Twilight of Divine Right – Breitenfeld

[Whirlwind]

Please see here for a battle report of Breitenfeld, refought with Baccus 6mm figures and using the Twilight of Divine Right rules.

[Guy Farrish]

That’s a big battle! Solo?

Even bigger!

What about Lutzen? Death of Adolphus – overrated though he is by the US military – surely worth a shout as one of the most important battles ?

Anyhow – good game. Enjoyable report.

I’ve put  comment about the morale points on your blog – I think you get a maximum of 7 units in a support column for +3 x 2cols =6 max with the Imperialist formation and -2×2=4 for their enemy morale.

Still a lot isn’t it?

[Whirlwind]

Thanks Guy, much appreciated. And there is definitely a case for Lutzen, for sure.

I have put in a longer reply to your comment on the blog, but essentially it boils down to whether a unit with two units directly behind it (i.e. half of both the rear units’ frontage touching or close to the rear edge of the lead unit) can both claim +1 (which makes it powerful) or only one can claim +1 (which makes the Imperialists’ formation rubbish). I think a very literal interpretation of RAW tends to the first, the examples tend to the second.

(and yes, solo; strangely enough, the deep deployments in many of these TYW battles means the workload for a playing solo doesn’t increase linearly with more units in this game).

 

[Guy Farrish]

Well that’s embarrassing!

‘Unknown’ (Nick, author of the rules) arrived on Whirlwind’s blog to explain the situation above and his post cleared things up for me.

Regardless of the specific split support question you can only ever get +1 on your attack morale no matter how many support units you have.

I think my confusion arose from the combining of the positive point for rear support and the negative points for rear support in the same paragraphs. on pp18 and 19.

I was reading a +1 to the attacking side morale for each rear support bonus mentioned as well as gaining minuses on the enemy morale test for 2 and 3.

So only ever +1 rear support for own morale, with the first rear support bonus ‘B’ in the diagram on p.19.

-1 to your opponent’s test for the ‘second’ rear support bonus of the 2 ‘C’ units in the diagram.

And another -1 to your opponent for the ‘third’ rear support bonus of the 3 ‘D’ units in the diagram.

I have never built up a 7 line deep attack as that doesn’t feel like how Thirty Years War battles actually worked to me, so I don’t think it made any major changes to the games I’ve played but I shall have to make a note in the rules as I still find ‘rear support bonus’ automatically triggers an addition to something in my head and not a subtraction from the enemy score. Sad old thing that I am.

That will teach me to be cocky and tell Martin Rapier it’s dead easy and completely intuitive!

Sorry!

It has made me want to go and play some more ToDR though – so my stupidity turned out to be a good thing, right?

 

[Whirlwind]

Ha! Well, if it is any comfort, I have made the same mistake: the lines “to get the second rear support bonus…” and “to get the third rear support bonus…” made me think of these as cumulative (i.e. you could get a second and third bonus), with those also applying a -1 penalty to the opposition. And in my games it has made a difference, both sides working out what the biggest column they can get away with is! (I am telling myself that since both sides were at it, it has probably evened out over time…)

[Guy Farrish]

Our minds obviously work in the same way, which is far more concerning for you than for me!

I am going to play a battle through precisely according to the rules without skipping, assuming or guessing at any bits to see if I’ve been misplaying any other rules.

I may drag my son into it so he can say ‘Oy you can’t do that!’, if I can drag him away from his Ghost Recon obsession for an evening.

All I have to do is clear the wargames table which appears to be doubling as some sort of recycling station currently!

 

[Roger Calderbank]

How interesting! I too had misinterpreted the ‘support’ rules.

I must admit that I had been put off the ‘Twilight..’ rules by what appeared to be an over-emphasis on ‘support’. I couldn’t understand how multiple lines of friends to a unit’s rear would make the unit fight any better, and the idea of trying to form deep columns of units to get support bonuses didn’t seem to me to be how 30YW battles were fought. Now I know that isn’t how the rules work. On the other hand, I can see that multiple lines of enemy might be a bit off-putting for an attacker.

So the rules make more sense – I must revisit them properly.

I would also put in a vote for (First) Nordlingen being a key battle. The defeat of the Swedes there brought the French into the war, to stop a Habsburg domination of Europe. After Nordlingen, the 30YW seems to turn into a conflict about dynastic issues, rather than religious ones.

RogerC

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