Rounding Up The Stragglers

There are a few outstanding things to report here, and I shall start with the painting status.

The above shows the Japanese forces, now all painted and almost all based. There are six foot Samurai bases, four ashigaru with yari, two shot and one bow ashigaru base, and two Samurai cavalry. Those of you who have good memories and like that sort of thing might immediately smell a rat: were there not five ashigaru with yari bases?

You are correct, there are. Unfortunately, I messed up the basing of one of the said bases, and it will have to await the next batch. This sort of thing happens from time to time, I suppose. Anyway, the above nearly doubles the available Japanese forces, from about one-and-a-half armies to three. Thereabouts. It will be useful if either the Japanese decide to invade Korea, or if they fall apart into civil war. Both are possibilities in 1600 – Something.

Another development is that I have finally finished my measuring sticks, as shown above. The one on the left is a base width wide; the one on the right is a half base width. Both extend to the putative new range of heavy cannon in the rules, and the first three base widths of the measure are divided into half-base widths. As the Estimable Mrs P observed when she saw them: ‘Much neater than your handwriting…’.

I have found that the thinner one is handier for the actual games, as the other can knock things around a bit more easily. They both have a bit of a tendency to bow, which is OK. You could argue that they are not that accurate, and I would agree. The lines are hand-painted and a bit wobbly. But then, I do not really do millimetrics and working out exact distances and angles. I am more in the ‘if it looks and feels right, do it’ sort of camp. The other issue is that I could have scored the plastic card to make things a bit more precise, but decided not to, as it would make the measuring sticks more likely to snap.

A few other things have come to pass rule-wise. I mentioned the new smoke rules last time, and they are imported from the naval rules. I have also mentioned the new artillery rules, including longer and shorter ranges. The motivator for this was a recent battle in Burgundy where Spanish artillery, trained on an open field, managed to rout some French infantry single-handedly. At one level, that was fine. After all, I do recall Bicocca and the mess French guns made of Spanish cavalry at that one, but it did seem a little extreme. So the artillery has been downgraded a little, while the ranges have been adjusted. Not that it has made much difference yet.

That brings me to another thing I have been pondering over the last few weeks, relating to both the tabletop and the campaign rules. I keep tinkering with them, and I do not think there is anything wrong with that. On the other hand, I do feel a little guilty that, for example, the introduction of some fairly swingeing financial rules a few game years ago has really, totally and utterly crippled Sweden as a power. Is that fair? Should I have, say, set all debts to zero at the end of that year and proceeded from there?

I do, of course, invoke guideline 1 from that book, which is, essentially, if it happened and you think it was wrong, do not go back and redo it, for that way madness lies. Thus the Swedes are facing recurring bouts of rebellion and the loss of their budding Baltic Empire. That seems fair enough, and, indeed, agrees roughly with the historical record. But I do feel a little guilty sometimes that the financial rules were retrofitted, and I had not worked out the implications of going into debt before the Swedes plunged headlong into unaffordable wars.

The issue is a little more acute with the expansion of the game to cover the Far East and now Africa. For example, in the original Euro-centric campaign, the Spanish got an extra D6 money per year to cover income from the Empire, both the Spanish and Portuguese. The expansion to the Far East made no difference to that, as I did not model the Portuguese Empire. But now, with Africa and the Americas added, it is starting to look a bit odd. The two sea-borne empires are, on paper, wealthy, having large geographical holdings for the Spanish and great trading holdings for the Portuguese. So, should I remove the Spanish extra money per year?

At present I have not decided, and I will see how things go. At present the Spanish are unlikely to go bankrupt, as they did in real life, but that seems to be because they are holding on to a major empire in Europe on a really very small group of armed forces – three armies, two artillery trains and a fleet. The Empires will have to figure out how to remit money to the metropolitan capital as well, which entails having a suitable fleet (which they can do) and an unbroken chain of bases for re-victualling and repairs. Actually, thinking about it, the situation is not unlike the coaling stations of steamships.

The advent of empires has necessitated another slight rule change. Fleets started out as just fleets. In my head they were galleys in the Mediterranean, and galleons elsewhere. However, I have realised that there is a big difference between an ocean-going galleon and a home-defence galleon. This relates to the victualling issue raised above. Until the 1650s or thereabouts, for example, most English warships did not have the range to go far from their home bases, and the ability to receive supply at sea was limited. So the fleets of empire tended to be different – hence the ‘East Indiamen’ of the period. So now I need another fleet type, the ocean-going galleon. That, at least, is reasonably easy to implement, as only the Spanish and Portuguese have them at the moment, although the Dutch are starting to build such an object.