Bob Hurst and I each had five retinues, with each retinue led by a knightly knight. A retinue consisted of an assortment of troops… a couple of stands of archers, of men @ arms, of foot knights, and of mounted knights. Each retinue had its own data sheet on which we tracked its losses. In the first battle, we decided that when three losses were marked down for a retinue, that would result in a lost stand. Too bloody. In the second battle, we changed the loss rule… this time, four losses resulted in one lost stand. But now that the group lost a stand… which stand? A table was used… we tossed percentage dice and referred to the Loss Chart. Chart 1 01 to 10 Lose 1 mounted knight stand 11 to 30 Lose 1 foot knight stand 31 to 60 Lose 1 man @ arms stand 61 to 100 Lose 1 archer stand Note that the odds were that the lower level stands would be lost first… 40 percent chance to lose an archer, contrasted with 10 percent chance to lose a mounted knight. In the middle of the field was Hedrig's Farm, and in this farm was one of Bob's groups. This retinue was commanded by the Vicomte de Beau, and his men did good work. One of my retinues attacked that of de Beau's, but was driven back. It took a number of losses before de Beau's men took a critical morale test, failed and fell back behind the farm. The sequence used a common card deck for the sides. The various retinue leaders had been graded into three classes… A, (the best), B, and C (the worst). On each card was annotated the type of leader who could move his men. A type-A leader had more cards in the deck, hence he and his retinue moved more efficiently that his not-so-efficient neighbors. There were about ten cards in the deck…some of the cards listed more than one type of leader. The sequence itself was rather simple: Draw an action card for Side 1 and determine which type of leader could move his men. Simultaneous fire by the archers of both sides. Draw the next action card for Side 2. Simultaneous fire by the archers of both sides Resolve melee Units on both sides that took losses will remove stands In retrospect, in Bob's opinion, there was too much firing going on. The archers were too powerful. Most of the losses resulted from archery, and during the entire battle, we had only two assaults. For the medieval era, there should have been more hand-to-hand fighting. I agreed with him. And so, in the second battle, we defused the archers. Each archer stand contributed 15 fire points to a volley. Since each retinue had only 2 archer stands, the probability of hit (POH) for the two stands was only 30 percent. And if you tossed your dice below half the POH (15 or below), your archer unit would score 2 hits on the target. This change completely revamped the loss structure. We must have had some 8 melees in the encounter (I think I lost all but one of 'em). In the sequence for this second battle, I tossed in a 'reaction phase' for each side. After firing and movement, each side could use its Reaction Points (RP) to perform out-of-sequence actions. Using the RP was a 2-step procedure. When a unit wanted to react, it first had to allocate 2 or 3 RP (the required number changed each bound) for the response. Each bound, the sides had a number of RP in inventory, and although these were replenished, they were always short in supply. Allocation of the RP meant that the leader had issued the order to his unit. The next question was: did the order arrive? There was an 80 percent chance that it did. If the order failed to arrive (dice toss above 80), the RP were wasted. If it did arrive, the unit could react… it could move or fire or fall back, etc. In the center of the field in this second battle was Hedrig's Hill. Bob and I diced to see which of us could occupy the hill. Bob won and placed Sir Bilbo's retinue on the hill. Sir Bilbo's men remained there like rocks for the entire battle… they simply could not be budged. Each time a retinue took a hit, we placed a hit marker on it. Hits were scored on the retinue as a whole and not on individual stands. We didn't employ the card activation system in this game… we switched to a more standard "you go/I go" system. The first phase in the sequence was to determine the Elapsed Time of the half-bound. A 10-sided die was tossed… when the accumulated ET total (after several half-bounds) reached 12, the cycle ended, and the casualty markers that the retinues had been dragging around with them were transferred to the unit data sheets. At this point, retinues that suffered 4 losses would dice to see which of their stands would be removed as shown on Chart 1. On my side, Sir Val proved to be most valiant. Time after time, his retinue would surge forward, and time after time, be beaten back with heavy losses. Around the 5th bound, Sir Val and all of men disappeared… too many recorded losses. Melee was when most of the losses occurred. When one retinue closed with another, it added up all its combat points, and for every 100 points, tossed dice to strike at the opposition. Mounted knights were valued at 60 combat points, down to archers at 20 points. Initially, the retinues totaled around 300 points, hence each had three strikes at the opposition. As the losses within each retinue mounted, and stands were removed, the point totals decreased. At battle's end, 3 of my 5 retinues remained, and these were fairly weak. I grudgingly conceded the field to Big Bob. Back to PW Review January 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com