The Royalist northern army marches through the woods of Bredale, and is ambushed by a Scots-Parliamentarian armies laying in wait. The Royalists successfully route the Parliamentarian cavalry, but continuous musket fire from the woods is too much, and the Scots-Parliamentarians carry the day.
Gabe's friend from Argentina, Maro, turned out to be a tabletop battles player (One Page Rules, mostly), so we used this forest ambush scenario from the Kings of War Historical book. The attacker has 2,000 pts and the defender 1,500 (so we divided the attacker into two smaller forces of 1,000 each). The defender deploys in the middle facing all towards one long edge or the other, and the attackers deploy in huge wooded spaces on the short sides of the table.
I played the Royalists and overthought on deployment, setting up my units in a single column in order to try and avoid being charged right away. What this instead accomplished was making it very easy for the Scots-Parliamentarians to shoot the same units from both flanks. If I played this again I would deploy in double columns which statistically reduces the number of casualties on a given unit from shooting by half, if that makes sense.
The other thing I would do differently is probably attack one side or the other with all pikes and cavalry and try to defeat one side in detail (because then I have a slight advantage of 1,500 vs. 1,000 points worth of troops). This would also probably move most of the army out of musket range from the opposite flank and draw shotte units out of the woods on that side. As noted above, by deploying thinly along the middle, the Royalist army was subjected to fire from both flanks, resulting in unequal transactions like a pike unit routing from shooting without ever even being in charge range of anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment