Tweakle,
tweakle, melee rule;
Still
not ryte, thou bless’d owld fule
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| Artwork by Paul Hitchin |
Dalliance with my variation on Commands & Colors rules for the
English Civil War is going well. The games bash along nicely, but my preferred
“suck it and see” approach to changing the rules has sometimes produced some
unexpected results.
One area of study has been the rules for
Melee Combat involving horse. For those who are interested in this stuff, and
anyone else who has a few minutes to spare, let me explain a little.
Commands
& Colors is a boardgame. I’m quite comfortable
with this fact, though occasionally stones fall on my house because I have
painted hexes on my tabletop. The advantages of using C&C with miniatures,
for me, are that it works, its mechanisms are simple almost to the point of
being crude, there are no debates about what happens in certain situations and
the game trots along nicely – invariably reaching a conclusion which all
parties can understand. All of which adds up to the thing being – well, a lot
of fun.
My ECW game is actually based on the Napoleonics version of C&C. My
changes to the basic rule set reflect my understanding of how cavalry (sorry,
horse) operated in this period. As much for my own benefit as anyone else’s, I
shall set down a simplified version of this – if the simplicity is verging on
the infantile, that’s OK – that is the sort of person I am.
In the Thirty Years War, according to my
sources, there were two main types of horse – cuirassiers and general-purpose
cavalry usually referred to as arquebusiers. The accepted way of using them was
based on the methods and training of the Spanish and Dutch schools. As follows:
- Horse have pistols. These pistols are
heavy, inaccurate, unreliable, almost impossible to load on a moving horse and
serve mostly as a cross between a badge of a gentleman’s rank and a cudgel.
- When ordered to advance to the attack, the
horse trot steadily up to the opposition, get their pistols ready (usually in a
surprising, tipped-over-sideways posture which apparently increases the chance
of the priming igniting properly), get as close as possible (preferably right
in their faces) and attempt to fire (did it go off? – oh bugger – I’ve got
another one here – hang on…).
- If the enemy flinches, or otherwise appear
to be discouraged by all this carry-on, the discharged pistols are discarded,
or possibly thrown at the foe, swords are drawn and the whole thing becomes a
lot more energetic, one side or other being chased from the field, cut down,
captured etc.
You can see this would be an unpleasant
event to be caught up in, but it presents a strange, lumpy blend of chivalrous
protocol and loyal commitment to the fashionable technology. At least in
theory, at its peak this pistol ritual was developed into some complicated
formation manoeuvres – specifically the Caracole (derived from the Spanish word
for a snail, which I believe was associated with the shape of the turning movement
rather than the speed with which it was delivered) – which in hindsight seem better
suited to the parade ground than the battlefield.
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| "…pistol? - what pistol…?…" |
A number of rule sets I have read make a
particular feature of this pistol skirmishing, and even of the caracole, but it
doesn’t look like anything I would wish to use in a game, unless it was a 1:1
skirmish – fortunately, the caracole seems to have been abandoned by the 1640s.
Managing the loading and firing of individual pistol volleys within a brigade-level
wargame seems to me the sort of thing my late friend and guru, Allan Gallacher,
would have termed “Fannying About” – molecular-level activity of little
consequence.
According to the story, King Gustavus
Adolfus of Sweden (or some influential party in his gang) decided, probably
correctly, that the pistol was not yet ready to be used in such a manner, and
that it made more sense to forget about it and just jump straight to the sword
bit and – since you then didn’t have to worry about aiming a pistol, you could thus
get a bit of a move on as a result. One can almost visualize the shocked
expressions of struggling pistol men being charged in this barbaric manner…
Righto – having thus reached the limits of
my own attention span, I have adopted the convenient and widely used convention
that my ECW cavalry will break down into 3 types – “Gallopers”, who are
Swedish-style charging horse who just rush in with swords, rather than
fiddling around with pistols, “Trotters”, who are the more cautious pistol
chaps, and Cuirassiers, who are heavily armoured, slow-moving Trotters. I have
also decided to rise above the irritation caused by these modern wargaming
names for the classes, which generate a lot of heat and some contempt among
purists. If you are offended by the names then you are absolutely correct –
please be assured that when I say Gallopers, what I really mean is “that type
of horse which are not, and never were, actually called Gallopers, but which I
incorrectly and sloppily refer to as Gallopers entirely for my own
convenience”. And similarly for the Trotters - I hope that makes everything all
right.
Anyway – where was I? – oh yes – Gallopers.
Within my C&C-based ECW rules, Cuirassiers, being heavy, have a 2-hex move, Gallopers (which includes a
lot of early-period Royalists) have a 3-hex move and Trotters also have a 3-hex
move, though any Trotters moving into contact with the enemy are limited to 2
hexes, to allow for all this faffing about with pistols, and keeping everything
calm in the approach. Gallopers get an
extra Combat Die in a melee, to allow for the extra elan and momentum and shock
effect and suchlike – which seems reasonable – but they only get it in a newly
formed melee in which they are the attackers. In other words, they do not get
this in a melee which is continuing from an earlier turn, nor in any bonus
melee resulting from the C&C “Cavalry Breakthrough” rule, whereby a cavalry
unit which wins a melee may occupy the hex vacated by the enemy, and optionally
move a further hex, and may fight an extra melee immediately (i.e. in the same
turn). Neither do I allow Gallopers to claim this extra bonus die if they are
“battling back”, in C&C speak, having been themselves attacked.
My intention, as you will gather, was to
restrict this bonus to sections of the combat in which the Gallopers had the
initiative and had a definite extra shock impact.
I am still testing to see how this all
works out – the recent debacle of the Battle of Netherfield demonstrated an
extreme consequence of the horse getting a run of luck (mumble, mumble), which
is clearly something that has to be checked over.
An unexpected side-effect has shown up in a
couple of subsequent replays of the same test game; since an extra Combat Die
is a significant bonus, it is a smart move for the Parliamentarian (Trotter) horse
to attack first, so that the Gallopers are restricted to “battling back” and do
not get the bonus die. The result is that the Trotter horse have definitely become
very aggressive – unrealistically so. In an attempt to reflect a real tactical
situation in the game, I have generated distinctly unrealistic behaviour on the part of the Trotters.
I can solve this at a stroke by allowing
the Gallopers the bonus die even when they are battling back, in which case
there is no particular advantage for the non-Gallopers in making pre-emptive
attacks (other than the obvious one that they get first blow, and only the
survivors will fight back). The downside of this instant fix is that the
Gallopers become even more formidable than they were already. Hmmm.
We’ll try it out, anyway. I really do like
fiddling around with rules, but only on the understanding that one day they
settle down into something which is demonstrably sensible.
