Slitherine

fogman wrote:there are ways to keep a frontline in the flow of the battle without 'watching a simulation'. the present situation of aerial dogfight is not acceptable, no more than light troops commando behaviour in fog is acceptable. but maybe it's just me.

And yet, your primary sphere of interest, the early 16th century, is a prime example of armies not maintaining solid battle lines.

And don't be fooled by the neat battle diagrams you see in books - they only show the position before everything went to hell.

Rather look at some of the contemporary depictions of 16th century battles, and, of course, the battle accounts, with which you are very familiar. Look at the later stages of each battle, not the initial deployments.

fogman wrote:there are ways to keep a frontline in the flow of the battle without 'watching a simulation'. the present situation of aerial dogfight is not acceptable, no more than light troops commando behaviour in fog is acceptable. but maybe it's just me.

Overall I feel this game does give value to maintaining a continuous line, certainly more so than FOGAM (which doesn't have flank attacks) I mean realistically a commander would only command what, 2 ,3 maybe four "elements"? You would need a game where you could only give general orders to those battles/ wings, whatever you want to call them and then allow the Ai to move and fight as it wishes. More realistic but less game... I suppose you are going to remove a lot of mobility in your modded scenarios, strip lights from the game etc., which is fine. Different approaches are always fun to try out.

As for light foot in FOG I agree completely, however more based on their speed than anything else ( and the ability to make then "stand" vs heavy troops so you can pin them and get rear hits!) Modding their movement to the same as medium infantry goes a long way in FOGAM, no longer can javelineers simply waltz up to cavalry with a high probability to evade., even knights often catch em. (this is moddable btw in FOGAM)

TheGrayMouser wrote:Overall I feel this game does give value to maintaining a continuous line, certainly more so than FOGAM (which doesn't have flank attacks)

I didn't realise that. (It's a while since I played it).

Wow, I have never seen those prints before RBS, are they on a specific historical site ?

TheGrayMouser wrote:Wow, I have never seen those prints before RBS, are they on a specific historical site ?

I just google searched for battles I knew to be confused affairs. The top one is Pavia, the bottom one is Moncontour from the French Wars of Religion.

rbodleyscott wrote:

TheGrayMouser wrote:Overall I feel this game does give value to maintaining a continuous line, certainly more so than FOGAM (which doesn't have flank attacks)

I didn't realise that. (It's a while since I played it).

Haha, now the cats out of the bag and any fleeting advantage vs you in a FOGAM game is gone . I think that the very fluid nature of movement in FOGAm (and hexes) made rear hits pretty easy to get, adding flanks with the same mal effect would have made combat a smorgasboard of piling up on any enemy and evaporating them immedietly!

not quite sure how the pictures prove anything. the first one is by one hans schaufelein who, from his wiki info, can't be said to know much about war and like most artists of the time was probably more guided by artistic license than situational realism. the second one, date unknown, depicts a 1569 battle (not exactly early 16th century) which i know well because i wrote a scenario for FoG on it based on the only monograph ever written on it that i'm aware of, and being primarily a cavalry battle was bound to be confused to observers; but it's not because a battle was confused that troops were all over the place and in fact the Fog scenario doesn't play out that way. the picture in fact could have depicted french cuirassiers swirling around british squares at waterloo but nobody would extrapolate anything on the nature of napoleonic warfare.

fogman wrote:not quite sure how the pictures prove anything.

They weren't intended to on their own. The point, however, is that in this period units seem to have operated pretty much independently in very large bodies with large gaps between them. They did not operate in solid battle lines, which are much more a feature of earlier and later periods. Even if the army started off with cavalry in the gaps between the infantry units, the confusion of battle soon broke up anything that could really be called a battle line.

The game forces later armies to use proper battle lines because (as GrayMouser says) their units' flanks are much more vulnerable than the earlier massive units, and also because the army with a proper battle line will easily outshoot the army that is scattered all over the place.

Italian Wars arquebusiers are represented in the game as Light Foot because (apart from in Spanish armies) they did not operate closely enough with the pikes in this period be represented by mixed units, and they would be roadkill against pike keils if represented by Medium Foot.

Having said that, I am working on French Wars of Religion scenarios and in many of those the Huguenot arquebusiers have been represented as Medium Foot.

the problem right now is encapsulated by this one situation: i have a swiss pikes in front of a rodelero unit. i tried to turn its facing. can't do it. the swiss pike cannot do stationary turn but can walk right past the spanish changing direction twice in the process. in fact two lines of opposing infantry can walk right past each other, turn around and reverse the battle lines.

speaking french wars of religion, once i'm done with seminara, i'll work on porting moncontour over, and then dreux (but only after i rewrite it for FoG first)

fogman wrote:the problem right now is encapsulated by this one situation: i have a swiss pikes in front of a rodelero unit. i tried to turn its facing. can't do it. the swiss pike cannot do stationary turn but can walk right past the spanish changing direction twice in the process. in fact two lines of opposing infantry can walk right past each other, turn around and reverse the battle lines.

Hmm, yes that is an issue. It is an inconsistency between the priority target rules and the ZOC rules. Keils ignore ZOCs - the reason being so that gendarmes cannot stop keils advancing merely by standing beside them jeering. I will give some thought to how this can be dealt with more realistically. Probably by making them not ignore the ZOC of a priority target to their front. This will stop them from bipassing the enemy to their front.

Thanks for pointing out this anomaly.

Wait, wait! You can't do that -- I used that to good effect against you in our game!

You can't take away my best tactic...

John