Sunday, March 22, 2015

The First Battle of Newbury, English Civil War (part one)

This series of posts will serve almost as a thought exercise as I prepare a wargame based on the First Battle of Newbury using the Carnage and Glory 2 computer moderated rules system.

So why First Newbury?  No particular reason, other than I was looking for an early First English Civil War battle that was relatively large.  The prior games I've run were smaller, and one was hypothetical, so now I want to tackle something bigger and historical.

 
The above map is from the British Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate 1638-1660 website, which seems like a pretty good resource.  First thought I had when I looked at it was, this doesn't look so bad!  Less than a dozen regiments per side!

Well...  Upon further reading each of the units denoted on the map are brigades, each consisting of roughly three or four regiments per brigade.  That's fairly big.  So, time to downsize.

There are several ways to go about this.  I could just make up the order of battle with each unit being a brigade instead of a regiment.  This could be problematic since the Carnage and Glory software isn't designed that way.  It organizes the regiments into brigades which I believe effects how well soldiers from one brigade respond to officers of different brigades as opposed to their own.  Also, the ground scale would no longer be accurate, though that might not be apparent in the game.

Biggest reason I wouldn't want to "upscale" the scenario that way is I would lose much of the detail.

Another way to go is to do the entire order of battle for First Newbury, but only run a scenario for a portion of the battle.  This is much better to me since I wouldn't be "cheating" the system, and I can actually run several games featuring different parts of the battle.

To start I think I'm going to do the mostly cavalry action on the southern half of the battlefield.  For one thing depicting the northern half will require me to model the disruptive terrain of hedges and narrow lanes, while the southern part was relatively open.

With that decided, the next issue is whether I actually have enough figures to do one half or even one third of the battle.

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