Sunday 13 September 2015

More Pike and Shot Units

I made some new units for my paper ECW armies today. Firstly I expanded the colours and styles available to each side. Originally I'd done the Royalist forces all in blue and the Parliamentarians all in red, mostly because that was how the sheet of figures I used for them came. For this batch I changed coat colours, giving a little bit of variety. In addition I made some cavalry variants - helmeted cavalry with swords and pistol-armed cavalry in hats, for example.



As you can see, I also made a couple of generals, and some artillery. The former are just garnish in the basic OHW scenarios, but for larger games I can see them having some use. I have some ideas for command actions floating around which I'd like to try one day. For the artillery I have put one gun on a 3cm square base (the other units are on bases 6cm x 3cm). When rolling for armies a player should roll for the first shot unit received; on a 1-3 it is an artillery base instead. For six-unit games I wouldn't have more than one artillery unit in a force. In terms of rules I have them firing at 4x infantry range (48" in the norma OHW rules), with a short range of 1/2 infantry range (6"). At short range they'd certainly roll 2D6 under my combat system. I haven't decided how they work at longer ranges; 1D6 would be obvious, but I rather like my mechanism for determining out of ammunition, so I did try them rolling 2D6 and picking the best single score for hits, but still going out of ammunition if either dice rolls a '1'. This means that their chance of scoring a hit is the same as at short range, but they can never score more than one hit at long range. If artillery goes out of ammunition it can replenish, but it must spend one turn without being engaged in close combat or moving or pivoting in order to do so. Unlike other units artillery cannot move and then fire.

I also made a couple of bases of armed and dangerous peasants. These are for one of the OHW scenarios which requires a couple of bases of irregulars, but would do for other scenarios as well. I'm not sure they're quite what Neil Thomas had in mind for Swordsmen in his Pike and Shot rules, though.


Anyway, each of my armies now consists of the following:

6 x Pike and Shot bases, 3 x Shot, 3 x Trotters, 3 x Gallopers, 1 x General

In addition I have the two irregular units and 6 x Artillery. I made a lot of the latter in case further play shows that they are better deployed on 6cm x 3cm bases like everything else, in which case I can muster three.

4 comments:

  1. I thought that for the ECW, Scots Highlanders could stand in for swordsmen.

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  2. This a charming project, and I hope that comes across as sincere and not condescending. En masse, the paper units have a wonderful Old School feel.
    I've played with OHW rules a bit and I think you are wise to augment them a bit. As you say, generals are garnish in OHW (the price you pay for really really simple rules) and I find myself wanting a bit more garnish.
    Cheers,
    Michael

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    Replies
    1. They are rules which are easy to augment, and it doesn't take much effort to do so and give a fun game. The paper figures have allowed me to explore a new (to me) area of wargaming with minimal cost and effort.

      If you look at my Battle of Southam post you'l see that I have added some leader-flavoured garnish :)

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