ECW AAR - Baroque Rules

[Captain Darling]

We played our second ECW game using Baroque rules last November (so yes I am a bit late with this AAR!). It was another balanced scenario with two sides of 600 points using the rules army lists as we were introducing George and Al to the rules, we'll get a bit more fancy next time!

Hidden deployment was used and surprisingly both sides set up with infantry in their centre and left and all their cavalry on their right, an interesting situation.
The Royalists continued with their plan whilst the Parliamentarians changed theirs and marched their mounted men across the front of their line to face the Royalist cavalry.
So while the Roundhead horse redeployed the Cavaliers trampled a large number of Parliamentary foot!
When the two sides horsemen finally faced off the Roundhead Army morale was broken and they fled from the field!
A Royalist victory, thanks to their bold use of cavalry!
I wonder if the Parliamentarians had kept to their plan and used their cavalry to push the Royalist left whether the result may have been much more interesting, as it was while the Roundhead horse wasted time redeploying the Cavalier horse used that same time to gain the Royalist a big advantage! The cavalry face off was fairly even but it did not take many losses to push the Roundheads over the edge!

Cavaliers face off against the sole Parliamentarian infantry unit to survive the initial Royalist surge!


There was some desultory fire between the armies infantry units in the centre before the Royalist e decided the battle!


There are more pictures and AAR stuff on the TSOG Blog here...
https://toysoldiersforoldgits.blogspot.com/2022/01/another-ecw-aar-baroque-rules.html

[Battle Brush Sigur]

Thanks for the write-up! Looks like a fun game. :-)

Did you use any rules amendments? I'm considering shifting cannon fire modifiers one to the right altogether to give cannon a bit more range compared to muskets.

Did you get the impression that the two players who weren't familiar with the period 'get' what the rules try to convey about warfare in the 17th century?

[Captain Darling]

Hey BBS thanks!

We played the rules as written in both our games so far, we agree looking at the rules either artillery range is too short or musket range is too long. Two things have come up; no one at during the games used long range musketry as the range modifier meant little chance of success and holding your first fire to the last minute was important so once musketry began the units were pretty close and artillery was pretty shit as this point and that’s how it played out in the games. We think we will lengthen the artillery long Ange a bit next game and see what happens.

The newbies caught onto the rules quickly, one with a knowledge of the period thought the rules gave a good period feel the other enjoyed the game!

[Battle Brush Sigur]

Cool. Yeah, at first I was a bit worried about the potentially long musket range, but that's offset quite well by the modifiers. In my recent test game of the rules (I'd played back in 2016, but forgot everything about the game), musket fire only really happened at point-blank or short range, not the least because the bonus for first fire is quite substantial in these rules.

I tried shifting the cannon range band modifiers, and I think it works quite nicely. In my game I just used one light cannon per side, so they didn't really do much anyway, but it feels more proper to me.