Beneath the Lily BannerGame Two

Bob and I had our second game of Beneath the Lily Banners this week. It was a slightly smaller game, in that we cut out a couple of infantry battalions as we wanted to focus on cavalry actions this game.

We each had four battalions of infantry, two squadrons of cavalry and an field battery ... again the British were Platoon fire for infantry and Blade for cavalry. While the French were Rank firing and Bullet cavalry. All units were classed as Drilled as well. Both Commanders were rolled as Competent.

 



The Battle
The start of the battle saw about half of each side advancing ... under the cover of long range artillery fire. The second turn saw our first cavalry clash (our last as it turns out!).

 

The bonus for being blade tipped the balance to the British cavalry who won the first round 5 to 3. We each reinforced the battle with a second squadron. Even so, as both sides were disordered, we each only rolled a couple of dice. 

 

The British still won, 2 to 1. This brought up a few issues (aka problems!) as the casualties inflicted eliminated the French squadron. With much reading we moved on through it, which resulted in the British squadrons overrunning the other French Squadron.

 

Bob now set out to send his infantry forward, ... that was the plan, but he had several bad turns for orders, so only a couple battalions of infantry advanced.

The sluggish nature of the advanace allowed the French Artillery to pour fire onto a lead battalion, eventually reducing it to half strength and shakey morale. By then though we each had two battalions of infantry blazing away with musketry.

The British cavalry had reformed and charged into a fresh French battalion, who issued their opening volley onto the foolish cavalry ... one hit was inflicted.  I though that was the end of infantry, but in the combat they managed to draw with the horse 3-3. Now reduced the horse only rolled one die, while the infantry rolled two ... and won 2-1! With the British Horse eliminated we decided to call the game.

After Action Report
While we still had a good time with the game, we did run into several issues/problems. While I do still like the morale checks we have to make, they did not seem to impact the game much. We must have taken over twenty five checks for various reasons ... and only had one unit become Shaken! Basically you need a 4+ to pass and it is real easy (especially in a small game) to get positive modifiers. The thing with casualties' is that they don't kick in until the unit is really starting to get beat up, so I suspect most units will simple be destroyed before they ever Rout.

The other issue that came up was with multiple units in close combat. There is some vague wording about it. the first is what happens to the reinforcing unit if the primary unit is destroyed? It implies that it is treated as a Lost Combat, but is that for the round or the whole combat? ie does it just take a morale check as normal or does it rout. Also what happens to the reinforcing unit if the primary unit is wipe out AND lost a number of combat rounds to auto Rout? Also are casualties spread upon all units or just the primary unit?

We also found that Cavalry is very brittle ... basically they have one good charge in them.

I am really keen to try a game with a scenario and multiple people ... While I know it will bring up other issue we will have to work through, it will be more entertaining to have a reason to attack/defend then just to "test out" game mechanics. :)