The Thirty Years War: Europe in Agony

I have been playing quite a few games of Thirty Years War: Europe in Agony recently, partly for its own sake and partly to evaluate it for use in my planned re-fight of the Thirty Years' War using miniatures. I have also tried to learn the lessons of my last big campaign, the re-fight of the Gallic Wars, which ended with a squib rather than fireworks partly because I played the board-game element of the campaign so badly as one side as to leave it no reasonable chance of victory, despite that faction doing better tactically, in many ways.  This was especially important in that campaign since the factions had to behave in radically different ways and that might not be so much the case in the Thirty Years War, but I want to make sure I do my campaign full justice, so I have been hopefully learning how to play this game rather more competently.

 

The basic elements that one might expect in a Thirty Years War game are all there, it looks reasonably comprehensive.  Most of the political side is handled by card draws, which is fine: such things are quite easily modified for solo play.  In the game, players play one card at a time sequentially, over 6 phases per turn, from hands of 7 cards.  When playing solo, I just use sequential draws from a deck of 6 unseen cards per side, so the strategic choice is only to have the political event OR to use the card for recruiting, army movement, getting foreign aid, and so on.  The mechanics of the game are pretty straightforward really and I got the hang of them after a few short games.  They cover most of the things which one would think should be covered in a game covering the whole of the Thirty Years War!  The actions of the Eighty Years War within the Thirty Years War are somewhat abstracted, and the conflict in the Iberian Peninsula is not covered except as a card-driven even, nor the wars between Sweden and other Baltic nations: the focus is heavily on Germany, Austria, the Spanish Netherlands and Francs.

Combat in the game seems exceptionally bloody and sieges relatively quick and easy.  Combat damage isn't determined by an effectiveness/strength ratio as in most other games, rather a certain level of combat effectiveness simply determines the range of casualties that a force might inflict, which could be a relatively high percentage.  Leaders often have short and exciting lives in this game too. Whilst interesting as a game mechanic, I wonder somewhat about the accuracy of all this (I have had quite a number of mutual destruction battles) but more importantly, how the game will work if the miniatures rules I use prove somewhat less mutually costly. But that is hard to know without actually playing them out.

There are quite a few alternate set-ups published on the internet; some of this is to make it more historically accurate but more pressingly, it is to avoid the opportunity for an easy quick win as the Protestant player in the first couple of turns, since the rulebook set-up allows Mansfeld and the Bohemian rebels to inflict such damage on the Imperials straight-off as to make a subsequent Catholic victory vanishingly unlikely.  With the modifications though, it isn't very clear how aggressive or otherwise each side should be early on.  The force density is quite low in the first turns, which means any serious mistakes in play are very hard to recover from. In some ways, my ECW re-fight faced the same quandary: it logically must be the case that one side benefits more from a waiting game early on, concentrating on resources and recruitment - thus the other side should be attacking.  In a two-faction game, it is hard to reach a sort of Nash equilibrium where both sides best move is to do the same thing.  But if one side doesn't take the optimal strategy early on, then by definition the other side has been given an advantage.  Still, one advantage of solo play is that one can take a bit of time to mull all this over!

Anyway, it looks reasonably suitable and I am quite eager to get started - the only thing I am finishing off is a little re-basing of some of the troops I will need.