Slitherine

Hi all,

our group has just started FoG-R again after a long bout of ancients and the topic of artillery came up, and more importantly, being able to move through it.

As we understand it, you cannot interpenetrate artillery with mounted units. This is fine for your own guns and own mounted, but seems to become a bit strange when you capture enemy batteries.

As we understand the rules, if you were to capture a battery with a mounted unit, your troops can not then pass through the captured guns to do anything else (like say loot the baggage or something useful like that). We can't find any exceptions in the rules to tell us otherwise but it does seem a little strange.

Are we missing something here?

We mused on the somewhat gamey tactic of fielding rubbish light artillery just to block up an enemies mounted flank (slightly expensive way of doing it, but if they can't cross the gun line you could block off a decent part of the table that way) so I at least are pretty sure we are doing something wrong here.


thanks

Are we missing something here?

Nope, you've got it dead right. Bizarrely, mounted can leap six foot hedges and drainage ditches with ease, but they can't weave through a gun battery.

Uncontrolled Artillery is a major anomaly in the rules (well, minor anyway). If it really causes problems, either remove them when captured or treat them as a linear obstacle for movement purposes.

Dave

As Dave said, you're doing it right and, given that we haven't got much else to complain about with these rules, it's one of the few things left that need to be resolved.

My personal preference is that Artillery is just removed if you can't (or don't want to) re-crew it when you capture it, but nobody else seems to favour that. So my latest thoughts:

1) If you capture artillery but can't (or don't want to) re-crew it, replace the models with a marker of the same size as the number of bases in the artillery BG.
2) These bases can then be moved over as if good going.
3) If the original owner moves over (or into contact with) the bases, they recover the artillery (and can optionally re-crew it if an appropriate BG) provided there are no enemy currently in contact with (or on top of) the marker.
4) Recovered artillery can be recaptured as in 3.
5) Artillery BGs count as lost if not currently in the posession of the original owner.
6) Only the original owner takes CTs for seeing Artillery captured, and only if it is crewed when captured.

No Kevin

I think you are absolutely right just remove it, I would like that anyway but definitely if you can't recrew it, that said with the rest of the rules good it is a minor thing that doesn't get me to annoyed, but something we aught to sort at some stage

cheers

Alasdair