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.

1600 – Something: Obscured by Clouds

And so, westwards in the Summer 1606 move, to another Persian invasion of Mesopotamia. After the last round of hostilities here, both sides have deployed field armies, and so it was two standard lists that encountered each other. The is three Ottoman light cavalry bases, five cavalry, two janissaries, and two militia bases. These faced two light cavalry, six cavalry, three shot, and a militia base.

For this game, I tried a little experiment. In the naval rules, as you might have spotted in the last game for Spring, there was a lot of smoke generated. This was inspired by historical accounts of naval battles in the Anglo-Dutch wars, where the sky is reported to have turned grey. Indeed, if you look at some of the artwork of the period, you will find that the skies are indeed grey, and it is not just an artistic conceit. The sheer number of cannon fired made for lots of smoke.

Anyway, after the success of the smoke reducing visibility at sea, I thought it was time to consider it on land. After all, 500 muskets going off at more or less the same time do make a lot of smoke. So a temporary rule was introduced that the smoke I use to keep track of who has fired this turn will linger unless a roll is made under the wind force number. I also added (which should probably be in the naval rules as well) that un-dispersed smoke will drift downwind.

The terrain rolling favoured the Ottomans, who are to the left above, sitting, mostly, behind a stream. Their light cavalry is deployed forward of it, just to make a nuisance of themselves. The Persians have put their infantry in the centre, with the militia, mindful of the Ottoman light cavalry, by the baggage. The Persian lights are on their right, hoping to make a gap somewhere for the heavier cavalry to pass through.

The Persians tried, shall we say. They got their shot in over the central hill and are firefighting the janissaries. Unfortunately, they were also taking pot shots at the Ottoman militia in the rough ground, and so did not focus their superior firepower against the Ottoman shot. On the Persian left, their cavalry has been held up and disrupted by the Ottoman light cavalry. On the far side, the Persian and Ottoman light cavalry are having a go at each other, but the Persian heavies are refusing to cross the stream.

The Persians were having to be cautious. The Ottoman heavy cavalry on both flanks is lurking within a charge move of the banks of the stream, so any attempt to cross is likely to be met by a downhill charge, which will, in all likelihood, destroy the Persians. The best hope was on the Persian right where the light cavalry could cover the heavies, and the Persian reserve and general headed that way.

This, however, took quite a long time, and the situation was not much better than it was when the general set off. The Persian cavalry was still refusing to cross the stream. Meanwhile in the centre the Persian shot had managed to drive back a base of janissaries but was not going to attempt to cross the stream without some cavalry support, which had just arrived on the right.

At this point some strategic considerations began to emerge. The engaged forces were the only field armies for both sides for quite a number of provinces. Neither side could really afford to lose the army, as then only local forces would be available to prevent an invasion. This might be adequate, but it might not, and neither side wished to risk it, particularly. Secondly, the Persians had never been sure they could force the crossing of the stream. With their cavalry advantage, they would have preferred more open terrain. Additionally, they could possibly have used their militia base on the front line to assault across the stream.

As for the Ottomans, they were on the defensive anyway, and the same considerations applied to them about crossing the stream. Light cavalry, of course, are not disrupted, but their light cavalry were stretched enough on the wings. They were also losing the firefight in the centre, partly because the smoke kept blowing in their faces, rendering their shooting a little less effective.

At this point, and with these considerations, the Persian commander gave the order to withdraw from the combat. The risks of crossing the stream outweighed the potential that could arise from it. While the firefight was going in their favour, the Persians could not see how to exploit it, especially having committed the reserve cavalry and general to the right.

While this was not, perhaps, the most exciting game in the world, it was, nevertheless, interesting. The tactical problem of how to cross an obstacle in the face of determined opposition is always a thorny one, and the Persians did not have an answer this time. The aim was to outflank the Ottomans on the Persian right, but the timing of that did not work out. They might have done better to have retained the general and reserve cavalry in the centre and tried to exploit the advantage they had gained there, but it was only marginal, and losing cavalry to militia might have been deemed embarrassing.

So, both sides live to fight again, and I dare say they will. The rule change seemed to work quite nicely, with a -1 to shooting factors for firing through smoke. Even though the wind was strong, the smoke still hampered the firefight. While I cannot think, offhand of too many incidents where smoke caused problems for combat, it must have been a bit of an issue, especially in those European actions where there were a lot of muskets and cannons. I do recall an incident at Basing House where a regiment of foot was loomed at out of the smoke and opened fire, only to find the loomers were on their own side.

Still, next up is the accidental Muscovite invasion of Latvia. All I have to do is work out a Latvian army list for 1606….

The Meaning of the Campaign

Thinking philosophically about wargaming, or bout a wargame campaign, is probably a bad idea. After all, wargaming is a hobby. And some rather unhelpful non-questions can be thrown up, but such reflections, some of which I have considered here in the dim and distant past. Examples would include ‘does wargaming indicate a condoning of violence?’ The answer to that one is a fairly straightforward ‘no’. There are more difficult questions, of course, such as ‘does the depiction in this or that role-playing game of the nation state suggest fascism?’ The answer to that one is ‘possibly’. But I am not really trying to pursue such questions here.

What has been slightly puzzling me over the last week or so is the thought that my campaign might actually represent, for me, part of my world-view, albeit reduced to something which can be comprehensibly wargamed. I suppose I need to elicit the campaign system a little bit, and also a bit of the background to why I made the choices I did.

First of all, the background. The idea of wargaming a whole world (this one) has been with me for a while. When I started solo wargaming, there was a penchant for imaginary worlds, peopled in various ways, like Tony Bath’s Hyboria campaign. Wider reading, such as Parker’s The Military Revolution, indicated that the early modern period was the first in which the various bits of the world really started to interact with each other. The 1618-Something email campaign was an outworking of this, inspired by the DBR army list books which covered the world (or much of it, at least).

I suppose you could say that the various campaigns I have run, more or less successfully, and journaled here as blog posts, have been practice for 1600 – Something, the big one. Quite likely. Ideas that have been around for years have linked up with fairly new ones to form some sort of fairly open, flexible, practical and interesting method of dealing with large numbers of actors, at a level of detail (or lack of it) which keeps things moving and keeps wargames flowing. The latest of these, incidentally, the Wars of Stuart Succession, has just been published in Lone Warrior. 232.

Underlying the system is a good deal of randomness. Each power, each turn, attempts to make an initiative roll. They manage it or not. Those that make it then draw a card which indicates the activity – raise or move a force, engage in diplomacy, or subvert someone. Across the mass of actors, this can lead to quite a variation in action, and each has to be considered as to what would be best or most likely for the actor in question. Occasionally this is clear, but mostly a list of options can be made and the decision established by a dice roll, possibly a bit like matrix games.

Other dice rolls, such as GOOS rolls or diplomacy rolls, decide on the outcomes of the actions. Hence, a list of wargames is drawn up, which are resolved on the table. The results of that- financial, in terms of armies and territory lost and prestige gained (or not), then feed into the next turn of the campaign. Random events, such as rebellions, disaster, or a few good things, mix things up a bit, as do some of the more raucous elements of the world of the early Seventeenth Century, such as the Mongols and Circassians.

Does this mean, then, that I see the world as essentially random, with no one, no potentate of 1600 or so, as really in charge of anything? Is that an expression of my political (with a small ‘p’, please) views of today? Anything is possible, I agree, and I might not be the best person to assess my motives, but the answers are, I think, ‘yes’ to the first question, and ‘no’ to the second.

The final influence on the game is possibly Parker’s book, Global Crisis. The thesis of this wide-ranging book is, as I recall, that Seventeenth Century rulers put far more store in their ambitions and ‘honour’ than they did in the well-being of their people, even in the face of environmental catastrophes, such as crop failure and plague. The rulers of Germany, for example, continued to make war even though their polities were depopulating. Spain kept fighting even though the country was financially exhausted. Sweden kept going in spite of the fact that the country was more-or-less depopulated, so much so that agriculture could barely continue. And so on.

I suppose that my campaign is in part a reaction to this, and an acceptance of it. The reaction is that my actors have small armies, and the conceit is that these do not really affect the local populations. The acceptance comes because the armies, or at least their victories and losses, can cause problems to the home nation in terms of bankruptcy and rebellion. In the game, Sweden is facing waves of rebellion because of huge (relatively) debts. Cambodia ceased to exist because of debt and battlefield losses. The actions of leaders had consequences for their nations, usually bad ones.

I am not sure, having tried to write this down, that it amounts to a ‘philosophy’ in any way, shape, or form. It does, perhaps, amount to a view of history, which suggests that most people simply want to get on with their lives in a relatively stable context, and that leaders only make things worse. On the other hand, I have, in the expansion to Asia, Africa and the Americas, tried to give these political actors agency. That, too, is a historical and possibly politically philosophical act. The Africans (etc.) were not simply quietly waiting for the Europeans to come and conquer them in the next two hundred years or so.

I suppose that there is not a single driver for the way the campaign has been created. I wanted a system that would generate wargames, and it has achieved that goal. What underlies that is a matter for some debate, but I have tried briefly to outline some of the influences, even if they do not amount to anything cohesive. But the foregoing may at least ask a question: do our wargames reflect our own personal thinking, or that of our society or culture in any way? Answers in the comments, please…. 

Lightest Africa

In order to expand the 1600 – Something campaign to include Africa, I am having to do some digging. First of all, of course, I need an atlas (which I can manage) and the DBR army lists. The African lists are contained in volume three of the lists, published, it would seem, in August 1997. Thus armed, I started to establish some of the players in Africa at the time, and started to encounter problems.

The first issue is that, actually, very little is known about most of Africa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century. There are hints, and a fair bit of stuff in the journals and accounts of mostly Portuguese travellers. But the Portuguese were not Africans, and they imposed their own views, worldviews, and prejudices on what they saw.

So, we have a problem of Eurocentrism. This is not unexpected, but, as a wargamer, it is a pain. We know a bit about what was happening on the coasts of some parts of Africa, but as to what was going on internally, we have little clue. The heritage from colonial Africa does not help at all, by the way. A lot of names have been changed (or, I suppose, changed back). The old political units of Africa have been roundly destroyed, some as late as the 1880s (or even beyond). And colonialism generally had the view that Africans could not govern themselves, which is patently untrue.

A case in point might be the rather mysterious ‘Zimba’ in list 8, East African Pagan. Just as an aside, the list covers more or less the whole of East Africa, at least away from the coasts. In the notes for the list, the Zimba are described as expanding from the rolling grasslands of the interior to the coastal plain and terrorising the inhabitants by their ferocity and cannibalism. They sound promising as a wargame army, but where, in fact, did they live and, perhaps more usefully, who were they?

The description continues with a brief account of the siege of Mombasa, where the Portuguese fought, and fought off, an expedition from the Ottoman Empire. ‘Hang on, a moment,’ I can hear you cry. ‘I thought we were dealing with East Africa, what is now Kenya. What has that got to do with the Ottomans?’ A good question.

Fortunately, the good old internet (which had hardly got started in 1997, of course) came up with this paper: Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World. Cracking title, I am sure you would agree, from Giancarlo Casale, in the Journal of World History, volume 18, number 3, 2007. But you might be forgiven for wondering what on earth was going on.

Well, the paper is available for free on Academia.edu; you are quite free to read it and decide for yourself. My own takeaways from it are, firstly, that the influence of the Ottoman Empire in the Indian Ocean was a lot more extensive than I thought. Apparently, Ottoman troops fought in the Far East (in Aceh, on the northern end of Sumatra, so far as I can tell). There was also a great deal of rivalry between the Mughals and Ottomans, particularly over the route to Mecca, the protection of the Holy Cities and the distribution of alms there. The Ottomans were also engaged in a protracted war with the Persians, and extricating themselves from the war with Spain, although not with Portugal. As a note to that last comment, of course, in 1579 Phillip II of Spain took over Portugal and its Empire. The Ottomans wanted a free hand in the Indian Ocean, so did not want to promise not to attack the Portuguese.

If you are still with me, some Ottoman officials in Yemen and Egypt sort of conspired to try to divert resources to the Indian Ocean, including suggesting building a canal from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Part of this was launching a raid on Mombasa in 1588 (an interesting date for Armadas, of course). The Portuguese responded by sending an expedition from Goa. The Ottoman force was welcomed by the Mombasans, and set up a defensive position with plenty of artillery and the galliots defending the harbour. This could be unbeatable, even given the numerical disparity.

However, the Ottoman position was undermined by the appearance of twenty thousand Zimba cannibals on the shore, which split the Ottoman forces. The Portuguese, when they arrived, overwhelmed the seaward-facing fortifications, while the Ottomans fought off the Zimba. The Ottomans surrendered to the Portuguese, and the Zimba crossed, terrifying the inhabitants and causing mass panic as the Portuguese only managed to save a few. The rest, including women and children, seem to have been butchered.

Casale interrogates the accounts of the action which we have, and dismisses quite a few aspects, including the idea that it was fanciful or made up, that the Zimba were really cannibals, and noting that the Portuguese chronicler might well have inflated the account to show that they, too, fought the infidel. But the point of interest here is to ask who, exactly, were these twenty-thousand Zimba?

Unfortunately, we cannot tell, and Casale does not probe too deeply. Were they a mercenary army brought from the Zambezi? Or a migrating band of Maravi warriors moving north, having been disrupted by the coastal Muslims? Or were they locals unhappy at the idea of an Ottoman takeover? Unfortunately, history does not tell us.

On the other hand, the decisive intervention in the whole affair was by a bunch of otherwise unknown Africans. The Zimba, whoever they were, determined the outcome of the confrontation of the two technologically advanced empires. How this came about is unknown; it could have been entirely fortuitous, or they could have been allied to the Portuguese, or influenced by them in some way. The point is that Africans were perfectly well able to act on their own behalf, under their own leaders and polities, however obscure to contemporary Europeans and historians those leaders and polities might be.

1600 – Something: Patience is a Virtue

The next action in the Summer 1606 turn of the campaign is, again, in South-East Asia. This time, a Laotian army is responding to the invasion of Vientane by the Vietnamese. You will doubtless recall that the Laotian army was a bit unlucky to lose against the invaders in spring, and was forced to retreat into garrison. The main Laotian army was in the north, invading bits of Burma. Now, they have turned south and with the aid of the garrison, are aiming at turfing the Vietnamese out.

The Vietnamese army also has support, and so it is two eighteen-base armies that are going to face each other. The Vietnamese totalled three elephants (including the general), two cavalry, six bows and crossbows, five bills and two skirmishers. The Laotians had two elephant bases (including the general), two cavalry, eleven tribal foot bases and three bows.

I rolled a fair bit of terrain, as you can see above. The Vietnamese are on the defensive, even though they are in Laos, and are to the left. I decided to leave the skirmishers protecting the train, while the main strength of the army is deployed on two hills, the central one with the general, and the far side with the sub-general. The cavalry are on the extreme left (if you look carefully you can see the edge of one of the bases), and the elephants are in reserve.

The Laotians were not looking forward to this. Previous experience shows that bill elements are very tough when uphill against, well, more or less anyone, and perhaps especially tribal foot. They deployed in two blocks, one in the centre under the general, the other on the right, to outflank and hit the hill on the far side. The cavalry were flank guards.

The Laotians advanced cautiously. I am trying to learn not just to slam tribal foot into any passing target, but to try to gather them up into a decisive strike. The Laotian ‘right hook’ is advancing, the archers having deployed. In the centre, the general is dividing the tribal foot into two, while pushing up the archers. On the Laotian left, the cavalry have advanced, but they have been disrupted by bow fire from the central hill, and are now a bit scattered, and the foremost element is looking a bit vulnerable.

The Laotian centre deployed and, with the Vietnamese on the hill masked by archers, charged the Vietnamese bows in the centre. Neither side had really planned for this. The Vietnamese elephants were too far away to support them, while the Laotians were also a bit flat-footed by it. Nevertheless, they are wreaking some havoc among the Vietnamese bows. On the far side, despite losing the archery duel, the Laotian right hook is making progress, even though charging bill bases uphill still sounds dubious.

Two-thirds of the Vietnamese bows were routed, although rather to everyone’s surprise one base stood its ground and recoiled the tribal foot. The Vietnamese on the hill advanced down it into the covering Laotian archers and routed them, while the remaining Laotian tribal foot charged on, encountering the Vietnamese elephants. The Vietnamese cavalry is being moved across to the volatile centre, while on the Vietnamese left the reserve bills are moving into position. At this point the Laotian morale drooped a bit, and they fell back.

Nothing daunted, however, the Laotians fought on. Their right hook charged up the hill and, rather to everyone’s surprise, took out a bill base, following it up with a flank attack on the reserves led by the sub-general, which they also won, killing the general. In the centre, the marauding Laotian tribal foot with the general were bounced by the elephants, and were falling back in disorder. However, the destruction of the Vietnamese left, and the death of the sub-general pushed Vietnamese morale to a critically low level, and a poor roll left them with a status of withdraw.

Overall, the Laotians had lost two bow bases, while the Vietnamese lost two bows, two bills and the sub-general. So it was fairly close, the main difference being the success of the flank attack. Strategically, the Vietnamese will now have to withdraw from Laos, and try to work out how to pay three armies from two provinces. The Laotians have just about survived the invasion, and the land grab in the north might, in time, give them the upper hand.

Along the way I discovered a problem with the Vietnamese list I was using. I referred back to the DBR list and discovered a whole pile of warbands (the DBR equivalent of tribal foot) which had dropped out of my twelve-base armies. So a revised list has been prepared, with two elephants, a cavalry base, four bows and crossbows, a tribal foot base, a skirmishers base and a rocket, cavalry, elephant or tribal foot base decided at random. It was a bit of a humbug moment, but invoking guideline 1 of that book I let the previous results stand, of course, but I must do some amendments to my lists.

I also am considering adding some singly-based elephant commanders to my collection. The problem is that in the armies with elephants, the elephant is the general, and this can lead to the general exposing himself to a lot of risk. Additionally, elephant bases are slower than cavalry or light cavalry bases, which most generals move as. This is not really a problem when both armies have elephant bases as generals, as here. But when one army has an elephant base as a general, and the other does not, the latter is a bit more flexible, which seems unfair. So I am trying to work out an order which rectifies this shortcoming as well.

Still, a good battle which shows that a patient build-up with tribal foot can pay off, even when attacking bills deployed defensively on top of hills. Mind you, the Laotians were lucky with some combat rolls.

Next up, I think we return to the Middle East, where the Persians have invaded Mesopotamia again.

Inching Towards the Goal

 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.

Incipient Megalomania and a Test Game

For reasons entirely unconnected with wargaming, I recently attended a course on the philosopher Nietzsche. Few people know much about Nietzsche, even how to spell his name. One thing people seem to know is that he went mad due to syphilis, which is only half true. He did go mad, but not because he had syphilis. The other thing people know is that he declared the death of God, even though he did not argue for it. There are reasons for what he said and why, but I am not interested in them here. What I wish to note is that just before he descended into irretrievable madness, he became megalomaniac, writing to friends about how he ruled Europe and would have all anti-semites shot, among other things.

I have for many years, in fact since the DBR army lists volume 3 book was released, pondered Africa in the early modern period. It never made it into my original 1618 – Something campaign, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the figures are simply not available. I have a fairly flexible approach to building Early Modern (for the sake of argument, let us define it as 1500 – 1700) armies, as the regular reader of this blog will know. However, it gets increasingly difficult as the forces and troops get more obscure, and Africa is definitely getting obscure. It is even more so with 6 mm figures, of course. Even so, back in the 1990s there were few figures around in any scale.

The next problem is finding anything out about Africa in the time frame. There was practically nothing about the subject. Even now, in the age of the Internet, there is not much. Mostly, what we have is reports from Portuguese merchants and adventurers, which we can believe or not, as we choose. So it is all a little tricky.

Not to be deterred this time, of course, I am planning a further extension to the 1600 – Something campaign, which has come to dominate the blog and which you are probably all bored silly with. But perhaps Africa in the late pre-colonial (or early colonial) period might be interesting for some. I have started with a map (which is proving difficult, as noted above) and sourcing figures. Having given up on finding the ‘correct’ figures, I am going to use what I have from my North African and Arab box, assorted Asian types and, of course, the Aztecs, who provide plenty of tribal foot, bowmen and skirmishers.

As a proof of concept game, or rather, just for fun and to show that it works, I set up a game, above, between Somalis (of an undefined location) to the left and Abyssinians to the right. The Somalis have a skirmisher (in the palm trees), two cavalry, three bows, and six tribal foot bases. The Abyssinians have four light horse, two shot (in the fields), a skirmisher, a bill base, and five tribal foot bases. I also rolled a fair bit of terrain, as you can see, which means that the Abyssinian light horse are, unusually, in column.

As this was not a campaign game, I was possibly a bit more gung-ho than I would normally be. The Abyssinian light horse have moved onto the flank in the foreground and deployed. The first thing they did was halt the rightmost group of tribal foot, so the Somali cavalry have moved across to cover them. The rest of the Somali tribal foot are moving forward into charge position.

The leftmost Somali foot charged home, shaking their opponents. Then they had a disaster, and the Abyssinians fought back, recoiling them and then, under the leadership of the general, routing them. This led the rest of the Somali army to waver. As they were doing so, the central block of Somali foot was charged by the Abyssinians and forced back. Meanwhile, the light horse were still entertaining and disrupting the Somali cavalry.

The coup de grace came when the Abyssinian general led the light horse onto the flank of the central block Somalis. The shaken Abyssinian tribal foot stepped up and recoiled the Somalis again, and they vaporised. In the meantime, the dancing Abyssinian light horse on their left subjected the Somali cavalry to a withering barrage and hit one base twice, the Somali general having just brought it back into line. The Somali general had to roll for risk, and failed. The Somalis were now four bases and a general down, and the morale roll came up ‘rout’.

That was fun, although I did not manage to get any firepower into the action on either side. Tribal foot armies then to either win big or lose big, and this was no exception, although the Abyssinian dice rolling was pretty good. With the general dead and the centre gone, the Somalis were toast.

So, the principle is proven. I can run wargames in East Africa, at least. The map is slowly being extended from Egypt down the Nile, and resources are being garnered for West Africa. I am even considering buying a few Ashanti, colonial Abyssinian and Zulu figures, just as markers for what is going on, but I suspect that the Aztecs will continue to provide the bulk of the troops.

As for the megalomania, well, you be the judge. The campaign currently stretches from Portugal to Japan, and Norway to Egypt, with, I think, twenty-eight political entities on the map (I can’t say countries, as Cambodia currently has no territory). By my reckoning, Africa will add approximately fourteen more, plus Morocco and Oman as separate actors.

The last map turn took me about an hour and forty minutes to run, and provided seven wargames. I reckon, then, that once Africa gets going, it would generate another three battles and another 20 minutes of preparation time. Mind you, the Indian subcontinent has been going for a few moves so far and has produced nothing.

So, there you are. Am I becoming a megalomaniac? Or simply going mad? You be the judge.