I finally got around to trying out an Italian Wars game using Warlord's Pike & Shotte ruleset, while also hosting my first porch game of the season. I perhaps cruelly used my guests as lab rats and mostly ran the same experiment as an earlier Kings of War Historical game: the question being, could an Venetian/Italian alliance army consisting mainly of arquebusiers, light horse, and a few Landsknecht, as well as the benefit of some earthwork defenses, stand a chance against a French army comprised of heavy horse and Swiss pike with some crossbowmen?
The answer, at least with Warlord's Pike & Shotte rules, using the Italian Wars lists therein, appears to be rather definitively no. I can't really tell if the problem is that the Italian Wars lists are poor, if a few select rules simply played to much to the advantage of the French, or if Pike & Shotte is better suited for the English Civil War and Thirty Years War, and the Italian Wars (at least the part of them I am interested in - 1495-1515 or so) are simply "too medieval" which makes Pike & Shotte a poor fit.
One glaring issue was that the French crossbowmen had a range of 18" versus the Italian arquebusiers' 12". This severely neutralized the Italians' edge in number of missile units. Another issue is that French mounted crossbowmen have more melee dice than the Italian stadriots, again neutralizing a possible advantage. Lastly the Warlord penchant for loading some units up with lots of bonues and special rules mostly worked for the French advantage (the Gendarmes and Swiss pikes).
The Italian players were good sports and played cagey. The French assault on the earthworks on the Italian left went far better than it should have, and the lay of the land (generated randomly with terrain tiles) allowed French mounted crossbowmen to completely bottle up the Italian extreme right flank.
The Swiss and Gendarmes performed well, and half the Landsknechts never even really engaged. A French victory, rather predictably, mostly.
When I first started collecting Italian Wars figures, my intention was to use these rules. But then Pikeman's Lament came out and Stuart at Army Royal gave me his Italian Wars Lion Rampant variant. As I was focused on running convention-style participation games, I leaned heavily into my own Lion Rampant variations for several years. The pandemic forced a "cold turkey" stop to this.
Since then, I've tried out the super simple Portable Wargame and aforementioned Kings of War Historical, which is also very streamlined. Both are also very fun.
After the game I got some excellent feedback from the players. High on the list was the importance the longer range of the crossbows played in both sides strategies. No one agreed that this felt accurate.
I voiced my interest in trying Kings of War Historical out in a multiplayer setting. I got some push back on this, in terms of ruleset-hopping, which is a legit complaint - I would couner that Pike & Shotte is still my go-to rules for the English Civil War, where the same-same nature of the opposing armies negates the problems seen in this game.
Of course, it was great to finally get so much of the Italian Wars collection out on a table, and the weather was very agreeable.
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