Episode 284: This is My Arquebus

[Rob Zacny]

Rob, Troy, and Bruce discuss Pike and Shot, a wargame about everyone's favorite 16th-century military formation.

 

Listen here.

[ExitDose]

Ben Hull's Musket and Pike Battle Series from GMT is another good treatment of the era's warfare. It has some similarities to the Great Battles series, but has its own unique bits for initiative, cavalry reaction, and handling of command and control. I think it does the best job of modeling the period. Unfortunately as distinct as Hull's designs are, the game is a bit fiddly, just like his solo series Fields of Fire.

[RayTheFourth]

Loved the podcast, particularly Troy's summation of the time period. The one quibble I have is with the characterization of the time period as tactically uninteresting, particularly when compared to the strategic/organizational level. I'd be happy to get more into the problems with that characterization but it was really just a small blemish in an otherwise great podcast.

[hexgrid]

The one quibble I have is with the characterization of the time period as tactically uninteresting, particularly when compared to the strategic/organizational level.

 

That's not how I interpreted what he said; the sense I got was that he felt that there were some particularly interesting problems/decisions at the strategic level.  In essence he said "a is even more interesting than b"; I took that as "b is really interesting" rather than "a is not interesting".

 

I feel like I should comment more here, since it was a good podcast, but I haven't played the game (yet...).

[Valorian Endymion]

It would be great if there where more game that explore this period or use it as base, because outside from the strategic and tatical elements, on the visual you not only have this first early part where heavier armor was still in use but quickly becoming discarted as the uniforms became more elaborated, until a moment where you have this combination of leather/cloth and breastplates, helmets and a fell half plate armor around, with massed melee and pike formations. Not to forget that battles where much bigger and complex.

The podcast remember me when I bought Cossack and expected at least something like that, but I confess getting bored and slight disapointed, everything moved like it was a SC fastfoward match in a tournament, it was impossible to control units (which made the whole: form a unit, put guy with drum and flag plus officer was micromanagement hell, it was easier to just spawn billions of units and throw them away) as they would died before I had time to move them away or foward, cannons where operated by ghosts (I know the game is old, but after playing game like Rise of Nations, seeing a canon moving on its own it was weird), Ai would employ bizarre tactics, like have gazillions of bombards - it was a really weird, building some fortifications and suddenly the Ai show up with many bombards but no unit to support it.

[Gaizokubanou]

It would be great if there where more game that explore this period or use it as base, because outside from the strategic and tatical elements, on the visual you not only have this first early part where heavier armor was still in use but quickly becoming discarted as the uniforms became more elaborated, until a moment where you have this combination of leather/cloth and breastplates, helmets and a fell half plate armor around, with massed melee and pike formations. Not to forget that battles where much bigger and complex.

 

I think closest we got to this in high budget production is probably Shogun 2 Total War (before that Medieval 2 as it had pikes and early firearms, but played really clunky), but that game represents drastically different cultural look so yeah would be nice to see more western pike&shot stuff.