Whalley Rerun

I haven't tried this scenario for ages, but with a low unit-count and some open areas I thought that it would offer some excellent flanking opportunities in order to test my rules changes.

Here's a rundown of the forces:

Parliament

1 x Commander (Colonel Shuttleworth)
1 x Elite Pike & Shot (Shuttleworth's Foot)
1 x Average Pike & Shot (Brereton's Foot)
1 x Average Dragoons
2 x Raw Horse

Royalists

1 x Commander (Earl of Derby)
1 x Average Pike & Shot (Molyneux's Foot)
1 x Elite Pike & Shot (Tyldesley's Foot)
1 x Raw Pike & Shot (Fylde's Clubmen) - This unit cannot fire and starts with a Strength of 3
1 x Raw Dragoons
2 x Average Horse (Derby's Horse and Houghton's Horse)

The action starts with the Royalist advance party, consisting of Tyldesley's Foot and the dragoons, being surprised by Shuttleworth's Foot and Parliament's dragoons. To cover this I had Parliament go first. To simulate surprise, and the the fact that a lot of each side's forces were unprepared and acting as reinforcements, I gave the Royalists only 2 activation dice on the first turn, and only 4 on the second. Parliament was restricted to 4 activation dice on the first turn as well.

Tyldesley's Foot beat a hasty retreat when Parliament's foot opened fire on them. Surprisingly the dragoons stood their ground. 

The Royalist advanced party fell back towards the stream, but their horse was coming up and engaged their Parliamentarian opposing numbers.

Colonel Shuttleworth advanced his foot in pursuit of the Royalists

The Royalist horse was held back, allowing Parliament's horse to cross the stream and attack Lord Derby's troops. However the poor Parliamentarian horse wasn't really up to the task and was driven off completely.

With their forces now consolidated the Royalists advanced across the stream, and slowly began to push the Parliamentarians back.

Molyneux's Foot broke under fire ...

... but elsewhere the Royalist advance was a resounding success, the high-point of which was Fylde's Clubmen striking Colonel Shuttleworth's veteran foot in the flank and routing them.

Reduced to a regiment of foot and some dragoons, Parliament's army broke.

I fought it again the next day. After having a look at the terrain on Google Maps I made the stream trickier to cross in the second game (stop when you reach it and on the next bound the only move you can make is to cross one square). This time the initial Parliamentarian volley destroyed the Royalist dragoons, whilst Parliament's horse pushed back the Royalist cavalry. The Royalists quickly found themselves on the back foot, and defending the stream-line, but steady fire from Parliament's foot and flank attacks from their horse saw Lord Derby's men break.

The flank attack changes didn't get a massive test in either of these games, since most retreats were blocked anyway, but I will keep trying.

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 ...

The Shipyard Finally Delivers!

Last July I was making some new ships for my Galleys & Galleons fleets. Yesterday I finally finished them, having spent the past week or so pottering away at them and the previous nine months doing nothing with them.

And here they are.

Most are just duplicates of types I've made before, but these coffee-stirrer jacht/schooners are a new design.

These two are a newer design as well; they're similar to my smaller galleons but not quite as long. I can't remember why I thought they'd be a good idea, but I made them anyway.

Anyway, this probably gives me enough sailing ships for a while (although I may make a couple more of those jacht/schooner things).

North Sea Pursuit

1916. The dastardly Hun have bombarded an insignificant English coastal town and are running for home. But the Royal Navy are hot on their tail! And they have ships moving to cut off the German escape as well.

The stage was set for another Thursday evening game of Broadside: Empires of Steel.

Here's the Germans - eleven cruisers and light cruisers. And maybe battlecruisers. To be honest I'm not sure. Their objective was to get into the blue zone at the end of the table. British ships would be pursuing them, and some capital ships would appear at the sides of the blue zone as well. Any German ship not in the blue zone at the end of six turns would be assumed sunk by the High Seas Fleet.

Into the action as the British arrive in hot pursuit. They had the problem that they could either only fire their forward guns, or risk losing ground against the Germans by turning to use their full broadsides. That said they managed some telling hits on the Germans.

The British took some hits back. The dastardly Hun were being assisted by zeppelins! Whilst SMS Bayern shelled her, HMAS Australia was bombed by one of the mighty gasbags.

As the Germans approached their safety zone the British capital ships began to appear. The Germans took HMS Warspite under fire, but were taking hits in return.

I thought I'd taken a few more pictures, but obviously not. We had to abandon the game halfway through because we ran out of time; the scenario was simply too big for an evening. At the time we finished the Germans had lost a couple of light cruisers, whilst Australia was close to sinking as well. The Germans looked set to reach their safety zone within the time limit, but would still have to spend a few turns being battered by the three capital ships that had turned up by the end whilst also dealing with the pursuers. There was still plenty of action left in the game.

Aggressive Outfolk

Having painted them I wanted to get my new Outfolk onto the table, so I set up a game of Paleo Diet. I was a little over-ambitious with the scenario, however. I had two groups of hunters, both after a single mammoth in the centre of the table - the tribe which made the killing blow would be the victors. I added in some wild cattle for the fun of it and, of course, a group of opportunist Outfolk

One tribe - the Red Heads - closed in on the mammoth.

Or most of them did. One of them, armed with a stone-axe, went hunting the Blondes. 

And killed one.

Another Blonde rushed over to avenge his comrade and was also killed.

This fighting attracted the Outfolk, who were now close up to various hunters and looking very threatening.

The mammoth (remember him) became very agitated and attacked one of the Blondes. The Blondes were not having a good day.

Their day got worse when the Outfolk attacked their slinger.

The Outfolk were now getting very aggressive, and the hunters of both tribes were devoting most of their attentions to fending them off.

Just to add to the fun, one of the cattle decided there was too much noise and movement and charged a Red-Head. 

By now both tribes were down to two hunters apiece, and the Blondes didn't have anyone unwounded.

Both tribes withdrew. The mammoth was going to be too hard to hunt in these circumstances.

There was plenty of action in this game, but at the end of the day it was all a little unsatisfying since it turned into a massive brawl. Probably not my best designed Palaeo Diet setup.