Newbury

I am playing around with my Portable ECW rules a little more at the moment, looking at two things. The first is the co-location of artillery with other units, rather than it occupying a square on its own. I covered this in a post earlier this month. The second is a tweak to the way flank attacks work.

Flanking enemy units is basically very easy in most iterations of the Portable Wargame, but over time I've made the effects of being flanked deadlier, especially in how it affects the ability to retreat. For the past year I've been considering ways to help reduce this. I started by looking at making it harder to make a flank attack, but couldn't get that to work for me. But the other day I clicked that really I'd created my own problem by making it harder - nay, impossible - for flanked units to retreat. I went back to the basic Portable Wargame rules and in those a unit can simply retreat, so long as it's not blocked by terrain or other units. So if you are hit in the front and have an enemy on your flank as well, you can still retreat from the unit in front of you.

So for my own Portable ECW rules I have decided to try the following change: When testing for the effects of a hit a unit takes a -1 modifier to the roll if they are in the frontal zone of more than one unit. This makes it more likely that they will simply take a hit, but doesn't preclude a retreat. The rule that a unit cannot retreat if in the front squares of more than one unit is removed. All other retreat rules apply.

To test this I set up my refight of Newbury, which has become a default scenario for any testing, since it has a decent number of units, a relatively simple battlefield and roughly equal forces.

So here is everything set up and ready to go, with Parliament on the right and the Royalists on the left. 

After a couple of moves the two armies were closer together. Parliament were on Round Hill, which is the only objective in the scenario. Both sides had ensconced themselves in enclosures to the north, whilsy the horse of both sides massed on Wash Common to the south.

The cavalry action on Wash Common. Both sides had taken hits.

On their extreme left the Royalists broke through and routed the Parliamentarian horse opposing them.

With their horse looking shaky to the south, the Parliamentarian troop to the north on their left flank advanced, hoping to drive the Royalists out of the enclosures and turn their right flank.

The Royalist horse was slowly grinding down and pushing back the Parliamentarian horse, and were soon able to turn on the flank of Parliament's centre.

Parliament brought up a reserve regiment to hold them off, but their cavalry was collapsing and the Royalists would soon have nothing between them and the Parliamentarian flank and rear.

The last of the Parliamentarian horse routed.

The Royalist horse began to attack Parliament's right. However towards Newbury, Parliament was putting in a string attack on the enclosures.

It wasn't enough, though. Their attacking foot regiment broke against a strong defence by the Royalist foot, and it was enough for Parliament to reach their breakpoint. They failed their first morale test, despite holding the objective, and the battle was over.

The co-located guns got a nice test here, adding in factor to the units they were with in both shooting and close combat. However the flanking changes didn't get tested at all; any units hit in the flank simply took SP hits and didn't get the option to retreat.

So this means I need to play more games ...