Armada Update

Behind the scenes here at Chateau Polemarch, all has been activity. Actually, that is not the case. All has been not-terribly good health, suffered by myself and the Estimable Mrs P. We appear to have cross infected each other with colds. She acquired one, and donated it to me. Not to be outdone, I have returned the compliment and so she is now sniffling. One of the joys of married life, I suppose.

Anyway, before this becomes a further tale of woe, I have been beavering away at the Armada project. I do not exactly recall what the state of play was when I last reported, but the Armada and elements of the English navy have been rebased. I think I might have noted before that rebasing the ships from thin card to plastic card was a lot harder than I thought, except for those ships where the glue chipped off in one go.

Beyond that, catalogues have been perused, orders dispatched and painting, and some basing has been undertaken. I am now about ten bases away from having a viable wargame of the Armada landing on the beach north of Whitby, and we shall then see what happens. I now have suitable untrained bands, as well as trained bands, Spanish infantry and, the last off the production line, naval guns and crews. There is a fair amount of evidence from the Irish wars of the sixteenth century that naval guns were landed and used, incidentally. I am having to use Napoleonic figures, however.

Firstly, of course, I shall need some wargame rules. My first response was to use the Polemos: English Civil War rules, which I had a hand. But, firstly, to do so would break the Polemos ethos, which is to treat each period on its own merits. Secondly, they would not work for the Wars of the Counter-Reformation, because the troop types are different. I have Spanish sword and buckler men to storm the beaches, for example. They did not exist in the English Civil War.

So PM: ECW are not viable. I have perused other rule sets which I have on my shelves which are not ECW-centric. I have DBR, which may well work for the period, but I am not so keen on them as I was. I have Renaissance Principles of War, which does not seem to be the sort of rule set suitable for this sort of battle. I also have, in the depths of my archive, George Gush’s WRG Renaissance Rules and also Tercio. I am afraid, however, that I lack both the time and the patience for the. I have perused the Perfect Captain’s Spanish Fury rules, but I simply cannot get the hang of them.

So I am a bit stuck. I know the sort of thing I am looking for, and the sort of battle I would like to fight, but cannot find the suitable rule set. I suppose I shall have to write my own, stealing bits from here and there that I like and might fit with my ideas and with the sort of thing I am trying to do.

I do have a problem with this approach, however. No rule set I have ever written survives first contact. Some drafts did not, indeed, survive putting the soldiers on the table, let alone fighting a wargame. This is not, or, I feel, should not be a major problem, but I find it to be so. I ought, I know, to have a more lassiez-fare attitude to this. What happens on the table happens, even though a subsequent rule change would make it impossible. After all, apparently impossible things do happen in warfare. Rules do not cover everything.

I am occasionally accused of being a perfectionist. That might be a charge that would stick, although it is strenuously denied. But I do admit to liking to be at least consistent, which is difficult if the rules, the very framework of the battles I fight, keep changing around me. Inconsistencies will abound, and as I am hoping to turn this into a campaign game (I am not painting all these peasants, guns and crews and rebasing entire navies for just one game. Even if the Spanish fail to take Whitby, they will try again somewhere else). Adjusting, say, the effectiveness of a 9 pounder between one game and the next could raise objections from my little lead slaves, at least, that they are dragging these dead weights over the Yorkshire Moors to no avail. I would have no answer to them, except to remove their straw and tell them to get the guns to Pickering and back by daybreak.

I probably need to re-educate myself, along the lines of ‘if you take that attitude you’ll never get anywhere’. Like Alice, I often give myself good advice, although I do not always take it. For some reason, probably due to my tendency for perfectionism at least with fairly abstract things, I do like them to be right. I can live with poorly painted soldiers (and, in this project, I am doing so), but inconsistent rules freak me out a bit.

I suspect that what will happen will be something like that. I will jot some rules down, pinching bits from DBR and PM: ECW (and even Polemos: SPQR, because I write it and so I quite like it (even if no-one else does, so there)) and give the game a go. The rules will morph at the latest at the point where my shiny new rowing boats with Spanish assault troops hit the beach. I will reach a conclusion of some description, but feel vaguely unsatisfied. A week or so later I will have re-written the rules and have another go. Something similar will happen. This may cycle on for a bit before I give up in frustration, and most of the planning and painting will be wasted.

I will then move on to the next project. Fortunately, I know what that will be: rebasing the Tibetans.