Amidst a very interesting post (in a series of interesting posts on the results of WSS' Great Wargaming Survey) on the Palouse Wargaming Journal blog, a finding about the 'clustering' of wargamers' interests really caught my eye. One might think of these as 'break points' I suppose. There is a break point between historical wargaming and non-historical wargaming; obvious perhaps, but a good sign of analysis is that it finds the obvious things first. A second breakpoint is between 'Modern' historicals and 'Ancient' historicals. This is also very interesting, especially as this first break doesn't occur at WW1 or similar, but rather from C18 onwards. But the most interesting is in the next set of breakpoints. I won't rehearse all the findings as you can of course read the post yourself, but to me the most interesting thing is that the common 'Pike & Shot' period clusters with the periods before it, not after it.
So, why so interesting? Well, to me, this points to the thought that maybe 'Pike & Shot' is not really very convincing as a wargames period. Not I hasten to write that I mean that the wars between 1500 and 1700 are not worth wargaming, far from it, but rather that the classification fails in quite key ways. After all, the 'Pike & Shot' period is also sometimes called the 'Renaissance' period, despite at least the Italian Renaissance falling firmly into the 'Medieval' wargames period. For me, battles like Steenkirke and Neerwinden share much much more in common with Blenheim than they do with Flodden or Biccoca (WRG's iconic rules were 1685-1845 after all). Conversely, the latter two aren't so different from Fornovo or something. Is there a shared experience of 'pike and shot' from 1500 and 1700 which ties it all together? I am not sure there is, or at least that the infantry carrying various forms of musket and pike in differing proportions throughout the period is enough to conceptualize it as such. For me, this isn't entirely a theoretical question. As primarily a solo gamer and not a club member (at the moment), I am not going to be able to field every army, not even an army from every period, even the main ones. So if I fancy doing Steenkirke or Sedgemoor, then either my WSS armies or my TYW/WotTK armies are going to have to proxy for them. Into the C16, then how far can my Wars of the Roses' forces, rounded out with the odd specialist unit (e.g. Spanish sword-and-buckler troops) be used to proxy for the Great Italian Wars?
How far would I go? I think that to my mind, White Mountain still shares more with Blenheim, And so to expand here, I think that I am arguing for a much expanded 'Horse & Musket' period, which includes Turenne's wars and The Thirty Years' War and The War of the Three Kingdoms and The Eighty Years' War. Conversely, even up to Dreux, the attack of a mass of heavy infantry aiming to get into close combat is still a distinct possibility and perhaps shares more in common with its predecessors. At least that is how it looks to me. But perhaps there is something which I am overlooking which players who will go to the end of the Thirty Years' War, but no further, share?
Pike and Shot I always see as a useful catch all phrase for a rather broad period, with sometimes the only common link the fact that pikes and firearms were a common theme. But even then they were used in varying proportions, were not always dominant etc, plus there were many 'supporting' arms in evidence too. Then the cavalry, from say the very heavily armoured (man and horse) of the Italian Wars to the buff coated ones during the ECW, perform similar tasks but had a different impact on the battlefield.
ReplyDeletePersonally I always feel P&S kicks off with the ECW, but that's down to my limited knowledge growing up, so would nowadays start with the 30YW. Anything earlier than that I would class a Renaisiance, which again is a somewhat broad and catch all term. Then the War of the Roses sort of sits out on its own, like the naughty boy in the class;).
Thanks Steve, interesting. Of course, in the end it is the rules writers/game designers who get to decide, because they are the ones who look to see where the commonalities are and the differences, and which outweigh the other.
DeleteI (think) I agree with you.....or, you agree with me! If we ant to pick a break point, I would go with 1490 or 1500. I think the Spanish tercios and Swiss pikeblocks have more in common with the combatants of the TYW or ECW than they do with WotR or other late medieval conflicts. The Renaissance is a turning point in western history and, to my mind, the start of the modern world. I could live with calling the period, in wargaming terms, early Horse and Musket....it's certainly closer to that than lumping it in with Romans, Greeks, Normans and Saxons etc!
ReplyDeleteThanks Ross, interesting thoughts. Will mull them over!
DeleteBack in the dim and distant past when I studied military history, the turning point from a military historical pov was "the revolution in military affairs' when fire become predominant over shock due to the adoption of more linear formations. Dutch Order etc. This lands smack in the the middle of the traditional 'Pike and Shot' period and doesn't align with medieval, early modern, renaissance etc as those divisions are more social, cultural and economic.
ReplyDeleteYes, that is pretty much what my study of the revolution in militaty affairs looked at - although with limited impact, since most rules put 'the revolution' in the centre of the period, as you note!
DeleteMany years ago there was a 'pike and shot' themed email list, which had a lengthy wrangle about what the period was about. Eventually, when the server had to change, it was renamed 'Renaissance, Early Modern and Pike and Shot', so as to avoid further argument.
ReplyDeleteIt really depends on where you are looking, of course. The Swiss (re-)introduced the pike in the C15. Deep pike blocks were the only way to deal with charging gendarmes through the C16 until the widespread adoption of the pistol. Thinner formations could then be used.
On the other hand a lot of historians view the use of the star fort systems as key to the era. You can view it as the rise of the firearm as well, from the WotR to the eclipse of the pike. Then you can extend it backwards to accommodate the Hussites, and hence land up with Gush's WRG rules 1420-1700.
All of that is largely Euro-centric, of course. From the point of view of, say, India, things were rather more static for much of the period, until those pesky Europeans started intervening. From the view of the Aztecs and Inca, of course, it was still more or less the stone age...
The military revolution of the C17, or C16, or whenever is a useful concept, but tends to dissolve under scrutiny. To an extent it is why we chose to give tight time and geographic limits to the Polemos rules. Extended time periods tend to give more exceptions than rules...
Yes, all that accords with my own study of military history. There was quite a lively debate about whether artillery and star forts; or muskets in linear formations and the Dutch Order were more key. I can quite see how George Gush went for 1420-1700...except we are back to having early Marlborough on a different side of the line from late Marlborough, and using the same rules for Narva as for the Siege of Orleans: instinctively I feel that the latter has more in common with the Siege of Alesia than the former has with the Sambre. And as you say there is a lot to be examined in regards to escaping from Euro-centrism: Indian armies seem to have adopted firearms and artillery with less revolutionary emphasis; some African societies did incorporate musketeers in (perhaps) a revolutionary way that yet doesn't look much like what was happening in Europe.
DeleteThank you for the feedback, for linking to my post, and for taking the time to make an interesting and thoughtful follow-up. What to do about Pike & Shot? That is a very good question! Do you suppose the confusion arises since most wargaming periods are grounded in a specific historical era whereas "Pike & Shot" references a specific weapons' system and tactics? We need to come up with a better descriptor for this period of warfare.
ReplyDeleteI think there are two slightly separate issues at play. For nomenclature, I think I would be happy with 'Early Modern', which I guess would reflect popular academic/educational usage (as far as I know, anyway). For the content, very tricky. You are always going to have edge cases if you have boundaries, and that applies to wargames rules as much as anything else so there is never going to be a really 'neat' solution. My basic thinking would be - when would a ruleset stop working? How far forward in time can you push forward DBA until you pretty much have to use DBR (or Hail Caesar & Pike Shot, if one prefers)? How far back can you push Black Powder before you need to swap to Pike & Shotte (or Horse, Foot & Guns & DBR)? And when I say need, I mean at a basic mechanical level, as opposed to issues of calibration. And if we do that, do we find we still need the middle set of rules at all? I know some people are quite strong believers in very limited scope rulesets, and that is fine; but to make that really worthwhile, your model of warfare should genuinely *be* different, not just skinned slightly different with a couple of 'period flavour' rules which are just as likely to make the rules worse rather than better. I know that some people are keen to cut the Wars of the Roses out of the 'Medieval' period, for example. No issues with that if that means a period-specific set; but putting it into a different 'era' set which includes Poltava but not Poitiers...less convinced.
DeleteI like your thesis on pushing a ruleset until it reaches the breaking point whether pushing forward or backward into time.
DeleteOn a mechanical level (relying on specific game mechanisms or "Game Engine"), I often use the same core Game Engine across similar periods. Since we are basically modeling human behavior, a model based upon combat effectiveness or soldier psychology ought to work, in its most basic form, across any periods. Technology and tactics may be different, no doubt. But technology often drives tactics. Specifics to any one period would be contained in period specific rules, modifiers, or chrome. How does one objectively qualify (or quantify) when a combat model ought to be genuinely different rather than simply adjusting the core game engine for period flavor?
My preferences for objectively qualifying a ruleset would boil down to 3:
Delete1 - Storyboarding: do the rules allow the tactics of the time/action to be replicated? Is there any action taken consciously by a commander of the time which would be literally impossible to replicate? So if your period involved, I dunno, passage of lines in action, then the rules have to allow that but can't allow it in periods where it didn't happen.
2 - Optimization of unusual/unheard of tactics. If the optimal tactics in a set of rules are not those used in the period, or where they were extremely rare and usually failed, then we probably need to look again. The really important example here historically (historical in the sense of 'history of wargaming') IMHO is the influence of the Napoleonic period on rulesets covering the 'Horse & Musket' period: in particular cavalry vs infantry/squares; and light infantry. Some of the foundational rules 'Charge'/'WRG 1685-1845' get into strange places for these reasons.
3 - Quantitative comparisons: where the sample size of battles is reasonably large, if one side consistently wins (at specific and distinct levels of combat) then that needs to be reflected in some way. That doesn't have to mean 'national characteristics' or 'leadership ratings' or what not, but 'something' needs to be in there.
Is not the breakpoint more to do with the professionalisation of military service and increasing centralisation / state control as the resource and industrial base required is only achieveable at a national level?
ReplyDeleteOkay, so if I am thinking about military history as a subject, I might agree with that. But wargaming is different because it is (more or less) entirely focused on tactical issues, so the question is always whether the tactical environment has changed so much that our rulesets have to change. As an example of what I am talking about, there were several changes within the 'Ancient' and 'Medieval' periods across the world which had wider changes in professionalization and centralization of state control - both increasing and decreasing them - but the tactical rulebook doesn't necessarily have to chnage because the tactical 'grammar' remained similar enough to make using the same rulebook workable. For our tactical games, we need to see changes in tactics, tactical organization and equipment. Now clearly that has 'something' to do with professionalization and centralization, but it isn't a very obvious read-off, at least not to me.
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