Saturday 5 August 2017

Flanks

I have, as some of you might know by now, obtained a small wargaming table. Now, I imagine that most tables are probably six feet by four feet, or even bigger. Certainly most pictures I see of people’s set ups suggests that size, as they say, is important. Some, of course, have bigger tables; I believe that someone once said that perhaps ten feet by six was the biggest practical, at least n one table.

I have no problem with this, of course. I used to have a six by four, which did sterling service for a number of years. The problem that I do have is with the numbers of toy soldiers that are placed upon said tables. I may well have moaned about this before in passing, and I may well, of course, contradict myself, but let’s see.

The issue at stake is, of course, the wargamer’s view that a wargame is not a wargame unless the table is full of troops. There are, of course, honourable exceptions to this general rule, but a brief investigation of some wargame blogs will probably affirm my assertion. Wargamers, in general, deploy everything they have across the whole width of the table.

Naturally, this is understandable. For one thing, most battles were straight on affairs. Most generals in his they could, attempted to secure their flanks by using impassable, or at least, difficult to pass terrain. Rivers, hedgerows, towns and castles have all been used to secure an army’s flanks. For another thing, sending a whole load of soldiers on a flank march is the luxury of an army that heavily outnumbers its opponents. After all, if the numbers are fairly even and a significant chunk of one army disappears, there is a risk that one or both bits will be defeated in detail before the others appear. For both these reasons, then, wargamers have it roughly right.

However, I do think that there are two things that do demand consideration. Firstly, flanks do not magically secure themselves. The choice of battlefield is significant in these circumstances, and is an important part of generalship. A general who is forced to fight with one flank ‘up in the air’ has to deploy forces to secure that flank, and this reduces the numbers available for the front  line. Thus it seems to me that wargamers who do not engage in pre-battle manoeuvring are missing a significant chance to show off their abilities (or lack of them, of course. I know where I would fall on this spectrum, at least) at forcing their opponents to fight at a disadvantage.

The second aspect is, of course, that in real life no-one wants a fair fight. The aim of generals is to win battles, achieve campaign objectives and win wars. The aim of wargamers is to enjoy a good game. This tends to entail filling the table with pretty toys and slugging it out. The relative unpopularity of campaign games is testament to that, as is the relative paucity of naval games. One of the writers on naval games noted that a naval wargame without the campaign context is a lot more pointless that land based wargames. In the latter, a crossroads or town can be declared strategically important and fought for. There is a lack of that sort of objective in naval games. Even in my recent ancient naval effort there was a non-naval objective, that of getting the transports to the island intact. While such scenarios do exist on land (think of the Wagon Train scenario, for example) they do tend to arise more naturally at sea.

Once the table is filled, of course, the opportunities for manoeuver are limited. Most troops can only really advance straight ahead and attempt to clobber the enemy. We aim to make a breakthrough. The chances of flanking anything except the odd unit are limited. In this sense most wargames, it seems to me, land up a bit like the Western Front in World War One where the strategic flanks were, ultimately, secured on the Channel coast and Switzerland respectively. The only way was to break through to the green fields beyond, to coin a phrase.

I have mentioned that, in my new regime of wargaming, I have stopped worrying about filling the table, and this is, I think, a good thing. Firstly, I can avoid the drudgery of painting, for drudgery it is to me (although, over all, I spend most of my hobby time doing it). Secondly, I can now deploy small forces and still not have the flanks covered. I have, I think, always wargamed like this. On my tables, of whatever size, the flanks have been open to anyone who cares to wander into them. It probably says a lot about my strategic or grand tactical vision that this tends not to happen. Or it might simply reflect on my aversion to painting figures.

On the whole, though, I do think that flanks should get more attention from wargamers than they usually seem to. I have to admit, however, that I struggle to think of more than a few battles where a classical flank march, along the lines of that advocated in DBM, made a difference. I am not that well versed in military history through the ages, of course, but in my periods I can really only think of the Second Battle of Newbury, where the Parliamentary armies squandered a 2:1 outnumbering position and a few strategic cards by engaging in a risky flank march and then not really performing on the battlefield. The most recent thing I have seen about this, however, is that it might have been done deliberately, so a faction (including Cromwell) in Parliament could get rid of what they regarded as the dead wood generals, who may well achieve a compromise peace with the king if they emerged as the victors.


That is historical speculation, perhaps. But perhaps we, as wargamers, had better watch our flanks. After all, we never know what might be approaching ut of left field…..

17 comments:

  1. I discovered this problem last January when I laid out a grand review of my 30mm mid-18th century troops as well as all of the supporting forces I have painted (pontoon train, supply train, etc.) on a 6 x 12 foot table. There was not much room left for maneuver as you point out. Clearly, then, a larger table is called for! Jut kidding. But it does present an interesting hobby conundrum.

    Best Regards,

    Stokes

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    1. I find that all those pesky support bases take up a lot of room. But the troops like to be fed...

      It is an interesting issue - not a show stopper, but might cause some pause for thought.

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  2. It's very difficult to achieve pre-battle manoeuvring. If doing this through map moves/on paper you need the area map to be fairly detailed in order to permit the 'generals' to pick their position. The movement and mechanics (especially with the 'fog of war') can be painstaking - which is 'too much like work' to some wargamers. If you do it on the table with small forces relative to the table size you'd need blocks and dummy blocks to create any surprise.

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    1. I agree, and I suppose that is why most wargamers don't engage in it. But it does seem to be something that possibly should be within our sights. But most wargamers seem to want to stuff the table with toys and charge straight ahead (I generalise wildly).

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    2. There are some clever chaps out there coming up with great ideas for games. Must be one of them who could crack this.

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    3. I used to enjoy Koenig Krieg, an fairly playable SYW rules set. The pre-battle game involved fielding large cards for each brigade in the army. These would manoeuvre until pinned by enemy manoeuvre. Once pinned, the units they represented had to be deployed and could no longer move, if I recall correctly. Once all units were deployed thus, or after a set amount of pre-game manoeuvring, the battle commenced. This frequently led to games starting with armies at an angle to the baselines, and clever manoeuvring could see your troops poised to fall on the enemy flanks. The key was to ensure that you did not try to play games that were too large. Moderation, eh? I've not played them, but I think the Too Fat Lardies 'blinds' system does something similar. In both cases, I believe that some of the 'blinds' are dummies while the rest are real units. It seems like a reasonable system to me for recreating a measure of fog of war.

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    4. Thanks for the tip Ruaridh. I've got a copy of KK somewhere. Must dig it out and have a look.

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    5. I had the second edition. I know there is a third edition but I don't know if it included the pre-battle manoeuvre phase. Hope you find it and it is useful.

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  3. I used to find this issue back when I played DBM but not so much now. Sometimes now, flanks are not an issue because I am refighting a historical battle. The game starts after the initial manoeuvring and flank attacks are defined by scenario rule. Other times, my 6x4 table is large enough to have decent-sized empty flanks for most of the games I play, now that I have learnt not to play DBM and similar rules sets. I believe that it is about moderation. This reminds me of a club game I saw at the Essex Warriors in the days when I lived down there. The host put every toy he had on the table without a thought for the number of players or the space available, leading to a game where a full day's playing achieved only a couple of turns' game play. Not only were there no flanks, there was no space to manoeuvre even.

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    1. Sometimes less is more, I think. I've grumbled before about a WW2 game I saw with the armoured cars lined up hub-cap to hub-cap.

      The only problem I have with flank attacks on wide open spaces is that they take a long time to develop. But that is, at least, historical.

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    2. Yes, the classic tank park is an issue in some games.

      If you provide the space for a flank attack to develop then the player has the choice. Much better to have the choice than not. The system I outlined in my other reply makes for a relatively quick and easy way for a flank attack to develop if the player is canny.

      How often did flank marches/attacks happen, as opposed to a flank collapsing and the enemy then turning in on it, and falling on the rest of the army?

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    3. The only one I can specifically think of in the ECW is Second Newbury, but there was a lot of beating a flank and then turning on the infantry (Marston Moor, Naseby).

      I suppose the surprise is how often it could have happened and didn't: Crecy & Agincourt spring to mind. Mind you, I'm not well up on more modern battles.

      As for the mechanism, I think Principles of War has a similar sort of thing. I've never tried it but it looks like it might work.

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    4. I think most rules cover beating a flank and falling on the rest of the army fairly well already. I suspect we don't see it as often as we might because of the way that many rules adjudicate victory, but it is certainly covered. If flank marches are as rare as it sounds, perhaps we are asking too much of our rules, and they should really be included as a scenario special rule rather than as an integral part of the standard rules. But then, given that many rules include army lists allowing for every exceptional option, it could just be that as wargamers we have romanticised the flank march and want to conduct it too often.

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    5. As wargamers I suspect we romanticise an awful lot, probably including flank marches.

      As for the beating and turning in, my experience suggests firstly, that you are right and that beating a flank is sufficient for victory, and secondly, turning in, even with cavalry, is a slow process. Maybe we overestimate the pace of a battle, I'm not sure.

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    6. I think you're right. In our minds battles proceed a lot faster than they did in real life. We forget the amount of time it takes to manoeuvre a body of men into position, get them all lined up properly, and then to charge. We forget that there was probably a lot of hurry up and wait on the battlefield as people attacked, paused, caught their breath and then attacked again. A lot probably went on that is only modelled in our rules as a half hour turn length without consideration of what that actually means. And yet, in our minds it is all one glorious charge, just like on TV or at the movies. Even for historians (amateur and professional), the depictions we see in popular culture have more immediacy and make a greater impact than the primary sources describing the actuality.

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    7. You could well be correct. I suspect also that we think that weapons are a lot more effective than they were as well. I was reading recently that the (I think) Dorset Yeomanry charged, successfully, a Turkish force which had 3 machine guns in 1917. Granted, they may have been ill-serve,. but it is not our usual picture of cavalry in WW1.

      That and the fact that cavalry charges, on the whole, were not charges at the gallop until the final few yards means that a lot of other stuff must have been going on, undocumented and mostly in the participant's heads.

      I suppose this relates to the granualrity of our rules (and, for that matter, the bases our toys are stuck to). We can only model so much.

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    8. Yes, the granularity of the rules has a lot to do with it, if not everything.

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