Battle of Agincourt II - My Medieval Rules WIP - Pt 2

Rules playing going well, even if  not a lot of time to do it (I blame the Cossacks I'm painting!).

The French Main battle is now approaching, but the front rank of crossbowmen is coming off worst in the firefight with the English archers, and routing French are causing morale damage even on the rear Battle.

Added in some rules for General vs General individual combat, so they should get a good test as we enter the main melee phase.

Really ought to make some "arrow" damage markers to replace the smoke-puffs from my gunpowder era games!

Battle of Agincourt II - My Medieval Rules WIP - Pt 1

A lot better game, rules proving a lot more straight forward, and the card activation a lot easier to keep track off.

Both the MMAA units were routed again by bow fire, and this time there was a mechanism for them to cause some morale damage as they went back. The main French battle sent DMAA into the ends of the English bow line, but the archers are managing to not crumble instantly (in fact I abandoned the "dagger" weapon as they got no hits in the first round, so upgraded them to sword, now doing too well, so now introducing a "secondary weapon" between the two.

Archers vs DMAA on the French right flank - 2 all!

The main body of the main Battle came on, taking damage from the archers. Surprised at even with a 9+ (longbow vs plate) all four D10 could fail to hit (which of course is reasonable). The "stalled" result on a double has also worked well, no triples yet!

The lead DMAA makes contact. It had taken 2 damage out of 4 to get alongside the English archers, but Orlean's then finally managed to roll a bonus command point and used it to drive the DMAA home before the English could get another shot in. Already weakened they lost another damage.

Weakend French DMAA crash into the English bow line

Not 100% sure about the melee system. Currently each side rolls for damage on opposition, but only the DIFFERENCE is applied to the loser. Putting the markers out as I roll so I don't forget works well. It does reduce the amount of damage, but despite an extra rule does mean that the winner of each round is unlikely to take damage.  I used the difference approach so say two lots of heavy knights don't decimate each other in one go - but that may be liveable with for faster degradation of both sides. Will try it once DMAA starts facing DMAA.

One Page Medieval Big Battles Rules Draft

Given my dissatisfaction with Hordes & Heroes on the last outing, and the mismatch between rules like S&S and TTS and what I want for a big-battle set I've quickly pulled together a 1 page set of medieval big battle rules. Will try them out over the next week on the Agincourt scenario and see how they play.

If you want to give them a try they are at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zo3rny18gc6ggf0/MMR%20Aide%20Memoire%20v0a.pdf?dl=0

Very abbreviated at the moment just to give me some structure - but if you know your rules your can probably work out how they work. The rules use D10 and a similar damage and morale model to my Steady Lads Steady Napoleonic rules. They are designed for 10cm Hexon hexes (but could modify for non-hex play),  with one unit per hex, and unit being about 500 men. Figure scale up to you (but I'll be using 6mm now and 20mm next year).

If they look good I'll gradually work them up into a proper set and possibly put them through either a magazine article or a free PDF.

Battle of Agincourt - AAR

Well that was over quicker than expected! The French cavalry moved forward against the English archers and got obliterated. Then the French Van moved forward  against the English archers and got obliterated. And all without any melee - not how Agincourt went. Same again with the Main battle.

I then let the French take a time-out and do some re-organisation and send the Rear battle in en-masse and against one of the flanks. They finally managed to break an archer unit, and could then start wrapping ip the flank and finally get to grips with the centre without all the fire from the flank.

The battle then disintegrated into about half-a-dozen one-on-one melees. But with equal participants in most cases (English MAA stretched thin!) the melee would only give at least 1 damage for 6/36 rounds (as H&H B&C class need 3+ hits for at least 1 damage), so it was all going to get pretty boring. I called a halt.

One of the final melees

The final situation

When I last used Hordes & Heroes (for Bosworth) I thought it worked pretty well - but this time I just couldn't get on with it. Key issues were:

• Longbows were devastating even against MAA - they hit on 8+ on D12 (so 42%) - and you're rolling 4x per unit, and the English were getting 2-3 units firing on each MAA TWICE per turn. OK it's not a 1:1 map of hits to damage (hits-3 basically) and with only 3 damage per unit the MAA were gone pretty quick
• The IGO-UGO model with both wises firing in each fire phase, and melee in both phase made it hard to keep track in the sort of interrupted solo games I play
• The "flee" result which comes up from about 4 hits onwards send a unit to the back line, where it automatically rallies, even if its only taking 1 hit! So potentially having fought one battle you might have to fight it all over again!
• The two stage hit calculation/damage chart mechanism is a bit cumbersome, particularly given the chart is a 10x5 grid

It probably wasn't helped by the French having to charge (slowly) into the valley of death - but at least they should have made contact!

So I think I'm going to park H&H. But where to go instead? I've tried both To The Strongest and Sword & Spear and both have nice points, but they aren't really solo big-battle rules. I had c.43 units on the table, so single activating every one as both rules require would be a real pain. I've tried and passed on Impetus and DBA variants.  I might do a quick look on freewargamerules, but other wise there isn't a commercial rule-set I can think of that fits the bill - so probably time to write my own simple set!

Should be play-testing by mid-week!