Soloing On (2)

EACH of the 15 battles in Mike Lambo's English Civil War book gets a spread.

Battle of Edgehill

On the right is a hexed map, which includes restrictions on where each side's units may be placed.

The Royalists, coming from the top of the map, have high ground in the rear of their deployment area.

The Parliamentarians, coming from the bottom of the map, have two wooded hexes, and there are more wooded hexes in the centre of the map.

On the left are details of each side's forces, and how the AI works.

The clever thing about the AI mechanism is that the human player never has to make a decision for the AI - the process is completely automated by a unit's general orders and, specifically, by dice throws.

At Edgehill the human leads Parliament, getting two units each of musketeers, pikemen and cavalry, and one of cannons.

The AI, commanding the Royal army, gets three units each of musketeers and pikemen, two of cavalry and one of cannons.

It should be obvious that these units cannot be thought of as single regiments.

An army's two units of cavalry, for example, should be thought of as the the army's right and left wings - at least that is how armies of the period generally set up.

A second thought arises: why are muskets and pikes treated as separate formations, when overwhelmingly at this time the two weapons were integrated into joint units?

Perhaps it is to add flavour, and Lambo does point out in his introduction that "many concepts have been simplified or abstracted for gameplay purposes."

One way of rationalising it is to think of foot units as containing mixed weapons, but with some emphasising, or being more proficient with, pikes, and others with muskets.

I do not claim that is entirely satisfactory, but will wait to see how the rules play out.

Incidentally, they could easily be adapted to Renaissance battles, when soldiers armed with shot weapons were usually separate from those trained for meleeing.