Unlike last time the historical winner are the enemies, the Catholics. Which means we have our work cut out for us. We do not get to select certain troops to bring, instead I believe the different difficulty levels determine the starting morale of your troops.
Our army is outmatched in terms of numbers, experience and power, most of our infantry are raw recruits and the hussars are demoralized. BUT we have nicely set up artillery and detached muskets in fortification and lots of arkebusiers
Therefore, my original plan was to setup arkebusiers and soldiers in the defensive line marked by the red and black lines. The arkbusiers are in front to delay and distract enemy gunfire while the infantry blast away. Sadly, this did not work very well as there was not enough infantry to create a full defensive line and one rout was all it really took to get a chain rout going across the line. However, the flank cavalry did do very well in distracting some of the enemy tercios... And the hussars in the back line didn't really do much and could be reformatted to doing a bit more to help fight the Catholics.
Instead the infantry will set up on the higher points of the hill where it wont take as many to establish a full line and allows for more opportunities to shot at the advancing enemy front. Furthermore, we can not afford to pull any punches, almost all the hussars from the back line will be reformed to create a force to flank on the left side. And thus the great reshuffling commences I make sure to move the pike and shot units out of the fortress on the right to other areas that will need their firepower to hopefully overpower the enemies tercios as they are my only non-raw units.
The right flank charge the enemy and gets the attention of some of the tercios just as the main line engages in light skirmishes, getting ready for the brutal close combats. Our left flank is poised to pounce when it is needed.
After 2 turns of fighting How our center looks. A huge mess, but this works in our favor as it distracts the enemy infantry and allows us to target their artillery and maybe shoot their tercios from behind with our hussars. This makeshift line of arkebusiers will not hold for long though.
The right flank is also not faring to badly, we handled the Catholics' cavalry and dragged three tercios(!) away from advancing towards the hill into trying to fight the cavalry. They did manage to rout a hussar but, again, their role is to buy time for us to alleviate the center so that we can then distribute some troops around to the right flank. Because we simply do not have the infantry to match theirs 1-1.
At the end of turn 14, our akrebusiers have mostly routed and the enemies infantry begins the march towards our infantry line. This sets the percentage of routed units on our side to 38% and for the Catholics only 33%
. I hope that we can make up for this difference with the damage that we have caused their tercios to help with routing them. The remnants of the right wing managed to blindside the enemy tercios by going around them and will help out the reminder of the cavalry that’s holding the forward line on the right and destroy the last pieces of enemy artillery firepower. Within the black circle we can see the beginning of what I tried to minimize as much as possible, melee with the veterans tercios. Again, manageable for now as its only one of them but we can not do a 3-on-1 melees for all of them. Which is way it is great news that we did manage to rout another veteran tercios from all the damage they took.
After a great performance from our pike and shot in melee combat the enemy tercio fell back! This is a great outcome so that we can hopefully rout them before they charge again. However its not all sunshine and rainbows as a kurassirs did manage to get behind out lines through our ill-equipped right flank. Now this is very dangerous situation (as is exemplified by the amount of times I circled it) as it will be able to get a rear charge and one of the tercio's that was focusing on our cavalry on the right flank is bolting straight for the hill now.
We handled the tercio and made it rout! It almost looks like it is up against a firing squad with how all the units decided to shoot at it. The unit dispersed immediately after this which was good news, but we did lose the right side artillery greatly decreasing our ability to inflict psychological and physical damage to the enemies tercios on the right side of the map.
The general situation after a few more turns. A tercio on the right flank approaches the hill just after we managed to get rid of the enemy kuassir that was behind our lines. We need to make sure we get some volleys on it before the unit inevitably comes crashing at the infantry because even with the +100 POA from height difference from the hill, that will not give these raw units a fighting chance. The remnants of both of our cavalry are duking it our in the center, I have sent two reserve hussars out to try and stem the tide so that my infantry can focus fully on the advancing tercios on the left which have routed one the detached muskets in the fortifications. By this point we have managed to turn the battle in our favor with the percentage of routs at 46% for us and 57% for them. But we could still lose if we aren't careful as most of the raw units we have will almost all collapse the moment one of them does.
In spite of that, the worrying was for naught as we manage to win after a few turns at 53% and 62% for the Catholic's by routing one of their later tercios, a early tercio and the rest of their cavalry
. This was a very close battle and a lot of fun! I definitely think the strategy I come up with wasn't the best as it did call for sacrificing a lot of our own troops but it did allow us later on to focus on the Catholic's infantry and then subsequently rout them. The main take away for me is to not be afraid of setting up units that are meant to fall, use them to delay and shoot at the rest of the enemies army that are backed up by this. Now, would we still continue to win the scenario if we were the play out the scenario?
I believe so (although it would continue to be pyrrhic), while our position is a little unstable and we wouldn’t really be able to whittle down the remaining tercios by shooting at them, especially since they destroyed the artillery on the right side. We would have to hope the slopes and numbers we have will give us the POAs needed destroy the last parts of the Catholics army.
Thank you for reading! See you next time for battle of Wimpfen, where we will be the ones hiding in the forests...