In order to play well you need to know the enemy army but, even more important, to know yours. In this battle I realized that I didn´t know the army I was using, and so I played one of my worst games in a long time. In fact, I really played against myself!
I won initiative and decided to put much terrain to stop the enemy brigades and use them as bases for my highlanders. I chose forests and they fell as following:
The swedes concentrated almost all their army on my right wing, far from the central forest that would obviously be mine. The plan seemed to had a good start but you can already see the chaotic deployment of my army, with units without room and having to start in the forests. That being said, that was an impressive battle line!
The swedish army waits for the start of the battle
I advance and claim the forest! I try to press on my left wing.
On my right flank I decide to wait for them and try to flank its brigades from the forest. But the forest near my base edge disrupts my mobility.
My mounted can´t match theirs, even with the help of the hill, so I decide to stop his mounted attack with my infantry, but they move so slow due to the forest. Maybe they won´t have time to redeploy!
On the left wing I succesfully press on the enemy dragoons.
The swedish brigades are getting near!
It seems that the enemy mounted attack on the right wing will be stopped.
I annihilate the enemy dragoons. Both armies manoeuvre. One swedish brigade suffer casualties by my fire but at that moment I had realized a great mistake: the forests not only disrupt the higlanders being difficult terrain, they prevented my second line from firing!! My supposed advantage in volume of fire was gone! I got into a terrible mess trying to move and optimize fire.
On the right wing, disaster! The brigade that prevented his mounted attack is annihilated by mounted ans artillery fire. The flank of my whole battle line was open! I had to order a square and some other troops to pivot, and fortunately the troops took action without delay, had it not been the case the battle would have been over rather quickly.
Close combat comes and swedish superiority takes its toll.
And time was called, something that saved my army from certain defeat. We had both four or six points lost by that time. I chose terrain awfully bad and made a mess of deployment, taking away my army´s strenghts. Well, not really me but Montrose
