The Northern Meteor

I am continuing to tweak and refine my Great Northern War variant for One Hour Wargames and have played a couple more games to try out ideas I've had.

This evening I had a go at a scenario I've played before - the Flank Attack. One army starts on a hill, the other starts with a small screening force before them and the bulk of their troops on the defender's flank. The defender must turn to face the main attack before it sweeps them from the hill.

I did it before with monsters. Really. It was a fun game in its own right, but as a representation of the original scenario it lacked a certain something. This game was closer to the original intent.

The Russians got to defend. The Swedes got to do the bold, sweeping flank attack. You can guess how the game panned out.

Here are the armies at the start. The Russians had cavalry superiority - two dragoon and a cavalry regiment, to the Swedes' two cavalry regiments - but the Swedes had the edge in infantry - four to three. There was no artillery.

The Russians had the dragoons on their right, and the cavalry on their left. All things considered this wasn't a good move, putting their primary shock troops right in the way of the initial attacks. The Swedish main force was three infantry and a cavalry regiment, whilst the other two units - ne each cavalry and infantry - occupied the Russians' attention from the front.

The Swedish attack rolls in. They moved cavalry around behind the hill, but it took a lot of fire moving into position and after an attack on some Russian dragoons it pretty much withdrew for the rest of the game.

But this was a battle for the Swedish infantry. They charged up onto the hill and the Russians could do little to resist them.

The Russians were soon forced back into a horseshoe line. On their flanks the dismounted dragoons tried to hold off Swedish attacks for as long as they could, but they weren't up to the job.

On turn 8 (of 15) the Swedes destroyed the last Russian defender on the hill ...

.. whilst a final cavalry charge wiped out the surviving dragoons.

This was an easy win for the Swedes, but the they are an army built around this kind of attack. I tried out a different way of reflecting their aggressive infantry tactics in this game. Previously I have allowed their infantry to charge into contact, at the expense of not being able to fire for the rest of the game. However in this game I merely allowed them to ignore the penalty I give to infantry who move and fire so long as they pretty much move straight forward. To offset this their long-range fire is less effective than that of the Russians. In this scenario that wasn't an issue. I will explore this idea again, though, as it did create the right feel.