Friday, October 02, 2020

English Civil War

Chris & I fought a small ECW battle to try out some new tweaks to our house rules I wanted to test before introducing them to the more argumentative members of the group. 

Jim's Parliamentary army is on the left.  Parliament has 2 shot units for each of their 4 pikes 4 cavalry & 2 guns.  Chris's Royalists have 1 shot unit for each of their 4 pike, 6 cavalry & 2 guns.
Parliament got the first move & immediately advanced their cavalry to gain an uphill advantage.  Then Cavaliers charged them anyway. On the rest of the front, Parliament advanced inclining to their right, while the Royalist took up a defensive position in the farm. 
The cavalry fight is initially indecisive.  Parliamentarian shot is advancing on the Royalist guns while their own guns have deployed to fire at the pikes beside the orchard.   There is an exchange of shot in & out of the orchard with the Royalist cover negated by superior numbers able to fire.
The Parliamentary horse had gained the upper hand over the Cavaliers, but the shaken Cavaliers have been withdrawn & their fresh 2nd line has now charged.  The Royalist gunners are evaporating under musket fire.   One of the Royalist shot units in the orchard has broken & the other has withdrawn.
The fresh Cavaliers are beating the Parliament's horse while their 2 shaken units are being rallied by their general.  The Royalist gunners have run away.  The pike have charged the Parliamentary shot, but threw awful dice & bounced off.  Then they fell back further as the Parliamentary shot overlapped their right.

The cavaliers have finished off the enemy horse, but the pikes on their right have been broken by the ring of shot. 

The Royalists are withdrawing. 

We have been using casualty removal rather than casualty counters in these rules.  We weren't happy with the way unit looked when they got close to half strength (at which point they broke & were removed). But today we tried a mixed system where a casualty is removed every 2nd hit & a counter used to record the odd hits.  We also re-introduced a Shaken Status.  Both changes seemed to work really well with no unforeseen problems arising.    

 

1 comment:

Gonsalvo said...

Looks good; seems to be a surge of ECW gaming recently!