This was a battle of retinues, wherein each retinue was defined to contain the following: 1 stand the Leading Knight, himself 1 stand Mounted knights 40 combat points 1 stand Foot knights 30 combat points 1 stand Men @ arms 20 combat points 1 stand Trained archers 10 combat points If you total the above retinue points, you’ll see that the amount is an even 100 combat points for the unit. The retinue of 5 stands was the maneuver element, i.e., the combat unit… it could not be broken up, it moved as a single entity, and when it moved, it could go 10 inches. And each retinue had two key parameters which were tracked… I decided not to remove single stands, and so I gave the retinue (a) Control Factor (CF), diced for at the beginning of the battle, ranging from 50 down to 30 (b) Fatigue Points (FP), which were derived from combat. When 10 FP were accumulated, the retinue was removed from the field. In our battle, each side started with 6 retinues, plus one Lord Knight, who was the Big Guy… he commanded everyone on the field. The Lord Knight had his own diced-for Control Factor, which ranged from 40 down to 20. And thereby hangs a tale. When I tossed the dice for my Lord Knight, the guy turned out to have the lowest possible value… 20. The turn starts by having the active side dicing for the number of retinues he can activate… and the selected retinue is activated by a Totaling the Control Factors (CF) of the retinue’s Lead Knight and the Lord Knight. b Tossing percentage dice below the total. If the toss is successful, the retinue moves as desired. If the toss is not successful, indicating that control has not been exercised, the retinue is referred to a random-move chart, which may result in the unit movng to one side, or halting, or falling back, etc. Most of my Lead Knights’ CFs were 40, and when I selected a retinue to function, and added the 20 CF of the Lord Knight, the sum was 60… indicating that only 60 percent of the time, my retinues would do what I wanted… the remaining time, they would disobey. I lost the battle because of the Control Factor… quite simply, my Lead Knights would not obey me or the Lord Knight, and went off on their own. If I wanted them to charge forward, they’d fall back, and if I wanted them to move to the left, they’d move to the right. In a couple of instances, I had a unit advance and make contact with an enemy retinue, and then I ordered another of my retinues to advance to get within 10 inches of the first retinue. The 10-inch distance was critical, since if a retinue was within 10 inches of a friendly unit already in contact with an enemy, the second retinue could join in the melee and help out, contributing a certain number of combat points. The test to see if the second retinue would assist also depended upon the Control Factors of the units. The procedure was to total the Control Factors of each of the Lead Knights of the two units, and toss percentage dice below the total. A successful toss, below the total, meant that the second unit joined in. An unsuccessful toss meant that the second unit stood there and watched the fight. For example, Prince Val, as a Lead Knight, started with a Control Factor (CF) of 40, and had lost a melee. Each time a Lead Knight’s retinue loses a combat, he reduces his CF by 10 points. Which meant that Prince Val’s CF was down to 30 points. Charge I ordered the Prince to charge a second time and was successful. And then I called upon Lord Romm to support Prince Val. Lord Romm had also lost a combat and hence had his CF reduced to 30. The total CF of both Lead Knights, Val and Romm, was 60… sad to say, Lord Romm refused to help… I tossed a 72, and Lord Romm thought better of assisting his long-time friend. The movement sequence employed a deck of cards. Each side had it own deck and they drew alternately. Each card stating how many retinues could be activated, either 2 or 3 or 4. Note that the deck didn’t permit all 6 retinues on a side to be activated at once.. And even if a card stated that 4 retinues were to be “energized”, the Control Factor test might prevent all 4 from being activated. This card-activation-business yields a rather “lurchy” sequence… for a multi-player game, it’s the pits, but for our one-on-one game it worked fine. There were two ways to eliminate a retinue, i.e., completely remove it from the field. The first concerned the CF discussed above. If a Leading Knight lost enough combats, and had his CF reduced to zero… that was it… he and his retinue would go home. The second elimination parameter dealt with Fatigue Points (FP), which were accumulated by the retinue during combat. A total of 10 FP, and the retinue was defined to have had it, and was destroyed. Each time the retinue was hit by archer fire, it would gain one FP. And if the retinue lost a melee, not only would the Lead Knight reduce his CP factor by 10, but his retinue would pick up 3 FP. Hence the tracking requirements of the retinues were two-fold… both CP and FP were recorded. Since each side had only 6 retinues, data keeping was fairly easy. I had mentioned that my Big Guy, the Lord Knight, Sir Bulb by name, started with a CF of 20. Sometime during the game, Sir Bulb was drawn into a a melee and lost. In this particular melee, Sir Bulb was only supporting… hence when his side lost, he didn’t lose a full 10 points from his CF, but only lost 5. The result was that his CF went down by 5 to 15, which made it that more difficult to control the units on the field. In all, it was a bad hair day for Sir Bulb, and his forces retreated from the field. Back to PW Review June 2002 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com