Slitherine

Was this scenario thoroughly tested before inclusion ?

Archers range isnt long enough to reduce the far superior numbers of French so that means the French can hit the staked line in force and go round and through it with ease. Needs more strength in the defence line for the British , or far more archers, or far longer range for the archers more in line with reality.

Just played, I agree, that it's a bit hard for the English.
First of all, although I hit the French knights quite hard with arrows, their superior and elite status prevented them breaking. Also, I cannot understand why the English longbowmen are only average. Even Henry and his knights/commanders are only superior, though the French knights are mostly elite.
What's about "We few, we happy few...". Shouldn't this give some quality bonus?

From a tactical point-of-view, it's a bit problematic, that the French mounted knights - more or less unhistorically - moved through the woods on both flanks of the English. As troop strength of the English is not good, flanking through the woods kills the longbow on both flanks, PDs or no PDs.

Another point, the image for the peasant levies is not well chosen, imho, as it display more or less civilians and dogs, which I would expect for families, but not levies, even if they are mob type units.

The question I would like to ask is where did the designer of the scenario get the plan of the battle or battlefield?

I do have some lovely books about this battle and particularly I can recommend "Agincourt 1415" by Matthew Bennett and published by Osprey. The book is full of information and has plenty of nice maps and battleplans and even numbers of men involved.

Now, I know that we can argue this and that, but clearly the scenario bears little or no relation to anything I have seen on Agincourt in any book so far, for instance the whole of the area in front of the English line was a newly ploughed, rain-soaked field, which from all accounts severely hampered the French attacks. This was so severe that the French foot knights, were easy pickings for the English Archers and many of them drowned in the mud were they fell and were subsequently trodden over by their comrades. The woods on each flank were impassable to the French, so really should simply be counted as the flank edges of the battlefield, and finally the composition is all wrong.

The English were all on foot and the French were a goodly mix of both but the majority being foot men at arms, as for the peasants, well they were literally non-combatants, so shouldn't even be included, and finally the French had their own archers too. Quality wise, the English (especially the Archers) should be upgraded it was literally a case of kill or be killed, so they should be given a morale boost to reflect this. The French, well I wouldn't give them elite status for this battle as they did so abysmally and even before they started to lose I think that their head wasn't really in the game for this one, so at best they should be superior.

I am going to have a go at redoing this scenario and will submit to the site, so that everyone can have a look at it and hopefully see how this battle should look and play.

Would someone mind posting up a screen shot for the current layout for the battle of agincourt in the scenarios - or would this be breaking some sort of NDA? I didn't get my pre-order in soon enough to get into the beta and I'm kind of interested to see how the current layout looks in the scenario based on what's being said here.

Basically a good scenario, that has to be a bit polished, imho

Lupus wrote:
Basically a good scenario, that has to be a bit polished, imho

The picture betrays what I think is on of FoG's biggest flaws right now- the dearth of terrain tiles. A plain field for them to charge down, with no mud or any other obstruction? Seriously? And only 4 or so different types of trees, no buildings, no walls, no anything... really, really lacking. Even where they do have a type of terrain, such as scrub, there simply isn't enough diversity in the different depictions of scrub to make large quantities of it look attractive.

Pleased you had exactly the same issues as me Lupus - my thinking was that the sides need to be either the edge of the map OR maybe distort history in FOG terms and make in to water to stop the French coming through the woods. I had to withdraw both flanks in the actual battle to defend against that threat which weakened the centre but it would not have held anyway. And maybe making the area in front of the British in to marsh would help slow the central advance. Certainly the levels of the participants need to be revised as well to balance it. As it is now, History could not be repeated. I also agree its a nice scenario though but needs a fair bit of tweaking to make it properly playable to have any chance of being able to repeat what happened.

SWR1962 I also agree on the facts of the battle as I have some books on various Battles, including Agincourt, and it doesnt match too well hence some of my comments above - look forward to seeing what you can come up with

Apart from troop quality questions, we have bascially two major terrain issues:

1) Flanks: The forest on the flanks isn't enough obstacle for the French knights to not pass through. In order to simulate the charge across the field, one could make use of the - currently unsused - blocked hex type.
Some years ago I beta-tested several game by John Tiller, mainly Pz Campaigns and Early American Wars series. Here the scenario designer could mark hexes as blocked, meaning that neither AI or player units could enter, such forcing the AI through the free hexes. So, if the flanking woords would be blocked, it would forces the French through the open field.

2) Open plains instead of mud. A short term solution could be numerous swamp hexes to simulate mud. A better, log-term solution would be introducing different ground situation like soft ground or frozen ground with an impact on movement capability of the various troop types.
I originally planned to make a Lake Peipus 1242 scenario, but with no winter terrain available, I skipped the idea. Would be nice to have something white available, similiar to the arid terrain.

I only played for the first time after it was put in the beta. It will be changed. I dont think it is possible for the French to lose if they try!

I've added to the wish list the need for more terrain tiles including winter ones & weather related such as muddy fields, iced lakes etc.

I have redone this scenario, basically the same field, but added all the extra terrain details such as ploughed fields across the entire English and French battle lines, less trees and the road which ran across the front of the French. I have added far more French foot knights, some archers, more mounted knights and done away with the peasants, and finally more English archers. I have made the unit sizes smaller for the archers and foot knights and upgraded the English archers to superior whilst downgrading the French to superior. Afgter play testing I found I ran out of time but the french lost half their points total for the loss of no English, so I added an extra 5 turns and put the French just inside the English bow range, hopefully this will be enough. I will make one more play test and then submit it to the site. Visually it looks great, and from the English viewpoint you are wondering how the hell you can possibly win with the overwhelming amount of French nobility on show, but hopefully this will be feasible even if it is very hard fought. I may or may not put some marshy areas mixed in with the ploughed fields to simulate areas of extremely boggy/muddy ground, but will first see how the next playtest goes. All I need to do then is figure how to post it on the site, any suggestions will be welcome as I hope to get this done tonight.

Send any scenarios to Keith

Just finished playtesting and it was a very tight game, unfortunately I ran out of time again (the arrow storm isn't quite fast enough) just as I thought I had it in the bag, I (the English) lost 13 out of 19 break points and the French lost 49 out of 54 break points. The English lines were broken and there was a lot of fighting in the rear of the English line but they held on and were just about to end the French when dayligt ended. I have now chosen to add random wet patches (marshes) to the field to break up the French advance a bit more and because they look nice (a brownish/green water may look even better) and I have also added an extra 5 turns, so its now 30 game turns. I am happy enough to submit it and let everyone else playtest it from here in, so will get on that now. Here is a screen shot, hope you like the look of it.

Looks good so far, but a couple of suggestions. The road should be running vertically on the field of battle in regards to the battle line lay out you currently have set up (at least from most maps of the battle I've seen). In addition, I think the english longbowmen on the flanks should be positioned so that the english battle line ends up making an outward V. (The wings of the line being positioned so that the french are funneled into the group). Also, I think the first line of french troops should be a mix of cross bowmen/archers on the wings, with the dismounted knights/men at arms in the center. Just my suggestions at least. Wish I could play test it for ya!

Thanks for the suggestions Ryan,

I took the battlefield/battleplan from the Osprey book "Agincourt 1415" by Matthew Bennett. There are several roads in the maps/plans in that book, a couple as you quite rightly pointed out do run vertically but these are on the extreme flanks so I didn't bother depicting them, the road on the plan is simply the linking road between the two. Again after reading the book I based the battleplans on those offered in the book and also as suggested by the author based on historical evidence that he presented.

The English line may or may not have arched forwards to funnel in the French but this would have meant making the map smaller or adding even more units so that the English could not be flanked. The arching would only have been slight anyway and due to the restrictions of the angles presented by the hex's on the map I thought that this would have exagerrated the look of English line up.

As for the French, apparently the archers/crossbowmen were pushed backwards by both lines of foot knights as they were eager to deal death to the English, so this is why they are relegated to the third line, also it would have been a very different battle if the French bows had been able to fire as they had almost as many men as the English archers.

I have submitted it to Keith as per Iain's request so hopefully they will like it enough to use it, if not and they throw it on the scrap heap I will submit it elsewhere for everyone to have a go at.

SRW1962 wrote:Just finished playtesting and it was a very tight game, unfortunately I ran out of time again (the arrow storm isn't quite fast enough) just as I thought I had it in the bag, I (the English) lost 13 out of 19 break points and the French lost 49 out of 54 break points. The English lines were broken and there was a lot of fighting in the rear of the English line but they held on and were just about to end the French when dayligt ended. I have now chosen to add random wet patches (marshes) to the field to break up the French advance a bit more and because they look nice (a brownish/green water may look even better) and I have also added an extra 5 turns, so its now 30 game turns. I am happy enough to submit it and let everyone else playtest it from here in, so will get on that now. Here is a screen shot, hope you like the look of it.

Sounds and looks good - cant wait to try the new version

Hi, i wait the new version also...I've played the first version delivered by the new patch, but i've defeated the english army very easy.

Regarding the historical sources for the scenario, I have the Osprey book on the battle, and it is very flawed because a very poor mastery of French sources. In order to get a more balanced and historically accuarte scenario what should be done is to reduce the odds. The best English sources put the English army at 5.900 strong, and the best French sources put the French army at 10.500
Another question is the composition of the French army, it wasn´t by any means, a Feudal army, it was an army levied on indenture contracts, very similar to the English army in that regard.

Without wanting to get into a debate about the numbers involved (I would leave that to the author to defend his work) as I am NOT a professional historian, I would like to say that at best any author of any work about a battle such as Agincourt will have to make some guesses and assumptions on numbers involved, at best they may have some documentation from a source that may have existed at around the time of the battle.

For instance it is still unclear as to how many English were there and even exactly how the English formed a battle line, I like many others have been brought up to believe that the standard fighting formation for the English archers was a Herce (basically a wedge pointing towards the enemy), now the thinking is totally different and even that the Herce was an invention by a British historian. What is clear is that a large French army (much larger than the English army) was defeated in a very hard fought and bloody battle on a rain soaked ploughed field near Agincourt.

I have made the English army about 6,000 strong and the French army 25,000 strong, which although based very heavily on the Osprey book this is within the realms of lots of other account/books about the battle that I have read over the years. What I do know is that I have played this battle with these numbers and without penalising the French or making the English superhuman in any way I was able (despite my own initial disbelief) to win a very, very hard fought victory against the French army. Had the numbers been only 2-1 in favour of the French then they would have simply been butchered by the English in the game I played even if I had upgraded the French and downraded the English.

As with all aspects of history there will be very different views of the battle depending upon whether you are English or French, and as always history does tend to be written by the victor (unless its written in Hollywood, then you can simply write anything you wish and pass it off as history, Braveheart to name just one travesty.) so the basis of the history of the battle is probably coming more from English sources than French.

Final version, done and playtested. Will play great in multiplayer for both sides now and will hopefully be the start of series of similar battles I will create over the next few weeks.

Now, who fancies Bosworth Field?