Wars of the Sun King in the Sun

It's been a couple of weeks since we played this game, but what with being away on business for one week and a crushing schedule of work the next it's took me a wile to finish this report.

Having played our first game of Chosen Men Well Disposed at the beginning of the month we decided to have another go. In the previous game I had boosted the French army by photographing some units then printing them out. We probably had too much stuff on the table that time, so this time we played with smaller forces just using the stuff that we had painted. It would only be myself and Drew today, Bruce and Sasha were unable to make this one.

I got the table set up in the den, but when Drew arrived the weather was glorious so we carried everything out onto the patio so that we could play there.

As you can see from the shadow the sun was super bright so the first phase of the game was the mandatory application of some sun cream :) 

Drew, as usual, opted for the French and I would be the Dutch, last time we played we counted everything as normal regular troops, this time we rolled a die for each Brigade, on a 1 it was raw, for the infantry or dragoon on a 5 or 6 for the Dutch or a 6 for the French it was veteran, for the horse on a 6 for the Dutch or a 5 or 6 for the French it was veteran. Units marked with green stickers are raw while those marked with red are veterans.

As I would be away on business in Mexico City the following day I though it only right that I should prepare for a trip by cracking open a case of Corona and chopping up some limes. Rather a lot of beer was drunk during the course of this game, so some details may be a bit sketchy....

Both of us had a large cavalry division and a smaller one and both of us managed to pit our bigger one against the smaller one, this would have quite an effect on the battle as it unfolded.

The two infantry divisions closed on each other, the Dutch were almost all veterans while a good half of the Frenchmen were raw, as you may imagine the French held back rather to see if their superior horsemen could gather an advantage first.

On my right I had six units of horse against eight French, four of which were veteran, so I would have to play a cagey game here, as it was once we got stuck in, the French had the initial success

As was alluded to earlier, much Corona was consumed during this exercise.

The hard pressed cavalry fight on the right continued, but I was able to balance that out as the game developed and even broke one of the French Brigades and caused the French Division to retire, although it only cost the French a single Critical Morale point.

In the centre the Dutch and French infantry closed to combat, as was to be expected the superior Dutchmen rolled over their French counterparts, who despite showing great resolve were soon overwhelmed. I was struggling to capitalise on this though as Drew was rolling much better than me for Tempo and the French maintained the initiative throughout the battle.

Eventually the French had lost a division each of horse and foot, while the Dutch has lost a division of horse, the 'broke boxes for each army are shown in the next two images, first the Dutch.

Now the French!

We declared a minor victory to the Dutch again and retired to the patio sofa to drink more Coronas and to enjoy some lovely sushi that Victoria had prepared for us.

First try of Chosen Men Well Disposed

Sundays game saw our first go with the Chosen Men Well Disposed rules from Polemos pitting my newly painted Dutch against a rather two dimensional French army.

I've only gotten a handful of French units painted so I took some top-down shots of some of my units and then took them to Office Depot and had them printed out and then cut them out to the required size. A purchase of $14.00 dollars saw one sheet of Warflags three laminated quick reference sheets and the whole French army ready for battle. It's not as spectacular as playing with figures but better than not playing at all.

I picked two roughly equal armies to oppose each other both of three Infantry Divisions and three Cavalry Divisions, for our first game all units would be classed as Trained and all Generals rated as Active, this would hopefully keep things simple for the first game. In retrospective, we probably had far too much stuff on the table for an initial foray into the rules and splitting just the painted stuff we had in half would probably have been better.

Drew and Sasha took the French while Bruce and myself commanded the United Provinces forces. Drew and Sasha kept the tempo early on while Bruce and myself marshalled our own tempo until we had a good spread and were able to commit forces cohesively.

On our left we had the advantage of an extra division of horse while on our right we were at the disadvantage, so we committed to holding out on the left whilst trying to batter through on the right with our infantry swiftly closing in the centre to take advantage of our superior close ranged fire effect, if we could pin the French infantry in place they would not be able to take advantage of their A'Prest bonuses.

It went very well on or right and with just our lead division we had crushed and broken the opposing French horse, hastily re-positioned French infantry tried to shore up the line. The loss of the French horse on that flank saw almost half the critical morale of the French gone.

On our left we soon had lost one of the brigades of horse, but we were clinging on, passing several brigade morale tests and keeping our troops in the fight while our reserve infantry division moved up to cover any French breakthrough.

The centre was a devastating fire fight, initially the Dutch loosed some crushing volleys, in some cases the initial shots causing the opposing French to give way completely, but the line eventually stabilised and the firefight ensued.

With time about to be called we did a quick count up, the Dutch had conceded none of their critical morale points while the French had lost five, also the advantage of units lost was swung in the favour of the Dutch, we wrapped up giving a minor victory to the United Provinces and we need to re-read the rules to see what we did wrong.

Some points we raised from the game, if you've got some experience with the rules we'd be glad to hear your thoughts:

1. For the army generation, how do you decide how many batteries to allocate?
2. I know that artillery was not very effective in the period, but with an arbitrary four batteries per side I would have expected some effect.
3. How do you keep track of what brigade a unit has come from when you get into contact, in the cavalry melee on the flanks and the fire-fight in the centre we had units everywhere with no idea of their starting brigades.
4. When your enemy recoils from melee and your horse follow up, do the supporting squadrons accompany them?
5. Is there a good reason to big high for tempo early in the game, it seems best to amass lots on your units for a coherent committal rather than going in piecemeal.