Encounter 2: Protecting the retreat

This is the Shako battle report for game two of the mini campaign for my first flats units (game 1 here and here). The Reichsarmee rearguard occupies a village and tries to block the Prussians from advancing up the valley. Once the Prussians have deployed into line, the Reichsarmee can dice for reinforcements from the first Kurmainz bataillons I'm currently painting up.

Unfortunately the pictures seem to be broken so I'll hide them until I find a way to recover them.

One of the things I like about this Shako SYW approach where armies march onto the table in columns and deploy into lines from the march is that you experience the difficulty of organizing everything correctly. In the picture above you can see that the Grenadiers which were meant to support the main push to the right of the village deployed to the left by mistake, so their role will be limited to keeping the Kurpfalz unit pinned in the village on the Reichsarmee's right flank.

Once I noticed that mistake I got even more confused and turned the left column into the first line of battle when they should have been the supporting second line.... as a result the key attack had to be executed by the lowly Fusiliers (with good success, though, as you will see below), with the Grenadiers from the right approach column only providing rear support.

In turn 12, firing and Franconian losses continue. The 2nd bataillon Kurmainz has taken up a protective position in the woods on the left and can just pose a realistic threat of counter charging any attacks on the Franconian left. Despite heavy losses, the Reichsarmee rearguard once more bought time for their main army to continue the retreat in order.

In this game I didn't push the quality differences between the armies as hard as I could have. The maneuvering turned out very straight forward with little move / countermove action, but plenty of the nuts-and-bolts difficulties to align and arrange all units correctly to have free range to fire and charge in constricted space.

I love how the rule mechanics ancourage this very historic feel without any artificial "dressing the lines" events or overly complicated movement rules, just by setting very simple geometric restrictions to unit movements and volley fire from formed units. I don't think I'll go for an animated version of this encounter, though - all the maneuvering difficulties would only show up in slight variations of marching speeds in the approach march, and then it's mostly firing from static lines.

I'm really itching to replay the first two scenarios with my newly acquired Piquet 2nd ed. Cartouche rules. However, the experience from this game encourages me to keep unit quality differentiations at a minimum (even in this game of Shako I kept forgetting about all the ideas I had had to dice for unit quality at first use etc.). I do wonder whether the impulse system will introduce similar timing and coordination issues as I saw them in this game - here, plenty of delays and complications came just from deploying and maneuvering units from a realistic approach march in only two columns and working with constricted space, so maybe Piquet impulses will even unbalance things too much.

I will definitively take over the approach to have armies deploy from approach marching columns. I'm not sure yet whether I should do simple Igo-Hugo moves until battle lines are formed, or already go for the full impulse and card deck mechanic to have some uncertainty about deployment and force commanders to decide between risky and conservative deployment distances and sequences...