pleased if his chaps started firing at such a range - and is certainly just plain silly in the ECW. And yet I've adopted a 2-hex musket range for the ECW game - why?

Well, to be honest, I'd be more comfortable if musketry were not handled explicitly in these games. I've already abstracted cavalry firing their pistols into the bit of the game that comes under the heading Melee Combat. Pistol fire was just one of the unpleasant things that cavalry did to each other when they were in reasonably close contact. It would make sense to do the same with musket fire - simply regard it as a close-range matter, in terms of the ground scale, and include it into Melee, in the same way I've already done for the Horse.

This would certainly not be very revolutionary. Long before C&C appeared, I used home-brewed Napoleonic rules which were very influenced by Doc Monaghan's Big Battalions, which originated with the Guernsey Wargames Club. This was most definitely a miniatures game, but it used a very neat melee system, which was very clearly board game-like in style, and there was no musketry. What? That's right - cannons fired at people, and there was some skirmisher activity ("harassing fire") which was carried out around the same time as the "Bombardment Phase", but volleyed musketry by close-order infantry was something that happened in a close combat situation, so it was covered by the board game-style melee rules.

It worked nicely - it took a bit of getting used to, and it would certainly alienate the chaps who don't like C&C because it denies you the opportunity to form lines or columns, or fiddle with skirmishers. I think that if the game scale is big enough, abstracting musketry is logical and reasonable.

So why have I persisted with a distinct rule for musket fire for the ECW, which is, to say the least, not well supported by our understanding of the facts? Why not take the obvious step of making artillery fire the only kind of Ranged Combat permitted? Hmmm.

First thing to say is that musketry is kind of fun - the game would feel poorer without it, and in this game it is not very effective anyway. Next, the same arguments could be applied to the Napoleonic game - which is a board game, let us remember - yet the very experienced and knowledgeable authors of that game decided to feature it as part of ranged combat.


That whiff of board game is quite an important aspect of this. In a traditional board war game, cardboard counters move next to each other on the board, and bad things happen. It isn't a series of individual musket volleys or charges, it's almost like some kind of force-field thing - the units interact in some manner, and one of them prevails, or is eliminated, or whatever - as the game scale increases, our view of the details starts to disappear. It is the sort of thing that turns off the Old School enthusiasts.

Thus I have left musketry in my ECW game at present, because it feels more like a miniatures war game if it is left in, but my feelings on the matter are pretty marginal. There are strong arguments to make it part of the Melee, and the game would be tidier (and probably more correct) without it, but it would feel less like a "proper" war game. Peter Young would have been horrified not to get a chance to fire his muskets, so that'll do for the time being.





Tuesday 10 October 2017

ECW - Rules Tweak Scaled Right Back

I've had a most interesting few days' correspondence with Peter B, Prof de Vries, Martin S and, most especially, the Jolly Broom Man. As a result of all this enlightenment (and, by Jove, these chaps know their stuff), I've decided not to make the ambitious changes to my ECW rules, as sketched out in my previous post.


It all comes back to the issue of how the regiments arranged their musket fire back in the 17th Century. I was concerned that if (to put it in layman's terms) everyone fired at once (BANG) then subsequently they would be conspicuously unloaded, and, since the idea that they might manage to reload while rushing about seemed unlikely, they would arrive unable to fire if they attacked someone without having stopped somewhere on the way. This kind of thinking owed a lot to my exposure to the Victory without Quarter rules, which make a feature of loading as a necessary activity.

Well, as everyone in the world knows very well - apart from me - it all comes down to the way they conducted the firing. Because the matchlock was a cumbersome thing to load, the approved method was to arrange the musketeers in a lot of ranks - 6 or 8 was OK - and then fire by rolling the ranks:

(1) Intraduction, by which the firing line advanced, required the rear (loaded) rank to move round in front of the rank which had just fired - the sergeant, with his partizan or his half-pike, would show the newly loaded chaps where to line up and fire. Thus the rate of advance would be up to the sergeant, and the firing line would move forward.

(2) Extraduction, by which the firing line fell back, required the front rank, after they had fired, to nip round the rear (the sergeant would show them where) and get on with reloading. In time they would once again become the front rank, and it would be their turn to fire once more. Thus the firing line would gradually be moving back.

I apologise for the kindergarten explanation - it is necessary for me to envisage things in simple terms. Anyway, this means that the firing would not go BANG, as discussed, it would go bang--bang--bang--etc, and it also means that the Foot would never all be unloaded at the same time, which means that they would be able to produce some amount of fire while on the move. If, like me, you imagine that advancing or retreating by means of the rolling intra/extraduction system would slow down the attack to a pitiful shuffle then I am assured that this is correct - this is why the rules reduce the movement rate for Foot when close to the enemy, but I am also informed by the JBM that this was not a critical-path issue, since the unit closing up and the pikemen sorting themselves out was just as big a problem prior to a clash. [The Broom Man, by the way, apart from a life of monastic research, also has personal experience of re-enactment; never disagree with a man who knows how to handle a pike - especially one who may have been at the Siege of Bristle.]

I sense a lot of unrest - people with their hands in the air, protesting, "...but, Miss, Miss, Miss...". Well you are quite right, there was also the process known as fire by salvee, which was introduced by Gustavus Adolphus for his Swedish army, and which did, indeed, have everybody firing at once and thus being unloaded immediately thereafter. I am assured that this was beyond the capabilities of just about everyone apart from the Swedes during this period - thus it is not relevant for the ECW, and Peter B reckons that it would be used even by the Swedes in the 30YW as a short-range device, such that it should be considered as part of melee combat in rules of this type.

Gustavus Adolphus
Thus, after this long ramble, I am merely going to switch my CC_ECW rules back to allowing Foot to move 1 hex and fire at reduced effect, which is where I started a few years ago, in a manner similar to what Commands & Colors does for Napoleonic warfare. Peter B made the interesting point that this kind of reduced fire while moving actually makes more sense in an ECW context than it does for Napleonic warfare, which is a suitable topic for debate in the pub, but gets me off the hook anyway.

I am somewhat sorry that I didn't get to play with the cotton-wool smoke markers, as discussed last time, but no matter. Simple is good.

One other change I shall introduce in the revised rules is that Stand of Pikes formation will not be permitted in woods - in fact units armed with pikes will not be allowed to fight in woods at all. That was a stupid oversight on my part - the JBM assures me that big boys with pikes in the woods are going to get into bother, and someone will get hurt, for sure, so we can't have that. The upgraded rules will be downloadable in a week or two, once I've rehashed the QRS chart (which is the trickiest bit of the editorial process).

My thanks to everyone who contributed. There is talk of an ECW battle in these parts sometime in the nearish future, so a quick review of the rules was - how do you say? - opportune - yes, that's it.