Twilight of Divine Right – Fleurus

[Whirlwind]

Please see here for a refight of the Battle of Fleurus, using Baccus 6mm figures and the Twilight of Divine Right rules.

[Konstantinos Travlos]

A battle I have dabbled in scenario writing myself. Good show

[Guy Farrish]

Really interesting battle. To my shame I’d never realised it was so close to Ligny!

Good set up too.

On that front, are you using 60mm frontages still? The table looks really small if so. The first time you tried it looks much bigger somehow yet you said that one was only 2’x2′!

Whatever the latest one was, it looked good and seemed to play really well. I must restart my TDR campaign. Real life got in the way and I’ve been too lazy to get things set up again. This may well have been the inspiration (kick up the backside) I needed! Thanks for posting.

(I’m glad you’ve stuck with these rules. I enjoy them but there are bits I think I miss during the game. I remember giving Martin Rapier a bit of a hard time when he said he felt they had too many moving parts for what he wanted now. I apologise. I  really like them  but I think I need to play them more often than I do to feel I have got it all (90%?) right at the end of a game. There are quite a few variants to the basics depending on unit size, mix of P&S and cavalry tactics etc.  All part of the fun of the period though!)

Edit: Square bracket syndrome again! The last bit disappeared on me when I posted!

 

[Whirlwind]

Thanks Konstantinos & Guy.

Yes, both play areas were the same size; only difference is that the first time I did it I used a corner of my big gaming mat, this latest was on a specific 2’x2′ board. So the main issue I have is that my bases are too deep relative to the frontage as compared to the recommendation; it doesn’t ‘usually’ matter, but sometimes it makes a difference. Since I am playing these solo, my way of getting around this is to be permissive about fudging moves to the rear (e.g. avoiding bad terrain by a few mm).

There have been a few areas to get used to in ToDR. Might categorize them something like:

1 – The core mechanics are really simple, but with some marginal complexity at the edges (what I think of as ‘small rules’ – different troop types act in different ways, lots of different possible actions, a number of ‘if’ clauses, 3 different types of artillery fire, that kind of thing. nothing too difficult, but plenty of little things to remember).

2 – There are lots of different troop types and lots of dials to differentiate one similar unit from another. This partly interacts with #1 (how various unit differentiators interact with each other in the morale test sub-routine, for example), but is mainly a test of your record-keeping and/or marking abilities. Polemos is a lot more about making it all work at the army level rather than the individual base, so I sometimes take on a bit of that mindset and do a bit of amalgamation etc. so that more units are more ‘vanilla’.

3 – Some of the ways the rules reflect the tactics of the period were a bit unintuitive. I get it now Nick & others have explained them a bit to me, but I didn’t always intuit successfully how some things were represented. I think I am mostly past this.

Anyway, explaining my learning experience as a player can make it sound like I like these rules less than I do. They are really good! And you can get a fair sized battle played to a proper conclusion in a very reasonable amount of time, without feeling that it was rushed in any way.

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