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The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo. Russell F Weigley
Pretty much does what it says – looks at the whole of the search for decisive battle (pretty much a failure) in the era of musketry-covers socioeconomic background, strategy, tactics, organisation, armaments and the people behind the guns. 579pp. That’s a lot to cover in one volume but it a good place to start on ‘Horse and Musket’.
The Face of Battle. Keegan.
Great start on the battlefield as the battlefield. Will kickstart medieval, horse and musket and modern war through Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme.
Forward Into Battle. Paddy Griffith. Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to Vietnam.
Great companion piece to Keegan. Similarly nominally low level it (should) open your mind to the problems of reading so much supposed authoritative military history. The piece on the competing operational ‘schools’ of the US forces in Vietnam is worth the price alone. Traditional writing on Napoleonic battle is dissected as well.
The Western Way of War. Victor Davis Hanson.
Hoplite warfare and an exposition (you can agree of not) on how the western approach to killing up close gave Europe the edge. Detail and philosophy in one.
To fill in a bit of the gap between 400BC and Breitenfeld – you could do worse as a starter than
Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe, 300-1500. Helen Nicholson A summary of current theories on the development of warfare post Roman Empire to the 16th Century.
Read them – follow the bibliographies and notes and get back to us in a couple of weeks
PS For REALLY Broad brush – I started in the 60s with Fuller’s ‘A Military History of the Western World’ and Montgomery’s (nominally!) ‘A History of Warfare’.
That’s great – how do you do it?!
Is the scale of the rules such that individual figures are the information carriers themselves (on the table and okay to fight or dead/severely wounded/mentally incapacitated by fear/shock etc and removed?)
Or – other?
Enquiring minds….?
I started off with 25mm because that was all there was (except for 54mm and very expensive 32mm stuff – and a few tanks in 5mm (not a typo))
That meant the minimum realistic area to use was 6’x4′ and this was the max space available my parents would allocate.
That seems to have stuck – probably habit more than anything else, plus the size of rooms in British houses. I have had bigger tables when I was single and in the garage I still have the folding table tennis table I used for a while and had such plans for. This has to some extent moulded my scale/figure size/level of actions choices.
So 6’x4′ table standard normally – odd larger foray for 28mm Great Italian wars.
On the standard boards go:
28mm Lion Rampant
28mm Dark Ages Dux Bellorum
15mm Medieval – using Impetus or home grown
15mm 18th Century Imaginations currently experimenting with Honours of War
15mm Late WWII -WRG Armour Infantry (1973)
1/200 Early War WWII -Blitzkrieg Commander and Megablitz
1/200 Vietnam Cold War Commander
10mm ACW Longstreet
10mm 30 Years War – Home Brew
6mm Napoleonics Volley and Bayonet (I want BATTLES not piddling divisional scraps!)
6mm Modern Cold War Commander
Some of these in the smaller scales I fit small actions on a
4’x 3′ board – along with
6mm Ancients Sword & Spear
On a 2’x2′ board
6mm modern platoon action -No End in Sight
15mm Renaissance skirmish – Irregular Wars (sometimes 4’x3′)
6mm and 15mm Modern skirmish -Black Ops
Looking at 28mm Frostgrave
(There are 2mm Horse and Musket armies, 15mm Renaissance Poles and Turks, and some 6mm SF (Angel Barracks) waiting for effort/decisions about rules, basing, size of actions, talent for scratchbuilding buildings/terrain etc somewhere)
Good job I rationalised my wargaming a few years ago isn’t it?
(this does not take into account my counter/marker/chinagraph pencil games of kriegsspiel and the like of course for which my figure size is measured in microns rather than millimetres)
I’m not overly praising Henry (although I think most of the revisionist interpretations trying to knock him off his perch are from academics trying to carve a niche in a difficult tenure environment, or freaky Richard III apologists). I’m just glad someone brought the whole tedious interlude of ‘King of the Castle’ to an end. If Ed had managed it, fine by me. But he didn’t so Henry gets my vote.
Well I am basically an ‘inclusiver’ (I wonder if that is the same as John Salt’s ‘Lumper’? I also have urges to define things precisely from time to time however) – if you want to be included in a made up group name to which I might belong that’s pretty much okay with me as long as what you are doing isn’t morally repugnant and/or illegal!
I think JT’s definition of historical gamer is (I suspect deliberately) rather ‘tight’.
I am not now nor have I ever been a fantasy gamer – or have I? I’ve never owned an elf, goblin or orc – but I have a copy of Frostgrave and a wizardy type, apprentice and skeletons. And other non existent entities are an option. I’ve been a mystical Japanese assassin in a live action role play at COW many years ago as well but don’t tell anyone.
SF? Got some of Mike’s stuff , will probably get more and have delusional plans to build a large ‘settlement’ around some sort of ‘processing plant’ a la Quatermass (but with more shooting).
So mainly historical (based on real earth time period history in the subjunctive mood – thanks Jon, good concept) for me.
I confess I had presumed that Henry was talking about a freelance magazine supporting community when he said what he said so it slid straight past my consciousness that there could be anything controversial in it. Obviously I was wrong.
I do find a certain sensitivity sometimes in SF & Fantasy gamers, that if you don’t say you’d love to play ‘X’ game you are a snob. I don’t like playing some historical games either. It isn’t snobbery it’s just that for whatever reason; rules, figures, but more likely narrative drive and vision behind the game, I don’t want to play it. That’s all.
Figures as tokens. Always have been John. They were probably more useful as such when each one purported to represent a set number of soldiers, occupying a certain amount of ground and were removed to represent casualties. Now, so often just sitting there taking up undefined space and not diminishing until evaporation, one wonders if Paddy Griffith wasn’t correct when he said ‘Down with Toy Soldiers’ (except they are often quite pretty – back to fantasy cf the average squaddie
).But he didn’t stop the silliness did he? Otherwise we wouldn’t have had Bosworth and the tidying up Henry had to do. Ed wasn’t ruthless enough with nobles. He should have topped a few more and broken the power of the bigger magnates. If he’d invested his French winnings into trade a bit more and nicked a few more noble estates then I’d be cheering for him right now. But he didn’t. Good try. Thanks for playing, next contender (pretender?).
Are they neutered?
Never had a neutered cat behave like that – and it doesn’t hurt at all as long as you remember to keep your fingers on the side of the bricks.
Don’t remember it being a massive problem. Occasionally I have played games where someone (sometimes me!) is caught between two or more choices and can’t decide but very rarely has this led to more than a polite ‘get on with it!’ from anyone (me included).
I have played games where part of the exercise was time pressure so responses (these games sometimes did not involve figures, or moving them yourself) had to be made within a specific time and failure meant the end of the turn. They worked but they removed the casual ludic air and replaced it with something probably more exhilarating but less relaxing.
The figure games where this approach was used were of the IGOUGO sort and the time restraints on figure movement easy to implement. The interleaved nature of many rules now would make that impossible I think as swapping initiatives, movement interleaved with responses and combat by unit mix so many imponderables into one interaction.
Umpires are good to move things on, whether in a formalised way as above or just a ‘friendly’ reminder that units can lose morale with dithering commanders.
(more difficult to get hold of than chess clocks though).
