I have very much resigned myself to the fact that the low granularity of the Portable Wargame won't allow me to differentiate between different pike/shot ratios. My One-Hour Wargame variant did allow for High Pike and High Shot units, as well as balanced Pike & Shot, but I can't tease it out in the PW. However it does allow me to do all-pike units, as well as all-shot. So here's some all-pike foot bases:
I already had all-shot bases; when I first started trying this period I had them as a specific unit type. In time they morphed into being a bastard hybrid of dragoons and commanded shot, up until now I've been running them as dragoons. Now they've come full-circle, and they are shot units.
So here are the three main types of foot: all-shot, mixed and all-pike.
And since my dragoons are now shot, I made some dragoons.
Finally, because there was space on the paper, I did a couple more bases of horse.
I've started looking at the Junior General figures with a view to doing a Scots Royalist and Covenanter force. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with that though; I will need to do a little bit of tweaking with the available figures in order to make them aesthetically compatible with my current troops.
I should say that I also played a few games over the weekend, and have fed a few tweaks back into the rules. A couple of the games made use of the pike units, which proved quite interesting.
looking good !
ReplyDeleteI do like these paper armies! On the matter of distinguishing all shot, mixed pike and shot and all pike, perhaps one can modify the PW system somewhat.
ReplyDeleteOne possibility that might be worth exploring is that in close combat, 'all shot' count as inferior ('poor') against all but 'all shot' and artillery. That is to say, they get hurt more easily. All pike might count as 'poor' against all incoming shooting (except close combat). All units fully are partially armed with pikes count as 'Superior' (elite) against Horse in close combat.
Might be worth a try.
I give pike & shot units a +1 in all close combat. My idea is to give all-pike bases an additional +1 in combat to their front (so a +2 fighting to their front), but they can't shoot. Shot get a +1 when firing if they don't move, but lose the close combat bonuses for pike (no +1).
DeleteHorse attacking pike are penalised, so would not be penalised against pure shot.