Special to the Lithuanian Daily Gazette... Church bells rang throughout Lithuania in the year 1422, when Prince Walakonis defeated the army of Vlad, the Usurper. Our re-creation was that of an extremely important battle in Lithuanian history, perhaps because it was the only one that Price Walakonis won that decade. I'm not sure if it was me or the Prince or my rules, but in all the previous re-creations of his engagements, he had lost. Opposing me as Vlad the Usurper was Fred Haub... this was not a huge battle, and we each had about 5 cavalry units, and 6 infantry units. A unit can be anywhere from 3 to 6 stands, depending upon how I apportion the figures while basing them. Much of my inventory comes from flea market purchases, and if there's a goodly supply of one particular type of figure, I'll configure a large unit of, say 6 stands... at the other end of the scale, I try to keep the minimum sized unit to 3 stands. In my Renaissance army, the actual number of figures per base, to me, is inconsequential... the little guys are mounted solely "for pretty"... the real strength of a unit during battle is tracked on its data sheet. For example, here's the sheet for Tharc's Cavalry, a 3-stand Haubian mounted unit: Line 1 gives the Combat Value (CV) per-stand. This is a constant throughout the battle. In combat, stands of the opposing units are paired off and the MV multiplied by a 10-sided die roll. High product drives the lower back, until only stands of one side are present. If all the stands (3 of them) in Tharc's Cavalry lost, the unit would mark off 3 "Hit Boxes" on Line 3. Line 2 gives the unit morale level. Line 3 is a series of "Hit Boxes", which are crossed out when the unit takes hits under fire or in melee. Note there are 20 Hit Boxes... 20 hits and the unit is destroyed. Haub and Simon have an ongoing disagreement on the number of Hit Boxes that should be assigned to units... I have a tendency to give them too many, to give the units "too long a life". In contrast, Haub considers about 12 boxes sufficient... if a unit is hit 12 times, surely that should do it in? Line 4 on the data sheet, titled BREAKPOINT (BK), is as important as is the row of hit boxes. When a unit loses a melee, it crosses off 3 BK numbers, and immediately undergoes a test to see if it breaks completely and flees the field. Looking at the sheet for Tharc's Cavalry, above, if the unit lost in combat, the first three numbers (2, 4, 6) would be crossed out. Then the last number crossed out, i.e., 6, is the percentage chance the unit "blows up". Note there are only 12 BK numbers, hence when the unit loses its third melee, all is over. In fact, the end may come even sooner... for when the unit is in combat, and wins, it still crosses out a BK number, although it doesn't take the annihilation test. And now to the battle. General Haub moved first, by dint of a high initiative dice throw. Out came one of the Haubian cavalry units, dashing across the field to interdict one of my own units. On this first phase of the sequence, the active side may move its medium and light cavalry units for a sweep of 60 inches. Surrealistic and a-historic as it is, the intent of the rule is to give the active commander the ability to hit any of the opposing units, immobilizing them for the remainder of the half-bound. The two units engaged in this melee, both winner and loser, are both prohibited from moving further during the half-bound. Thus the active commander, prior to launching his main attack during the regular movement phase, can use his cavalry to "take out" any of the opposing units that might give him trouble. General Haub's cavalry charge was successful... my unit was beaten. It crossed off Hit Boxes, crossed off 3 BK boxes, took a BREAKPOINT test to see if it disintegrated (it didn't), and fell back 12 inches. Movement distance are fairly large... infantry move 10 inches, cavalry move around 20 inches... hence our forces closed to contact almost immediately. On my right flank, I managed to hold my own, even though one of Haub's pike closed with one of my units, Shirey's Crossbows. In combat, each of the Shirey stands was worth 5 points, while the opposing pike unit was given a value of 8. Each unit had 4 stands... the stands were paired off, and their combat value was multiplied by a 10-sided die roll. The stand with the smaller product backed out of the combat, no longer fighting, while the stand of the unit with the higher product fought on. The fight continued until stands of only one unit remained in combat. With Haub multiplying his die roll by 8, and me multiplying by 5, Haub's chance of winning each pair-off was 70.7 percent... hence Shirey's Crossbows really didn't stand a chance. They lost, crossed off 4 Hit Boxes (one for every pair-off they lost), crossed off 3 BK numbers, took an annihilation test (they survived), and fell back 12 inches. A melee or two later, one in which I had driven back a Haubian unit of cavalry, I heard a cry of "Ah-a-a-a!" from across the table. The losing cavalry unit had crossed off 3 BK numbers and took its annihilation test... it had 6 percent chance of fleeing the field... the "Ah-a-a-a!" was the result. On my left flank, I had positioned a 4-stand unit of archers, Lynk's Bowmen, which turned out to be absolutely worthless. They refused to move forward, to even get within bow range (15 inches) for the first 5 turns... and then, once within range, their K-Mart bows and arrow sets could hit nothing. The basic chance to hit a target for an archer unit is a toss of a 1 or a 2 on a 10-sided die. But this hit number goes up by the number of stands in the unit firing. Hence with 4 stands, Lynk's Bowmen had to toss a 6 or under to hit. Not once, not once, during our 9-bound game, did Lynk's Bowmen hit anything. During the battle, I noticed that for one pike unit, Fred had jumbled up the stands... he had used the command stand from one unit, and the regular stands from another unit. "I did this on purpose" said Fred. "I didn't want to use your own yuckie-painted figures, and so I selected some nice looking stands painted by Jack Culverson and gave them an appropriately good-looking command stand." "No! No! No! No! No!", was my reply, "The right units must always be paired up with the right command stands. Otherwise, people will laugh, not only at my silly rules, but also at my silly army structure." And so I straightened Fred's units out, placing them in proper order. The Haubian pike unit that had my yuckie-painted figures in it was Captain Almadero's Armoured Foot. A couple of bounds later, I noted that, on my left flank, where I wasn't doing so well, General Haub had thrown Captain Almadero's pike unit into combat against one of my own pike units. Each pike unit had a per-stand combat value of 8, hence in the stand-by-stand pair-offs, each multiplied a 10-sided die roll by 8. But now, General Haub was hoist by his own petard. With Haub having so insulted and vilified Almadero and his men, it was obvious they simply refused to fight for the Haubian cause. Almadero lost every one of his combat pair-offs, and he and his company fell back. Almadero crossed off the requisite number of Hit Boxes, and 3 BK numbers for having lost the melee. Then the unit took its annihilation test. With only a 6 percent chance to flee the field... off went Almadero and his men! "I have been set up and betrayed!" shouted Haub. "That'll teach you to knock Simon's yuckie paint jobs!"... was my reply. But the defeat of Almadero had further repercussions for Haub, who, if you remember, was fighting for Vlad, the Usurper. The defeat and annihilation of Almadero's unit affected Vlad's victory conditions. Each side started out with 100 Victory Points (VP), which were reduced, during the battle, by various factors, all related to the unit's combat value: Fail a morale test: decrease VP by the unit's combat value Lose a melee: decrease VP by twice the unit's combat value Unit destroyed: decrease VP by three times the combat value Here, with Almadero's combat value of 8, when his pikemen lost the melee, Vlad's VP went down by 2x8, or 16 points. Then, with Almadero's unit destroyed, another 3x8, or 24 points, were taken off Vlad's VP. This cumulative decrease of 40 points, coupled with the normal losses experienced during the engagement, was enough to drive Vlad's remaining VP close to the zero mark. At this point, General Haub, still mumbling about having been betrayed, gave me his sword. Back to PW Review November 1997 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 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