With things coming back to normal now, our group decided it was time to start back up with our monthly Horse and Musket gaming. We decided to start with a playtest of the Twilight of the Solider King rules. We had done a game some time ago using the Twilight of Divine Right to do a Imperial – Turkish fight and thought the rules were worth a shot in this period. Being a bit older, it is easier to play only a few systems and not have to manage a different system for every game we played. This seemed like a good test!
Based on the number of available players, I decided to go with the introductory Battle of Mollwitz scenario. I figured this would be small enough to finish the game in the time we had and big enough to give everyone enough troops to get a nice feel.
I set up the board using my Cigar Box tundra cloth to give a frozen terrain look, but not make it too stark for the figure bases to not look too shocking! The roads and stream were also from CG, as part of their terrain set. The city blocks are just some basketball craft paper attached to adhesive felt and painted up in gray, The buildings are random offerings in 10mm. I forgot to bring my winter trees, so just used what I had, which are out of production Crescent Root.
My figures are all mounted for Koenig Krieg, which we all like because of the two rank look. The game uses a base size of 60mm wide, with two bases being a unit (a brigade in the case of these rules). So, I pulled out my magnetic sabo bases (Shogun Miniatures). I put three infantry bases for infantry and two for cavalry and artillery. This gave a base of about two inches per unit, which was close enough for what we were doing. So our base equivalent was 50mm. Since the rules base all distances on base width, this works out fine.
The scenario had the Austrians set up first. It was at this time I realized that I did not bring enough Austrian Cuirrasiers. So, we had to work around that… Fortunately, I had some other sago bases with me, so just split the miniatures on the bases to give enough units. Problem resolved! I just backfilled the figures as units were eliminated.
Once the Austrians set up, the Prussians followed. The scenario gives set up bounds, so there was not too much play on this front. With the troops on the table and we were ready to go.
The Prussians began their attack by refusing their right flank and moving at the oblique towards the Austrian right. As the attack closed, the Austrians withdrew their vanguard hussars to their left flank and started to move forward with their right flank cavalry.
The Austrian cavalry then charged as the Prussians approached and a long slog took place between the Austrian Cavalry and the Prussian main attack. We went through a number of turns and the Austrian cavalry was eventually cleared with the wing failing morale. The Prussians then started to work their way to the Austrian center. The Austrian infantry opted to fall back to anchor their front not he won of Mollwitz and advance their left wing cavalry. At this point, the Prussians began a full advance, as their left flank tried to close with the center.
Contact was finally made by the Austrian Cavalry on the flank and the Austrian infantry in the center (now the left flank). The superiority of the Prussian infantry took its toll on the Austrians grinding through them and defeating the center in total. The Austrians failed their army morale check and the battle was over. In the end, the Austrians had lost half of their units, with two losses for the Prussians.
The game took us about three and a half hours to play with three players. It would have been a little faster, if we knew the rules better. With that said, I think we could have finished the same battle with our battalion based rules in about the same time, so I do not think we gained anything. The rules are still more melee based than shooting based, which seems a bit odd for this later period. So, while we liked the rules for the 30 years war, its probably not the right fit for SYW. Our play test for BBB was about the same, so it looks like we will have to stick with period specific rules. I think the next experiment will be playing Kaiserin Krieg at the brigade level and see how that compares!
- Manteuffel
Especially for Mollwitz, the main advantage for the Prussian infantry is that it has a better fire rating than the Austrian infantry (FR3 vs FR4) and has the rapid fire advantage (RF) so it has a major advantage in fire comab vs melee against the Autrians. (Prussian check morale with a +1 due to inferior Austrian FR, With RF, the Prussians can force the AUstrian to reroll one die (of 2) for any morale check significantly increasing the chance that they will take a morale hit from fire combat. So especially for the Prussian infantry, fire combat morale checks should be much more effective at beating the Austrian infantry than melee. Cavalry will work primarily with melee morale checks (and the Austrian infantry will probably want to try to initiate melee against Prussian infantry if they can without or after passing fire moral cheks. So I don’t think these rules really emphasize melee over fire to a degree inappropriate to the period. (Mollwitz also has little artillery, just on battery for the Prussians and none for the Austrians. with more artillery, fire moral tests would likely predominate further.)
We haven’t played with the Sun King/Divine Right versions of the Twilight rules but judging from Nick Dorell’s hypothetical Divne Right Pike and Shot battle, *it does seem like fire is less effective in that period at least.