Heretical Gaming is my blog about my gaming life, featuring small skirmishes and big battles from many historical periods (and some in the mythic past or the far future too). The focus is on battle reports using a wide variety of rules, with the occasional rules review, book review and odd musing about the gaming and history. Most of the battles use 6mm-sized figures and vehicles, but occasionally 15mm and 28mm figures appear too.

Saturday 7 March 2020

Thirty Years War Campaign Planning

In some ways it is a bit odd to be writing about my preparations for an upcoming refight of the Thirty Years War when I am just starting my Gallic Wars campaign, but I try and do the planning for one campaign whilst I am playing a different one (because painting and other prep can take a while).

I have settled upon using Twilight of Divine Right as the tactical rules for the campaign, since they have proved able to handle the biggest battles of the period on a relatively small table (4.5' x 2.5') - this is currently a sine qua non for my gaming as there is no chance of me getting regular or undisturbed access to a larger table.



I totted up all the forces required to play all the scenarios in the Europe's Tragedy scenario book for the Twilight of Divine Right rules.

These came out as:

8 Early Tercios (basically the big, double-depth ones)
13 Tercios
35 Regiments
12 Musketeer units
9 Commanded Shot units
4 Dragoon units
21 Cuirassier units
28 'Dutch' cavalry units
31 'Swedish' cavalry units
5 'Galloper' cavalry units
5 Harquebusier units
13 Light Horse units
8 Field gun units
some regimental guns

I have pretty much all of this anyway for my ECW forces, I just need a few units of Commanded Shot I think. Twilight of Divine Right has worked fine so far with me using single bases of 60mm x 30mm, which is standard Polemos basing, although strictly speaking the rules would seem to prefer a depth of 15mm for this frontage - I can probably ignore this.  An Early Tercio should be double-depth, so that would be two units butted together, no real problem.

As I have mentioned before, I would really like to use command stands with appropriate flags although this will mean doing some form of re-basing for my ECW units.  I am vaguely thinking of having a small magnetised strip on the base for the command base only, although that may get fiddly.  Anyway, I have bought some extra command strips and various TYW flags to experiment with and hopefully I will have sufficient time to do some small experiments this week, so I can buy anything else I might need at Hammerhead next week.







2 comments:

  1. I look forward to seeing how these rules play. I find these days that I'm trying to stick to a few core rulesets, such a Black Powder and BKC, as they share very similar mechanisms, which makes it easy for me.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, there is definitely a cost in gameplay in using a multitude of rulesets.

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