PIRATES! In Oxford!! In 1695!!

[madaxeman]

The "I can't believe it's a serious army choice" Buccaneers return in 4 match reports from the BHGS Doubles, taking on opponents from the year 1695 in a fury of pirate-based action.



See a 900AP Pirate army in action against non-historical and entirely infeasible opponents such as The Tatars, The Anglo-Dutch, The French and finally, The Poles and Lithuanians as Piracy reaches shorelines previously thought safe from the scourge of the Caribbean (especially the Tatars, on account of Mongolia technically being land-locked).

The reports even feature proper maps and stuff so you can make some sense of the action, as well as just being vaguely amused by the bits I've spliced into the reports..

tim

[Sarmaticus]

Excellent report. Interesting to see Louis XIV's army performing "the Tartar dance" more effectively than the Tartars: engaging to gain time and exert pressure; using the available space to give time for shooting to provide a weakness to be exploited by mobile reserves. It's pretty much how fencers counter-attack.
It's how one might imagine a pirate band being dealt with by a French force of similar scale. What makes those tactics seem odd is when they work at the level of an army where coordination of fire and manoeuvre was just not that good and artillery took hours to have any effect on any but the most dense of targets.
There's an inherent problem of granularity, which delivers a major effect somewhere rather than a minor effect everywhere. Another problem for the game as a simulation seems to lie in part at least with lists and command and control that allow thevsame flexibility to commanders of farmies as to those of detachments.

[nikgaukroger]

I really hope the French list on the wiki is somewhat in error, otherwise it was highly illegal

[kevinj]

The DH need to be Unarmoured. That would put it 6 points over by my calculations, but otherwise OK.

[madaxeman]

Ok, I've changed it...!

Anyway, hopefully it's sheds some light also on the Massed Horse tactic, and how (IMO) it relies quite heavily on the use of Heavy artillery, and to a lesser extent, low dice volume additional sniping from Dragoons and/or LF who can shoot at full effect from within the flank zones.

In this particular game most of the enemy horse deployed, and stayed, outside of the range of our 2 medium gunnes, and without the 4 heavy artillery shooting at us and effectively forcing us to come forwards we might have been inclined to stay back as well - but that was not a option.

Even If that had happened I think the Horse army still would have had a pretty good chance just on the basis of doing a Frontal charge at the Pirates - which would have been very entertaining!

On balance I'm more comfortable with the idea that a massed mounted army will and should have trouble digging a foot-heavy enemy out of a defensive position, should be forced to have a go at doing so by enemy artillery and should need to consider thinks like flank marching to do so, rather than what happened here, which was that the mounted army could adopt the tactical defensive position, redeploy easily away from enemy On balance I'm more comfortable with the idea that a massed mounted army will and should have trouble digging a foot-heavy enemy out of a defensive position than

I've copied this to the other thread too

[nigelemsen]

Excellent report. Interesting to see Louis XIV's army performing "the Tartar dance" more effectively than the Tartars: engaging to gain time and exert pressure; using the available space to give time for shooting to provide a weakness to be exploited by mobile reserves. It's pretty much how fencers counter-attack.
It's how one might imagine a pirate band being dealt with by a French force of similar scale. What makes those tactics seem odd is when they work at the level of an army where coordination of fire and manoeuvre was just not that good and artillery took hours to have any effect on any but the most dense of targets.
There's an inherent problem of granularity, which delivers a major effect somewhere rather than a minor effect everywhere. Another problem for the game as a simulation seems to lie in part at least with lists and command and control that allow the same flexibility to commanders of farmies as to those of detachments.

As the tartar player... Yes we made real hard work of it... With hind sight should have just "phalanxed" up the cavalry gone forward... massed shooting, charged and seen what happens.. which wasn't really fixed until Warfare... Being minus any Artillery does make a difference and looking forward to this weekend and seeing how the "Mongols with artillery" (Qing) do... but still I find Mongols very enjoyable to play with... especially when you get to disengage successfully, really annoying your opponent Game three I think that was...

[Delbruck]

Ok, I've changed it...!

Anyway, hopefully it's sheds some light also on the Massed Horse tactic, and how (IMO) it relies quite heavily on the use of Heavy artillery, and to a lesser extent, low dice volume additional sniping from Dragoons and/or LF who can shoot at full effect from within the flank zones.

In this particular game most of the enemy horse deployed, and stayed, outside of the range of our 2 medium gunnes, and without the 4 heavy artillery shooting at us and effectively forcing us to come forwards we might have been inclined to stay back as well - but that was not a option.

Even If that had happened I think the Horse army still would have had a pretty good chance just on the basis of doing a Frontal charge at the Pirates - which would have been very entertaining!

On balance I'm more comfortable with the idea that a massed mounted army will and should have trouble digging a foot-heavy enemy out of a defensive position, should be forced to have a go at doing so by enemy artillery and should need to consider thinks like flank marching to do so, rather than what happened here, which was that the mounted army could adopt the tactical defensive position, redeploy easily away from enemy On balance I'm more comfortable with the idea that a massed mounted army will and should have trouble digging a foot-heavy enemy out of a defensive position than

I've copied this to the other thread too

Wasn't this the standard French tactic used during the Great Pirate Scare of 1695 . On the other hand, the Dutch Blue Guards found the use of massed firelocks totally ineffectual against the pirate hordes, and thus returned to the use of matchlocks for the Great War of Succession on the Spanish Main only five years later .... with very disastrous results. The world has never been the same.

Oh, BTW.... the most entertaining thing in Field of Glory these days is reading Tim's battle reports. Perhaps something of a sad commentary.

[Jhykronos]

Oh, BTW.... the most entertaining thing in Field of Glory these days is reading Tom's battle reports. Perhaps something of a sad commentary.

I thought his name was Tim.

Anyway, I don't know about sad, but I wish Slitherine would support their tabletop product(s) with even half the attention Madaxeman puts into his work.

[timmy1]

Tim

Wonderful and very enjoyable set of battle reports. I have learnt a lot from them.

Only one question. While I know that every other player on the planet might choose French for the Impact Foot, this is Alasdair we are talking about. Why did you expect that he even looked at what foot was in the list other than to take the minimum...?

[moncholee]

Great reports Tim! Here a good player, unlike me, shows that warrior impact foot musket troops have a place in the game if they are well led