As summer winds itself down towards the inevitable, wargaming activity proceeds in fits and starts. In the background, an attempt is being made to tidy up the 1600 – Something rules and make them presentable for a wider audience, which almost certainly is limited to me in the future. By ‘tidy up’ I mean things like giving sections proper titles, adding captions to tables, and generating a table of contents and list of figures. I am trying to avoid the temptation of amplifying and adding to the rules. At 16 pages or so, they are already quite long enough, in my view, although a lot of those pages relate to random events, so are not used that often. Still, I do know that overcomplicating campaigns leads to death, and I don’t want that to happen here, so the watchword is still, ‘keep it simple, stupid’.
Some revisions to the tactical rules are also being pondered. The first tactical rule change under consideration is to make foot skirmishers a tiny bit more powerful, by giving them a ranged combat tactical factor of 2 rather than 1. This should allow them to occasionally stop other troop types, while remaining with a 1 defensive factor should mean that they are fairly easily cleared out of the way. A long time ago I fought out a campaign with Aztecs, who have (under DBA, which I was using) three troop types: blades, auxilia and skirmishers. I was using a system of hidden enemy units, and the skirmishers were most useful in flushing any enemy forces hiding in ambush out. In pitched battle they are less handy, of course, but that seems to be as it should be. Still, I don’t think they should simply be targets, so I’ll try giving them a bit of a barb.
The second change under consideration is to artillery. These are starting to be used in the 1600 – Something campaign, having been largely neglected in previous wargames with my rules. The thing is the guns seem to be a bit powerful in ranged combat, with a tactical factor of 4. When in point-blank range, that is less than 4 base widths, this means that they can hit most troop types very hard. Thus, in defensive positions, artillery are very good indeed. Probably too good. After all, the Cornish pike at Lansdown (1643) did get up the hill and stand in the face of fierce artillery fire. So a reduction to 3 seems to be on the cards. On the other hand, I think that a change in the point-blank ranges is due, with light guns staying at 4 BW, mediums getting 6 and heavies 8. All this means is that the heavier artillery will not have to roll for targets over 4 BW, as they do now. I am pondering this, as it may make the heavy guns a bit too effective over the whole battlefield.
As an aside to this, I am also working on some proper measuring sticks for the wargames. My current stick has a tendency for the distances to get wiped off by perspiring fingers, and so a more permanent solution is hopefully in the pipeline. Mind you, painting even slightly straight lines is not easy, so it remains a work in progress. The unfinished prototypes are below and are, fortuitously, 8 base widths long. You might be correct in suggesting that the maximum artillery range of 8 base widths is somehow linked.
On the painting front, the seventy-two Samurai have, slowly and painfully, crawled across the painting table and are now finished, although the bases have not been so lucky.
The picture probably does not do true justice to the poverty of my painting efforts, but at least they are painted. These bases do, in fact, double the number of foot Samurai bases that I have and, when complemented with ashigaru and cavalry, increase my Samurai army potential from one and a half armies to three.
Speaking of ashigaru, I have started the yari-wielding troops.
As can be seen, progress so far is limited. Only the faces, hands and armour have been tackled so far. You might also note that there are 60 ashigaru, rather than 72 Samurai. This is because, for reasons I am not sure about, I have seven bases in stock already. I am sure it made sense at some point, even if I cannot recall what sort of sense it made. Eventually, this lot will make up five bases of ashigaru, but there is still a fair bit of work to be done.
So, in spite of the leaves turning, the brutal sunshine fading and the days shortening, at Polemarch Towers things wargaming are still proceeding. The work on the maps for the major expansion of 1600 – Something is more or less complete, although I am still working out rules for the functioning of sea-borne empires, specifically, initially of course, the Portuguese (and, to some extent, the Spanish). Having gone global, I can hardly reduce the Spanish flota to a d6 addition to Spanish income. Working it out, both Spanish and Portuguese income from their empires is relatively colossal, so I will need some reductions for local defence and administration, let alone paying for fleets to return the money to Europe. Mind you, in the campaign the Spanish are sitting on an immense treasury at present anyway, due to not actually having sufficient armed forces to defend their possessions in Europe and winning battles to stop that becoming a crisis. As in the real world, it cannot last forever, surely.
That said, I refer the reader to my earlier comment, the KISS principle. Returning the colonial loot to the metropolitan power has to be simply administered. I have run campaigns where one aspect, conceived of as being minor, has taken over the game to the detriment of the big picture. While colonial shenanigans were important, they were not the whole story and, from the treaties and truce in the early 1600s to the outbreak of war again with the Dutch in the 1620s, largely seem to have functioned normally. In fact, as I recall, that was the point from the Spanish point of view: to build up some cash to have another go at the rebels.
Trying to achieve this without over-complicating things takes a bit of thinking about, and probably some trial and error. Plus I have the Native Americans to think about. I fear at the moment I have robbed them of agency, but we will see.
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