måndag 8 december 2014

Division!

A couple of weeks ago some of the local By fire and sword players meet up under the initiative of Alexander to play a divison sized battle 'By fire and sword'. As only Alexander has enough to play at that level, Robin, David and myself gathered our forces in an alliance between Muscovite and and the Ottomans (not 100% legal gamewise). I am currently painting boyar sons to be able to play the muscovites cavalry skirmish force, and when my models from the Deluge kickstarter arrive I will have enough to muster my own Division force. With a bit off effort it will be done early 2015!



As when you play the game on skirmish level, division has quite a few rules that you have to go through before you start actually moving around your figures on the battlefield. These where mainly taken care of by Alexander.

To get even sides I volunteered to change sides and play with Alexander. As I have no clue to how other "nations" than muscovites  works in the game (and hardly them either), so I took command of the more static parts of the force, infantry and artillery. To protect our backs I also had a regiment of reiters.

Alexander has written a own report on his blog (Anatoli´s gameroom ), so I will focus on my own experience and my view of the battle.

One of 'By fire and sword' strengths is also its biggest weakness in my opinion, its pre-battle phase and that different sized "armies" can fight it out on the battlefield. The difference of size is then equalized with the weaker player gets to choose scenario and apply different random negative effects on the opponent. This can be great and adds a lot to the game, but at the same time it can make a particular very unplayable. Especially if you play a large army on the defense, as it will have to attack in many scenarios. Or as it happened in this game, where the defenders got to option to play short table edges, so the attackers a large area to cross before combat. Or as in the case of me who had the artillery, I really never got close enough for the shooting to be effective. I also had this experience in skirmish level sized games, where some battles really isn't worth playing.

Alexander deployed his troops on the left flank while I deployed on the right with a small village just ahead of my troops. This village was quickly secured by muscovite servant cossacks, so I began the slow task of getting my units to a effective shooting range, which took the large part of the battle as other servant cossacks units challenged to charge me if I left my defensive orders with all of my units. While doing this my reiters was trying to deal with some flankers that showed up. My artillery just got into range in the end of the game and didn't do any damage to the now well entranced muscovites in the buildings. The reiters did succeed in eliminate the flankers but even though I marsched them they didn't get to the front line to help their comrades there.

In the end it was time to calculate our victory points and it was 6 against 2 for the Muscovite/Ottoman alliance.

















2 kommentarer:

  1. A great looking game. Nice to see all those miniatures.

    SvaraRadera
  2. Yeah, lots of painted miniatures on a nice table, gotta love it! :)

    SvaraRadera