There must have been a theme developing in recent posts about patience and slow progress. I can report a bit of the latter, again, but I am not sure about the former.
A recent game (actually in the Autumn 1606 campaign turn) more or less denuded my stocks of Japanese, so it is, in a wargaming sense, at least, as well that I am currently painting some more.
On the right you can see the 72 Samurai foot which were painted the other week. On the left you will see the now finished but unbased ashigaru foot with yari. There are 60 of them, which somehow does not make for the poetry of 72 Samurai. But no matter, they are there, painted to my usual low standards are ready for basing. They will have to wait for that, however, as I still have three bases of bowmen and musketeers, and two of Samurai cavalry to start (let alone finish). I tend to base in batches of teens of figures, I admit, although these strip-based figures (they are Irregular) are easier to base than some others.
In other news, I have been adding to the campaign rules, realising that I now need formal rules for Off Board Zones, sea-borne empires and the differences between galley fleets, home fleets and ocean-going fleets. This, of course, adds a bit of complexity to the campaign, but I really cannot have Mediterranean galley fleets nipping over to the Caribbean. You might be a bit surprised to see the difference between ocean-going and home waters galleons, but in reality, most English, French and Dutch warships of the era were designed for home defence, not really have the capability of going a long way. Long-distance routes were usually sailed by armed merchantmen, which had a greater carrying capacity for provisions as well as cargo, and had a far smaller crew than a warship. It was only with the advent of frigate-designed warships in the middle of the Seventeenth Century that ocean-going fleets really got going.
The other major change to the rules is the advent of the African nations and American tribes, along with the Portuguese and Spanish empires. The latter has caused some head-scratching, as you might be able to imagine. After all, the Portuguese Empire stretched from Madeira to Brazil, East and West Africa, India, Ceylon, South East Asia, the Spice Islands, Japan and China. Mind you, most of these places were held only lightly, as factories or trading stations, rather than for occupation and colonisation. The exception to this seems to have been Brazil. Migration there from Portugal seems to be the reason that the rest of the Empire was only lightly held.
Rather fortunately, the Spanish and Portuguese Empires were always kept and administered separately, as, basically, an eastern and a western entity. The main Spanish Empire was, of course, Central and western South America, as well as part of the far south of South America. There were also the Caribbean Islands, southern Florida and, rather stuck out on its own, the Philippines. The latter was linked to the rest of the Empire through Central America, rather than the route back via Africa.
The map has, thus, been rather radically altered, although it might be a bit hard to spot the difference in the following snapshot. The Americas are in the bottom left-hand corner, by the way, just below Africa. Looking at the whole thing, I have deleted the Atlantic off-board zones, given that the Atlantic world is now connected, but the Pacific and Siberian OBZs have survived the cull, and assorted North American OBZs have been added. While I do have the information for which tribes inhabited these areas, the chance of any external forces arriving there in a sufficiently wargame-able number is fairly small. I can always expand the map (again) if I need to.
The major items to note on the world-sized picture are the yellow pins representing the Spanish and Portuguese forces of empire. These are fairly thin on the ground. The Spanish have a Caribbean fleet. The Portuguese have an army each in Luanda, Goa, and Malacca, plus a fleet in the latter two. The empires are both pretty rich, but getting that wealth back to the metropolitan power might be interesting.
While the Spanish ‘own’ central and southern American provinces, and the Portuguese do so on the Brazilian coast, the rest are defined as factories, which means that they do not draw taxes from the provinces in which they are found, but that the income derives from trade. This is usually mutually beneficial, but I am still working out how to model the interaction of the factories with the surrounding area. While the local rulers did occasionally attack Portuguese stations, more commonly it was other European powers which, either on their own or with local allies, did the assaulting. This slowly caused the fortification of the factories, and hence the export of the trace italienne to the rest of the world.
The final map of Africa was a bit of a juggle, but is above. There is a relative concentration of states and forces in West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and also in a strip roughly across central Africa. This is really as much as I could find documented; the only power which might be missing is Buganda. That is not to say that the rest of Africa was unpopulated, or did not have any political organisation. It is just that Europeans had not got there, and that the organisation was small, quite likely nomadic, and unlikely to be of interest to European traders. Africa was not a tabula rasa for European powers to inscribe themselves onto, nor was the technological difference as big as it became in the Nineteenth Century. It was a big, squabbling continent with political entities with their own politics, warfare and interests.
The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle is the Americas. I noted that the Spanish possessions were, really, colonial enterprises, and so were the Portuguese on the coast of Brazil. Expansion of both was limited by local resistance, disease, and the sheer low numbers of settlers. It would be a bit similar in the north when the Europeans arrived there. The idea for the Portuguese Brazilian provinces is that they are a bit like the factories; mutually beneficial unless relations go wrong. The Spanish provinces act more like normal provinces, although the random events system has the possibility for rebellions of the locals to take place. In fact, in Spanish America, most rebellions were against the distant monarchy and its representatives. Given that it took a couple of years for dispatches to get to Madrid, be answered, and for the reply to find the original sender, you can see why the metropolitan centre and the periphery got a bit distant.
So, there you are. The final expansion is nearly ready. The spreadsheet needs to be populated, and I am still learning where some of these entities and provinces in Africa are. But I will get there, I am sure, and I am hoping that Africa will provide a good number of very different sorts of forces involved in my wargames.
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