I believe there was a non-trivial chance of an eye injury from firing one too. Given this, and the very low accuracy of the weapon, there was little incentive to aim it precisely; rather they were fired in the general direction of a mass of enemy troops in the hope of hitting something/one.

The early Swedes seem to do OK against them, though the Poles are tough. I've played several times against the AI rules Poles. The Poles have no real answer the the Swedish salvo foot, nor I suspect to most other pike and shot types.

Maybe lights can move, others have to fall back.
Also, it seems you can fall back when in a ZOC, even though you can't otherwise move away from the ZOCer.

Agreed. But maybe not so odd if you consider it a swirling melee evade where the horse charged through the cossacks who flowed around them and then the horse turned around to come back at the cossacks, with everything getting confused in midst of action.

There seems to have been a a very broad and gradual change whereby European infantry were becoming more reluctant to actually close to contact over this period of time. To the extant this was not a change in behavior in reaction to the abandonment of shock formations, it might have been a cause of c...

Rather than win/lose/draw showing the chance of an enemy/friend taking a cohesion it might better be expressed as the probability of them having to take a cohesion test and then failing said test.

I think the difficulty of training men with bows is a bit overstated, and the ease of using an early firearms vastly overstated. Loading them was a very cumbersome and dangerous task. Still once you have a standing army, a few months of training in winter quarters will get your arquebusiers or the l...

Love the game.

What's the ETA on the 1st patch?

Is there any intention of releasing later 17th c expansions/mods?

What if you made it a requirement to take 1 hit per 4 bases in order to have to take a cohesion test in melee? (Keep the death check for any loser though to allow attrition to wear them down.) This would mean 1 hit on a 2-4 base unit would cause a check but against 6 or 8 would need 2 hits to cause ...

Perhaps as a simple way to simulate Elephants having a more disastrous effect when they rout through allies, rather than having random flee directions and etc, you could simply have a -1 to the cohesion test of units within 3" of elephants when they break. I like that as an idea. The random fl...

The 3 dice idea sounds interesting, and would have a similar result as my earlier thought about causing disorder to foot and severe disorder to mounted - namely that the elephants end up with more dice than their opponents. IMO elephants should win quickly or die quickly - doesn't feel right for th...

Another thing for elephants. Enemy non-nelly mounted should CMT to move closer to elephants in 6MU. That would keep them at a 25pt value. There are a fair number of accounts describing Muslim/Turkish light horse types fighting Hindu elephants. The elephants come off very badly against horse archers...

I vaguely recalled reading somewhere that the Sword and Buckler men were not thought by actual commanders to be all that useful against pike - though they did get lucky once or twice - and were replaced by other infantry in late 15th early 16th c Spanish armies operating in Italy once this became po...

I think allowing an equal number of bases of troops one grade lower to provide support is a good idea, maybe even of any grade. What about allowing routers to pass through any friends without penalty during a joint phase but not the initial route phase? Or maybe allow routers such interpenetrations ...

I'm not thrilled by the idea of a second round of impact combat in the 1st melee phase - it really disrupts the elegant symmetry of the game.

If the problem is in the melee phase fix that.

Fleeing or panicky elephants often did catastrophic damage to their own army's morale and order. An example (amongst others) of of this is Magnesia where nervous elephants fatally compromised the order of the Seleucid phalanx. What if all friends took a -1 to all cohesion tests if there is a unit of...

In ancient battles troops withdrawing or redeploying could cause panic among their friends. What if any unit which began a Maneuver Phases move at least partially directly in front in an enemy non-skirmisher unit and within its charge reach that ends its move not in such a path causes a cohesion tes...

The ability to do a lot of dancing is often dependent on being able to perform a complex maneuver. What if in order to perform a CMT during the move phase you had to have a general (not fighting in the front rank) in command radius prompt the maneuver. Further each TC could only prompt one CMT test ...

There has been quite a bit of (justifiable in my view) grumbling about the maneuver and filler advantage of smaller units. Back in WRG 6th-7th, etc. a small cost was assigned for each unit in addition to the per figure/base case. In those system sit was (IIRC) 10 points per regular unit and 25 point...

When there are light horse and cavalry armies present the deployment distances work well and give the armies the space required for mobile battles to develop. However it seems to me that the deployment distances are too far apart when both forces are infantry, knight or combined arms armies leading ...