On Artillery

I have, on and off, been pondering early modern artillery and its usefulness, effectiveness, and, above all, why armies bothered dragging the pieces over the countryside. After all, I think it was King Charles I who commented that the artillery train was a sponge that soaked up all the money.

By the War of the Three Kingdoms cannon had been around for a while. I think the first illustration of one dates from the early 14^th Century, and they were certainly deployed by the English in the 1327 campaign, not that they were particularly useful on that occasion.

Still, by the 17^th Century, things had improved. Powder, for example, was more powerful, and improved construction techniques meant that the pieces could take the strain, although a full charge of corned powder could well be too much for many gun tubes. That, I imagine, comes down to the skill of the individual gunner and his knowledge of his piece.

Gunpowder weapons of all sorts were horribly inaccurate. Bert Hall’s excellent book on early firearms reports a test of 325 discharges of smooth-bore muskets (dating from the 16^th—18^th Centuries). Surprisingly high muzzle velocities were reported (averaging 454 m/s, or 1490 ft/s), although that depends, of course, on the charge weights. There are some similar results for ACW artillery.

Spheres are the worst regular shape possible for generating drag, and the bullets decelerated at about 2.5 m/s for every meter of travel. About half the kinetic energy is lost at 100 m from the muzzle. Hall reckons that early modern weapons only have a possibility of being lethal at 100 – 120 m. At Blenheim and Fontenoy the high casualty rates were generated by shooting at about 40 meters. Drag meant that under normal circumstances at best 10-20% of shots hit the target, and, frequently, it is more like 5%.

Of course, artillery kept its velocity better, or at least, because the bullet was heavier they maintained lethal velocity for longer. But both firearms and artillery were notoriously inaccurate. Frederick the Great of Prussia calculated that 650000 rounds had been fired at Chotusitz (1742) killing about 2500 Austrians and wounding a similar number. That is, 1 in 130 discharges hurt someone. Other numbers bandied about were even more pessimistic.

Inaccuracy was also measured. At 100 meters the size of a square enclosing half the bullets is about 1 foot on each side. Actually, rifled muskets from the same period did not do much better. So the chance of hitting someone at 100 m was about 50%. Some weapons were better than others.

The problem is that spherical balls with windage – the difference between the diameter of the ball and the inner diameter of the barrel – bounce along the barrel. Ward reports that the standard windage was about a quarter of an inch in cannon. So the ball strikes the sides of the barrel after the gun is discharged, and picks up spin from such collisions.

As any cricketer or baseball player will know, balls with a spin on can behave in unusual, counterintuitive, ways. In a controlled spin, such as in a sport, this can be helpful. When aiming a weapon with the spn in an unknown random direction, it will move in the air. Hall reports an amusing experiment with a slightly left-bent barrel where the ball actually struck the target to the right of the centreline.

Artillery, although with longer ranges, suffers from the same issue. The ACW artillery deviated by 3 feet at 600 yards and 12 feet at 1200 yards for a 12-pounder. Lighter pieces seem to have deviated more. The aim of gunners, of course, was also to keep their shot below the height of a man. There is also the consideration of ‘point blank’ range, where the shot starts to drop away from its expected trajectory. Ward records point blank to a saker (5 ½ pounder) as 300 paces and a culverin (19 pounder) as 420 paces, which is the furthest in the list. Ultimate random ranges were 1500 paces and 2100 paces respectively, although the deviations Hall records for smooth bore artillery indicate that you were unlikely to actually hit what you aimed at at those ranges.

I have long suspected that part of the impact of artillery is simply the noise. A cannon discharging is, from my experience of attending re-enactments, very, very loud. Musket fire is less so, but these noises were probably the loudest ones available to most people. It would, at least until you got used to it, be frightening. Along with the noise the smoke and the possibility of being hit by a cannonball (which could damage you if it hit you at even extreme ranges), there was quite enough to perturb most people.

In Polemos: ECW we have a maximum range of artillery as 4 base widths and a factor of 3. At over 1 base width the artillery loses 1 from its factor. This, as JWH has pointed out in the past, seems a bit too swingeing. I suggested an alteration, making the artillery fire as normal over 4 base widths and then losing 1 per base width from its factor. That seems to make artillery too effective, as my experiment with Beatrice last week might suggest. I also added a second dice roll at over 6 base widths – the cannon needed to roll a 6 to hit.

In my homebrew Wars of the Counter-Reformation rules, I have adopted the above model. It attempts to depict the problems with the deviation of cannon shots, as well as the disruption artillery fire can cause. Beatrice disrupted the attacking Parliamentarians but did not cause any problems other than command and control. That seems about right to me, although I still suspect that the factor is a little high – perhaps it should be 3 rather than 4, although firing at dense pike blocks might give a bit of an advantage. But I am trying not to have too many factors in the rules.

So, in summary, I think early modern artillery should be a disruptor in battles, rather than a critical element. The hope of early modern generals must have been to shake the enemy and disrupt their deployment and advance rather than anything else unless there were specific tactical situations, such as narrow bridges or flanking fire, which would give the cannon an advantage. Sieges, of course, are a different thing again.  

The Bridge at Muchado

 

One of the great advantages of wargaming, particularly when you have been a wargamer for a number of years and have built up various collections of toys, is that you can switch from, say, one period to another, or from a ‘serious’ game to something just played for fun. You can get embroiled in heavy-duty campaigns, for example, and then just put a few bases on the table and have a wargame, just for the heck of it, or just because you can.

The Estimable Mrs. P has been a bit concerned about my wargaming, worried that it has become bogged down in concerns about painting (which she knows I don’t much enjoy) and also in campaigns. It gets, she argues, too complex for her husband’s overheated little brain, and she is probably right. I tend to overthink stuff.

I woke up one morning with an idea for an English Civil War / War of the Three Kingdoms action. In a sense it follows on, or is at least parallel to, the gunrunning scenario of a few weeks ago. But it is different and stand-alone. The idea of the scenario is that both sides have to try to seize a bridge, to permit (or deny) the passage of carts to where the supplies are needed. Hence the bridge at Muchado was born.

The peculiar name, for those who are interested, arises from Mr Shakespeare’s play. He evidently had these three villages in mind when he wrote, about 1600, a play about them. Granted, he transposed the action to Italy and so on, but I find that these sorts of things do spark the imagination.

So, we have the hamlet of Muchado, with a bridge over a fordable stream (except by carts, of course). We have two other villages, Nodding and Abbot. Put them together and you do have (roughly) the name of a Shakespeare play. A quick look through my complete plays of the Bard yielded some commanders, as well.

The Royalists, based at Nodding, were led by Sir Peter, with Benedict’s blue regiment of foot, Claudio’s buff coats, Claud’s cavalry, and two companies of dragoons, led by Dogberry and Watchman. On the other side, Sir Peter’s illegitimate brother Sir John leads the Parliamentary forces. He has Conrad’s and Leonard’s regiments of foot, Francis’ cavalry, and Verge’s and Sexton’s dragoons. Both sides are also blessed with a gun, although I did not name the commanders. Possibly, on the face of it, the Royalist gun should be called Beatrice.

The picture shows Sir John’s troops deployed on the right, with Sir Peter’s on the left. Sir Peter decided to stand, more or less, on the defensive and let Beatrice do the talking, as it were. Perforce, then, Sir John took the offensive, aiming to cross the stream with his cavalry while storming and holding the bridge.

A few moves into the game and you can see the plans developing. Beatrice has certainly disrupted the Parliamentary foot, and Sir Peter has moved his cavalry around the wood to oppose Sir John’s cavalry. What the picture doesn’t show, however, is that Claud’s cavalry is uphill of the Roundheads, which will cause them a problem. Poor tempo dice rolling has rather hampered Sir John’s attempt to get his attack moving, however, and he is having to now spend a lot of time persuading Conrad’s regiment to start advancing again.

The main clash was on the near side of the bridge, of course. Claud’s cavalry charged downhill and routed two of the three squadrons of Francis’ immediately. The third squadron held out for another move before turning tail and running, incidentally collecting Verge’s dragoons (who had dismounted) on their way and routing them. Four bases down, Sir John’s army decided that discretion was the better part of valour and decided to beat a retreat.

The Parliamentary cavalry had been caught with their backs to the stream, disorganised and downhill of the Royalists. It has to be said, however, that Sir John’s dice rolling was poor, and that his combat dice were even worse. To be several points down in the cavalry combat and then to roll a one does not indicate that the combat will last long. It also indicates that crossing obstacles is difficult under my rules, which is at it should be. While Verge’s dragoons tried to cover Francis’ reorganisation, they were under fire from Dogberry’s dragoons in the woods anyway and could not really face three bases of Royalist cavalry looming on the brow of the hill. They beat a retreat to behind their cavalry, who, when blown away, took them with them.

As I said earlier, this was really just a bit of fun. It was nice to get the ECW boys out again, and have a proper battle (as it were) albeit with small armies. The whole action did not take long, it has to be admitted and I think Sir John’s tactics were flawed. He could probably have done to have crossed the stream with both infantry and cavalry, at different points on the nearside of the table. Then the Royalists could have been a bit overstretched. As it was, Conrad’s attempted to cross the stream on the far side of the bridge and discovered it was a famous ‘crocodile-filled’ stream, and failed. Sir John did not have the tempo to get them going again, especially as they were under fire from Beatrice (who was alarmingly effective, as it happened).

Still, the use of the play gave a bit of extra depth and fun to the proceedings, so it felt a little bit more than just a stand-alone scenario, or a bash just for fun. I might use the idea again, especially as my complete plays is stored in the same room as the wargames take place (I’m not allowed to call it the wargame room – it is the snug). Sir Peter and Sir John and their merry men may well make another outing. We shall see.

The Campaign Paradox Revisited

My recent post on campaigning and why we, as wargamers, tend not to run campaigns seems to have sparked a bit of interest and comments, for which I thank everyone who has engaged. In particular, JWH posted a response on his Heretical Wargaming blog, and the comments there are interesting too, and worth a look.

To attempt to summarize the comments, campaigns do happen and are usually regarded with fondness in retrospect. The reasons for not running wargame campaigns seem to cluster around the time constraints, the complexity of campaigns, and the desire to actually get the toys out and fight tabletop battles, rather than move pins or counters around a map.

That said, a fair number of campaigns have been run. Some of them are linked scenario campaigns, where, for example, a battle group or platoon is followed through a series of engagements. As was noted, these tend to be the more resource management sort of games, deciding which resources you are going to commit to a given action, and resting up and conserving elements you might need later. While this is certainly giving a wargamer pause for thought before committing the reserves to a final charge, it is not quite a strategic decision.

The other end of the telescope gives us board games. Aside from self-consciously tactical games, such as, I imagine, Squad Leader, these tend to be inherently strategic in nature. Even a single battle board game gives the wargamer pause for thought about deployment and axes of advance, although again the strategic scope is distinctly limited. Many board wargames are, of course, on the scale of a front or theatre, or even a whole war. These tend to be enormous, quite detailed, and take a great deal of time to set up, let alone play. I think Phil Sabin observes in Simulating War that hobby games are far too complex and lengthy to be useful teaching aids.

Of course, to a great extent, wargame campaigns, as with wargames themselves, are open and flexible objects, and wargamers can and should do whatever floats their boats, as it were. If delving into the logistical arrangements of the war in the desert in 1941-2 is your thing, I am not the person to stop you. Similarly, if all you want to wargame is big battles in the Napoleonic era, that is fine by me. But many of the wargame books you see around do seem to suggest that a campaign is another level of wargaming, as JWH suggested in his survey of books on his blog response.

I suspect that one thing that has not really happened is rule writing for campaign games. I know that there are quite a few rule sets around which include campaigns, and even a few rule sets specifically for them (there is a set in Henry Hyde’s book, for example) but, in my view, they tend to the rather complex. If they do not, they have a habit of being severely simple, as a sort of afterthought to the rules themselves. Neither of these outcomes, in my view, are really conducive to encouraging people to run wargame campaigns.

A wargamer who would like to run a campaign is faced with some more or less complex decisions. There is the level of campaign, whether the participants are squads or armies or anything in between. There is the scope of the campaign, whether it is open-ended or aimed at specific objectives, in a specific time frame. There is also the question of what is to be modelled within the campaign. Are logistics included? Personalities? Replacements and reinforcements? And so on.

In part, I suspect, the question revolves around the campaign rules to be used and the complexity (or lack of it) involved. My narrative campaigns are very simple and easy to run. The outcome of the first battle leads to some choices for both the winner and the loser as to what to do. Normally the winner will make a decision, the loser responds and another battle will be set up, possibly with a few quirks. This is how the Armada Abbey campaign ran, and it still makes me smile when I think about it.

It is not always easy to think of the narrative, however, and, sometimes, the lack of detail might prove to be frustrating. Some wargamers might like the reconnaissance element of campaigning, for example, and the narrative process, while it can incorporate this, might well get bogged down. It is, as I have said, a question of what you want to model.

While many campaign rules do exist, as I mentioned, none have really caught on widely, it seems to me, and many of them tend to the complex. There is no real campaign equivalent to DBA. Whether you like DBA or not, it certainly encouraged wargamers to fight battles. It might even have encouraged a few campaigns at the very abstract level it included. But therein lies the rub: it was very abstract, a vehicle for creating tabletop wargames. Aside from the armies involved, it could have been any period.

I do not, of course, have any answers. DBA was a rule set that arose from long experience of wargaming by the authors, and much practice in wargaming. It may or may not have worked for a given wargamer, but the systems were quite elegant. We do not seem to have an equivalent elegance in wargame campaigns. War is, I suppose, inherently complex.

Clausewitz noted that everything in war is easy, but that the easy things are very difficult. Wargame campaigns should be fairly easy. After all, they are ‘only’ wargames writ a bit bigger. Perhaps if we had some truly elegant rules for wargame campaigns, one which ideally had zero record keeping and many opportunities for strategic thought and decision-making, we might have something that provides a satisfying vehicle for tabletop wargames with context.

The problem seems to be that these two objectives are mutually opposed. We cannot, it seems, have a strategic campaign system that is simple and has zero record keeping, but keeps the interest and decision points that wargamers need. Perhaps we just always land up in this bind and prefer to get the toys out (or do painting) after all.

Gunrunning

 

It might mildly surprise some of the readers of the blog (you think they are plural – really? (ed)) that I have an interest in naval matters and that naval matters during the English Civil War (or Wars of the Three Kingdoms, or whatever the latest name for the conflicts are) were significant. Unfortunately, they are also heavily neglected in the historiography, although that is starting to change with an eyewateringly expensive academic tome titled ‘The British Civil War at Sea’. At £75 or so, I’ll have to wait for the paperback.

Fortunately, I have a few ideas on the matter. There is some stuff around. For example, the failed naval expeditions to La Rochelle in 1627 and 1628 were expensive, cost Charles I his favourite and led to dissolving Parliament in a huff. Ship Money, of course, caused further tensions in the 1630s, and the wars with Scotland brought the nation to the brink. After the Irish rebellion, the navy went over to the Parliamentarian side.

The consequences were serious for the Royalists (and Irish Confederates). They turned to private enterprise, but still needed foreign arms and munitions, which had to be imported. Slowly the Royalists gained strength at sea – capturing West Country ports helped. Henrietta Maria, famously, landed with arms at Bridlington in February 1643, under fire from a pursuing Parliamentary squadron.

The big ships in the Royal Navy were fairly useless, being too slow, for the war of intercepting merchant ships, convoys, and privateers. Both sides hired armed merchantmen, and Parliament even built some frigates. While there were no big battles there were bloody hostilities at sea, not to mention the relief of various ports by naval forces.

As I mentioned, that was also the question of the importation of guns and ammunition, and it was this that gave me an idea for a scenario. As the Royalists were the worst off for domestic production, they had to try to get cargo across the Channel, while Parliamentary forces, of course, tried to intercept and stop them.

The scenario is shown set up above. Really boring I know, but it gives the idea. The Royalists are in port, and the Parliamentarians are patrolling the sea with their heavier ships nearest the camera. The royalists have to exit by the nearest or near right-hand table edges. Each ship getting to the corner will score 3 points, the middle third of each side will score 2 points, and the last third of the near table will score 1 point. For Parliament, each ship taken will be worth 3 points, while each ship damaged will be worth 1 point per point of damage (for either side, in fact), or if the ship is forced off the table elsewhere than the Royal exit areas Parliament will gain 1 point. Each damage level a Parliamentary ship receives will lose them 1 point.

I should note at this point that the Royalists could fight back against the Parliamentary light ships but would surrender if the heavies (1 third and 1 fourth rate) came into close range. This is because, under the rules, mostly the merchantmen and 6^th rates will be at least badly mauled by a close-range broadside from even a fifth rate. I should also note that the rules are my own, and are now covered with scribbled pencil notes.

I have recently discovered that naval wargames and describing the action is even more difficult than land-based wargames. Furthermore, the interaction of wind strength and direction makes things even more complex. The basic problem here was that for the first half of the game, the winds were light and so no one really moved very far or very fast. The wind veered from a north easterly at the start of the game and then round to south-west, which gave the Royalists the wind advantage from the second half of the game especially as the wind then strengthened, meaning that all the ships could move faster.

The game caused a lot of thought and manoeuvring, even more than a land game. The lighter ships clashed and Parliament lost one ship crippled and one seriously damaged (minus 5 points, oops). The main question was whether the Parliamentarian heavies could get among the main Royalist convoy. They were, at one point, getting close and the Royalists tacked (135-degree turn under the rules). The Parliamentarians were slower to turn and the Royalists gained but then reversed their tack and, moving a little faster than the Parliamentarian heavies managed to leave them just about behind.

The picture shows the final situation. While it would seem that the Parliamentary heavy ships are about to sail through the convoy, in fact, the next Royalist move will take them off the table and, due to the wind, there is nothing the Parliamentary ships can do about it. In the distance, on the right, you can see the two damaged Parliamentary 6^th rates, as well as one in the foreground and one in the background which are in the wrong place and going the wrong way. Two Royalist sixth rates are already off the table, incidentally.

So, that was interesting. The rules, which I have not used for quite a while, seemed to work quite well, although they now need revision. The Royalists came out of port into a headwind, but the wind veered and gave them the weather gauge, which helped considerably. The Parliamentary ships contested the progress of the convoy bravely but were bested by lucky Royalist shooting rolls. The heavies never quite got into combat as they were extremely slow in the wind conditions.

So, the question now is what next, aside from rule revision. As Paul Hague remarked, naval wargames are best in the context of a campaign narrative, so the choices are either a chase at sea, with various Parliamentary ships trying to intercept the Royalists, and/or attempt to blockade the port to which they are heading. Mind you, the Royalists are on +13 points and the Parliamentarians on -5 at the moment, so there is a lot to catch up.

The Campaign Paradox

As the regular reader of this blog might have surmised by now, I am something of a fan of campaign games. The ideas of linked battles, the movement on the map, the decisions of strategic import, and so on interest me. Perhaps I am much more of a big-picture wargamer than most others, I am not sure. The Estimable Mrs. P. keeps arguing that I think in the abstract, so maybe the interest in campaigns is a consequence of that.

Still, it is a little hard to find evidence that campaign wargaming is particularly popular among wargamers. I know that some campaigns are played (I could name a few blogs that report them) but, to be honest, most battle reports in the blogosphere, at least the slice of it that I read, are of either historical battles or of scenario games, with Neil Thomas’ One Hour Wargames as the source of choice.

Now, to be clear, I do not have the slightest problem with that. Again, the regular reader will be aware that I have indulged in not a few scenario-based games from OHW, as well as a few historical games. But the hankering after campaign games does not, for me, go away. Perhaps, as a solo wargamer, I have imbibed too much of the advice that, to keep the solo interest going, we need to move to campaigns.

There are, of course, campaigns and campaigns. There are sequences of scenarios, where the sequence is fought out step-wise, with results and casualties carried forward. Indeed, OHW suggests taking those scenarios and linking them. Then there are ladder campaigns, where the sequence starts with a middle-ground scenario and the action moves one way or the other until either the top or the bottom of the ladder is reached and the campaign is won and lost.

I suppose somewhere in this my ideas about narrative campaigns, where the detail of the map moving is ignored but the moves are conducted with reference to a map to decide where the next game is to be fought fits somewhere alongside these forms of campaigning.

The next logical step from narrative and ladder-style campaigns is probably to use a proper map, gridded or hexed, and plot out the moves properly. I tried this out with the Jersey Boys campaign and it did work quite nicely, but there is, of course, a bit of a penalty to be paid in terms of preparation. It might be at this point that some wargamers decide that an off-the-shelf scenario game is preferable.

Of course, as in real life, the complexity of campaign games is potentially unlimited. Jersey Boys did have personalities created for the officers, although it has to be admitted that most of the effort expended on this was rather wasted, I feel. It also made use of a proper map, with pins to locate the units, weather, and couriers. These latter bits worked quite nicely, although the invasion had to wait until the weather cleared.

At the most complex end of the spectrum are those imagination games where the action spans continent(s) and decades. These take a lot of work, I think, to set up and, if my own memories serve me correctly, a fair bit of effort to maintain. The gold standard in such campaigns is, of course, Tony Bath’s Hyboria campaign, as documented in Setting Up a Wargame Campaign. I have tried this sort of thing, and much simpler settings, but the sheer size of it tends to overwhelm me.

I am aware, as you might have seen, of most of the wargame books that cover campaigns: Bath, Grant, Featherstone, Hyde. But the fact remains, it seems to me, that campaign games are a thing that is more honoured in the breach than execution. That is, not many people actually carry out campaigns, even though they might like to in principle.

I think there might be a fundamental paradox lurking behind this. The idea of a campaign is to achieve an objective – capture Jersey, for example. The objective for the other side is, of course, a mirror image of this. However, the next idea along is that the objective needs to be achieved with minimal casualties because for each combat you might lose forces you will need shortly. The campaign paradox emerges.

The campaign paradox is that the wargamer wants to fight wargames, fairly obviously. In a campaign game, however, the idea is to fight as little as possible while winning the campaign. The nature of the campaign game, therefore, is to limit the number of wargames to be fought out, while maximising the paperwork. This is not an attractive proposition to many wargamers, I suspect.

Given the popularity of OHW, I was wondering if there was any scope for (and perhaps it already exists) a sort of similar book, packed full of smallish campaigns. A set of easily transferable campaign outlines might work. It would be the sort of thing that OHW does for scenario games, crossed with Featherstone’s actual examples of small campaigns.

Or, maybe, the scope should be bigger. The Featherstone games are, mostly, what could be termed grand tactical rather than strategic games. The introduction of strategy is, naturally, opening a whole extra can of worms, and there would be no telling where it would end. Nevertheless, it is fairly clear that generals of times gone by had strategies, even if they did not use the term (which seems to have got its current meaning sometime in the Eighteenth Century).

So, I open the discussion to the floor, if there is any interest. What would persuade you to get the maps out instead of starting another scenario? Is there anything, or do time constraints preclude such things? I suppose, somewhere in my mind, is the question of whether we have to dash on to the next wargame all the time. Slow wargaming, anyone?

Clarity

The Heretical Wargaming blog, run by JWH, has made some comments on the concepts of clarity and inspiration, a video blog post by Mr BigLee of Posties Rejects. I confess I have not watched the whole vlog; they are not my favourite form of communication, but I have seen a few minutes to get the gist of the point at issue. At least, I think I have.

Mr Lee (I could hardly call him ‘Mr Big’ could I?) suggests that clarity and inspiration are opposed in writing rules. That is, the clarity of a rule set is compromised by the addition of pictures, paintings, original documents, historical descriptions, and so on. JWH disagrees, and I think I agree with him.

The fact is that clarity is a usefully vague expression. It is probably best understood along the lines of an irregular verb: I am clear, you are vague, he is all over the place. That is, clarity is in the eye of the beholder. Clarity, however, seems to cover a range of issues, and so it is not just a single ‘thing’.

Clarity is not the same thing as coherence, for example. Coherence is not the same as meaninglessness, either. Meaninglessness is absolute. The sentence ‘The present king of France is bald’ is meaningless because it does not refer – that is, there is no present king of France. The sentence ‘The Pz II is a German Second World War tank’ in a set of rules about Napoleonic Wargaming is not meaningless – the sentence is correct and means something – it is rather incoherent with the rest of the context.

It is quite possible to be coherent without clarity. Much writing lacks clarity, unfortunately (including mine). Wittgenstein once wrote ‘Whatever can be said can be said clearly’. However, later work by Wittgenstein rather nuanced that statement, I think. Sentences are clear in a given context, with a given background and some sort of agreement between speaker and hearer, or writer and reader, as to what is the background of the writing.

Clarity thus depends on the audience, or the implied audience, the reader of wargame rules. An exposition of Godel’s incompleteness theorem might be clear to a class of mathematicians, but not really for a class of linguists. We can aim for precision, but the cost of precision is additional words or jargon. We have to explain what we mean and, moreover, expect the reader to remember what we mean. For example, in some philosophy (and wargame rules) you are barraged with a bunch of abbreviations and acronyms in the first few pages. These are then used extensively throughout the work. My mind does not retain these well – the meaning is clear, of course, but at the cost of introducing many more symbols into the work (and explaining them). Whether this is worth the price seems to me to be a bit moot.

Language is, of course, ambiguous. ‘I went to the bank’ could mean a trip to withdraw money or going fishing. We can try to avoid ambiguity when we write, but, because of the way English works (and, I presume, other languages do too), we cannot avoid ambiguity. Mostly the context saves us. Reading, in a set of wargame rules ‘The guard charges home’ suggests elite infantry advancing, rather than a railway conductor dashing to their house.

There is also vagueness. Vagueness is both a curse and a help. In the early writing of a set of rules, vagueness is extremely useful. As I have mentioned before, in the Polemos rules the initial state of shaken was referred to as being ‘not happy’ – a base that lost combat was described as ‘not happy’, for example. Over time the term was replaced with ‘shaken’ and the meaning of the term was defined more precisely. This is an avoidable vagueness that should be tidied up before the work is published.

However, some vagueness is unavoidable; some concepts are simply vague. We know what we mean, for example, by the term ‘morale’, but try to write a paragraph or two defining exactly what it is, how it is measured, and what effects it has. I would wager a small amount of money that you do not find it as easy as you expect. There is inherent vagueness about the word morale – we know what we mean by it but it can cover a great number of things all lumped together under it’s hat. We cannot demand more precision than the concept demands.

Finally, there is indeterminateness. This indicates that something is missing from our definition or our thought or concept. The sentence ‘The guard is elite’ is, in fact, indeterminate. How many guards are we referring to? All of them some of the time, some of them all the time, or something in between. This is different from ambiguity or vagueness and does indicate a lacuna in the thought. Therefore, wargame rules should try not to permit indeterminateness as it does lead to multiple, avoidable, interpretations.

The final comment is, I suppose, about conciseness. We can all waffle on endlessly about a subject such as the use of firearms in the Wars of the Roses. Whether all that waffle actually contributes anything, particularly anything to a rule set, is a bit moot. In the rules I have tried to write, I do try to keep the interpretative waffle away from the actual rules. I think it is healthy if a writer gives reasons for their choices in creating rules, but those interpretations should not, I think, be part of the rule set itself.

Perhaps this is what Lee means by ‘inspiration’, the background, explanations, and pictures attempting to give the wargamer the impetus to get the figures and play the game according to the rules. Personally, I do not find the pictures, at least, terribly helpful as there is no way that I can paint that many figures that well. I also sometimes find in the background some dubious assumptions about the period (assuming that I know anything about it, which is rare), which are not that helpful in getting into playing the rules either.

Still, I think JWH is correct in arguing that clarity is distinct from inspiration and that they can (and should) be separated in a rule set. But clarity itself is a portmanteau of different sins, some of which are unavoidable but most of which are traps for the unwary writer and reader.

If you have made it this far through the post, I hope the foregoing is clear…...

Moving On…

Having reviewed 2023, I suppose it is only fair to consider what 2024 might hold wargame-wise. As with most wargamers this is largely unknown territory. After all, we never know when something new and shiny might come along to tempt us away from the path of righteousness which we have been treading with family and credit cards.

Anyway, a few certainties are clear. First, I was rather alarmed to find a lack of naval wargaming in my games for last year. This is, as they say, an oversight. After all, Machiavelli does have fleets, and so I was open to some naval clashes. It is just that they did not happen. I suppose the result here is must try harder.

Thinking about it a little more, it is in fact much easier to conceive of naval actions taking place in campaign contexts. A good number of years ago Paul Hague, I think it was, observed that in a land-based game, it is quite easy to designate that crossroads or hill as being strategically important and to fight over it. At sea, one bit of water looks much like another, and so wider reasons for having a fight need to be sought. Thus, campaign wargaming is a useful additive for making naval games meaningful. This, combined with my penchant recently for campaigns, could be helpful.

On that note, I would quite like to develop some more campaigns. I do not know whether my reader is interested in such things – sometimes it seems you are, sometimes not – but I am fairly sure that I am and that there is a vast quantity of untapped possibilities in running campaign games. As I remarked a couple of times over the last year or so, campaigns can create their own scenarios and battle outcomes. Sometimes what happens on the battlefield is largely irrelevant to the outcome of a campaign, after all (I know that statement would need to be nuanced, by the way…).

There is always the holy grail of campaign gaming, or the apparent one, of some sort of complex imgai-nations type game, along the lines of Tony Bath’s Hyboria. This always seems to get set as the ideal wargame campaign. I am sure that this was not the intention, but that is sometimes how it seems. I think that rougher and readier methods of generating and playing wargame campaigns can be created, and I have tried out a few ideas in the last year or so. The ACW Greeks campaign was one such. Machiavelli and the Siena campaign are more. This needs thinking about, and some naval elements adding.

When we come to painting and acquisitions, there is a bit less to discuss, mercifully. I have demolished most of the unpainted lead pile, and my strategy is not to increase it by very much, if possible, not at all. This resolution has already been undermined, however, by the acquisition of some Warbase Parisian Civilians. These are 25+ mm and are aimed at my Flashing Blades role-playing campaign. Civilians, in any scale, are really quite difficult to find, which is a bit of a nuisance to those of us who do not think that everyone spends all their time fighting battles. Still, I also have about 16 other 25+ mm figures to assemble and paint.

The larger project is the recent (Santa is responsible. It wasn’t my fault, guv) of Chinese, Korean and Japanese fleets. These are aimed at the later Sixteenth Century, of course. Years ago I recall my frustration at being unable to obtain suitable ships for the Japanese invasion of Korea. A couple of years ago I discovered that Tumbling Dice has ranges which fit the bill very nicely, in my favoured 1:2400 scale. This was only slightly mitigated by discovering that I had failed to order any flags, but as the ships are still in their packages this is not going to be a problem any time soon.

Aside from that I am trying to keep the expansion of the forces to a minimum. I might, if they are ever released, obtain some more Italian Wars gendarmes from Baccus. As you might have noted from my Italian Wars campaigns I keep running out of the fellows. While I am about it some more jinites would not go amiss either, but I will try to limit acquisitions. Oh, and there might be some Turkish light cavalry as well, of which stocks are rather limited. And who knows what else.

Alongside this, there has been some writing. I was a bit perturbed to find this on the Helion website:

This is listed for release in the spring. There might be a bit of a problem with it, as it is nowhere near finished yet, and we are awaiting photographs to make it a feast of joy for lovers of the small chaps, and also for those who are willing to be converted. We shall see. If you have any nice pictures of 6 mm figures, from any manufacturer, drop me a comment (I won’t publish them) and we chat.

I have to say that while it has sort of been a labour of love, it has also been blinking hard work and quite frustrating to boot. I am awaiting further information from my co-author – yes, although I am named on the cover, it is actually a collaborative effort betwixt myself and Mr Berry. The Estimable Mrs P and been slightly perturbed on occasion by her husband stomping around the house shouting ‘All collaborators will be shot!’. Mind you, that sort of behaviour is not totally unknown in these parts as it is. It all stems from being in the Academy and trying to cooperate with people separated by time, geography and language.

So, there you are. As I have hinted there may still be some surprises, both in terms of subjects, wargames and even, possibly, more writing projects. In this life, you never quite know what is going to happen next, which does keep things interesting.