New SYW rules – Twilight of the Soldier Kings

[Hwiccee]

I am delighted to say that the SYW era rules in the Twilight series of rules are now available. These are called ‘Twilight of the Soldier Kings’. They are for fighting large battles with full historic armies with a reasonable amount of resources.

These can be purchased here – https://www.wyrehistoricbooks.co.uk/catalogue

Further details about the rules are on the above site.

Unfortunately, there is a slight delay on the first scenario book but we are hoping that will be available in around 10 days. If you intend purchasing both you may want to consider waiting to purchase until then and save on postage.

[Fredd Bloggs]

I have an issue with your rules range, what is wrong with the 1660 to 1680 period?

[Hwiccee]

Nothing wrong with that period 🙂 The earlier sets do actually cover this era but different conflicts from this time are probably better done with the different sets. So most are probably best done with the Divine right set but some will be better with the Sun King set. It is the same story with the gap between the Sun King and Soldier Kings.

[Fredd Bloggs]

My (insane) idea is siege of vienna, 1683, which is as much medieval as it is 9yw, gnw or wss!

[Hwiccee]

We regularly play the 1683 era but with the ‘Twilight of the Sun King’ rules, not this set. The Sun King rules cover the 9YW, GNW and WSS but also the Ottoman wars. So we use them for the war of the 1680’s & 90’s. Also the war against the Russians in 1711 and the Austrians again in 1714-18.

I am not sure I would agree that 1683 was very much like the medieval era but I guess that depends on what you mean by that?

You do need a set that treats the armies like the real armies and not like standard armies. This can apply to all the armies involved as some rules I have seen clearly have no idea what the ‘Western’ forces are like and their treatment of the Ottomans, Poles and other ‘Eastern’ types is often a joke. The Ottoman army in particular is tricky to get right but not particularly out of date. It is declining and so we have found the Kahlenberg battle itself a bit disappointing, the Ottomans don’t really have much chance in it.

In any case I hope you get to play the era sometime. It is fun to do.

[Fredd Bloggs]

Oh I am painting away. By medieval, I meant that compared to the west a lot of armoured horse and lance still about, as well as rise of flintlocks over match and wheel locks.

Poles are a fun army to recreate as well as the very modern Saxons, and turks are diverse more than anything else.

[Hwiccee]

OK I see what you mean by medieval and depending on what scale figures you are using you may have to go ‘medieval’ to build the armies. Unfortunately this is not too much what the armies would look like then,

The Polish hussars could still have lances but they actually really fought with swords & pistols. Lances were actually banned in the later part of the Vienna war. I think that most hussars would still have lances as a kind of status symbol but not many would actually use them in action in 1683. But it can be tricky finding Winged Hussars without lances and well they do look fantastic with lances. So all mine have lances 🙂

For the Ottomans it was basically the same. All the good troops used sword & pistols in action and only ‘backward’ contingents from the fringes would still use lances. I used this to help identify units. All my Sipahi had lances but I cut many of them down to represent swords or pistols. For the ‘elite’ units I did this to all the figures. For the’average’ units I did it for most but left a few lances and for the few ‘raw’ units I left most with lances.

There would be a lot of armour around if only because all the Western units would have it! Most of the ‘Eastern’ types were no longer wearing it or wore lighter versions than in the past and underneath their clothes. But again it can be difficult to get figures that look like this.

I sort of agree on the musket thing in that the greater use of flintlocks by the Western units meant that they had probably reached parity with the Ottoman Janissaries.

In any case keep painting and I hope to see some pictures of them at some point.

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