Author: Mikko @ Flintlock

Busy week(s) behind and finally I had a little time to catch-up with the notes I took during the playtest session recently. Artillery table happened to be on top of the pile, so I took a deep dive into it.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Buzzwords, surely, but as I am designing a boardgame and not a computer game, I took the axe and cut off a bunch of columns and charts from the artillery procedure. In my humble opinion (IMHO), it wasn’t overly complicated, but definitely needed a touch up. Now the overcharging of cannons, and brass vs. iron are gone. Gone. You can put all the powder you want into that barrel, but whether it is brass or iron, it’ll blow up. Yes, the barrels break differently, but perhaps – as I have no artillery ammunition modeled here – in the scale of the game, this would’ve been just a bit too much. If I can bring it back in a manner that makes sense, I am more than happy to do it.

These 18th centurity artillery pieces weren’t exactly science (Treatise of Artillery, anyone?) so beyond ~one kilometer range, you’re happy to come even close to the target. Definitely, the 40-50% of fired shots or shells are within X meters of the target, but again, I don’t have Pentium to calculate those little variables here.

I also made the cruel decision to drop the penalty of using captured artillery. The reason was simple: French already were using captured British artillery, so if they got their hands on additional pieces, they really should not suffer a penalty… A cannon is a cannon, so let’s keep it simple.

Arty range is now capped out a 8 hexes and roughly one mile (enough to reach the Rattlesnake Mountain from the fort, or vice versa). That should be all right, because in order to be effective, you need to hit the target first and these things were shooting all over the place at long range. Besides, the chart is a bit easier to read now 🙂

Light artillery impact table is also gone for now. I need to think about it as I am not sure how effective something like the Royal 5½-inch howitzer (or mortar) was. Modelling these little things will take a few additional cycles during the summer months.

So, in the above table, the idea is that you can combine arty pieces with similar characteristics into a single fire mission. The type (direct or indirect fire), size (light or medium/heavy), and the appropriate range band (similarly colored range) have to match. More pieces together means more punch, but only when they can work together.

But Kilroy wasn’t. It was quite an impressive feeling standing in front of the French center at the Heights of Carillon. What remains of that hastily built line is basically a bunch of earth walls. The line was beefed up post-battle in 1758 and reused by the British in 1759. Additionally, it was used again during the American Revolutionary War in 1776-7 although the American forces abandoned the fort as they realized they were being surrounded.

This was the center and apex of the French line. Montcalm was likely right behind this wall managing the defense as the British army was charging against the timber walls. As each of the regiments only defended approx. 100 yards (or a bit less in meters), we might even see the positions of three or more French regiments from this central spot.

Image above is from the Carillon Battlefield Walking Trail Guide.

The Highlanders attacked a bit down from this location (on the French right), but it was just a stone throws away from this location. That is saved for another post…

For Friday night fun I set up a small “scenario” where I have 2x 24-pounders and 4x 12-pounder guns bombarding the Fort Carillon. Assumption is that the British have set up their siege batteries and the French have some big pieces still defending the fort.

Fort Carillon, a somewhat awkward and almost-but-not-quite-Vauban fort in the wilderness of today’s Upstate New York, is a wonder by itself. Modern reconstruction was built approximately a century ago and is of masonry. The original fort, in the tumultuous years of the French and Indian War, was mostly made of timber and earth.

The “proper” plan was to besiege the fort as it is located on a small peninsula and surrounded by elevated ground. Amherst did that in 1759, but the previous year Abercromby had been led to believe e.g. by prisoners that strong French reinforcements could arrive almost any day, thus he hurried the attack believing the overwhelming numbers of his regulars and American provincial units would carry the day.

That didn’t quite happen, so I want to test out bombarding the fort with heavy artillery. The 1757 Fort William Henry (or the big battle scene in the “Last of the Mohicans” movie) is perhaps the closest comparison in this what-if situation. How much and what kind of damage do you need to inflict before you are able to carry a successful attack against the fort? Should / would the defenders fight to the end: How much is enough before a polite parley will come a mutually-acceptable conclusion?

Brushing all that aside, I’ll just do some artillery bombardment to observe the effects of the current “to-hit” and “impact” tables. Of course, a small Python script could do this is more effeciently, but don’t have it now, so I’ll just be happy rolling some dice.

The cannon can only fire against the redoubt as they are direct fire weapons. Mortars can fire indirect so they can fire the units behind the redoubt. The French have three heavy cannon that can fire into the direction where the British are coming from. Two 18-pounders and one 16-pounder – they all are heavy pieces with similar performance. How many artillery pieces are available depends on which bastion they are located. Fort Carillon had four bastions and two demi-lunes that extended out of the main fort. Artillery was placed in these and had only specific directions to fire. As the French player, you have to rearrange the artillery inside the fort to engage the British troops the best you can.

Let’s see what happens here. The French go first in this game, so they’ll have a chance to disrupt the British who have built level 2 entrenchments (“siegeworks”, redoubts really). In this case, direct fire is against the hard target i.e. the redoubt, and indirect fire is against the “soft targets” behind the redoubt (the artillery).

First fire is directed against the redoubt protecting the four 12-pounders in hex 48.17. Three heavy cannon unleash direct fire, assisted by an artillery leader (-1 “to hit”). They also get -2 “to hit” firing from the fort (French had ranged their cannon before the engagement) so essentially with a “9” you’ll miss – everything else hits.

We roll a “7” and it’s a hit as we get +3 from the modifiers mentioned above. The second (red) die is for impact, so three heavy cannon against a hard target (level-2 redoubt). The second roll is a “2” without any modifiers and we get a “reduce-1” effect reducing the redoubt-2 to a fieldworks-1. In the current chits, this is delineated with the single or double line as seen below.

We also have two heavy mortars taking a crack at the British. They can use indirect fire and target the four cannon. We roll a “3” giving us a hit and then an “8” – no effect. The big and heavy mortars missed their mark this time (or damage was too small in the context of this game).

The British artillery is still out of optimal range to breach the fort walls, but we have six heavy pieces ready to pound the fort. On their turn, the British artillery conducts the bombardment. Six pieces open fire and there is a “-3” to hit the fort – it’s a pretty big target. We get a hit without rolling a die (medium band, six pieces and -3 DRM is “9” or less to hit – i.e. automatic hit). Then I rolled a “5” for the damage roll, which against a hard target, is a “breach-1” inflicting one damage on the fort. It’s a good start but it will take a lot more to reduce the fort enough for the French to either surrender or flee, or for the British to mount a successful assault on the fort and its walls.

I just returned from the fort itself as I was able to travel there for the 27th War College over last weekend. Now I will just post a couple of pictures from the trip as I learned so much about the area, battle and 18th century warfare in general.

First some details of a diorama they display at the museum. Very nice indeed as it is always great to see how the artist has envisioned the event and its surroundings. In my humble opinion, there should be a lot more abatis, but I assume this was more of a challenge with the required effort to create the diorama than historical accuracy.

Pay attention to those firing holes between the logs, that really is an awesome detail!

A small detail of the fort between a demi-lune and the main walls. Masonry was added mostly later and the original Fort Carillon was built more or less out of timber.

Artillery at the fort. This gun (or cannon) is towards the Mt. Independence. I believe they fire this piece although I did not have time for any of the shows! There were a ton of various types of artillery at the fort and I will add more pics later.

As part of the testing, the British army conducted some hasty attacks as soon as they ran into the French army. They didn’t go too well and casualties mounted, however, there is no morale factored in the game… yet. Montcalm’s troops were putting up stiff resistance around the saw mill and Bernetz Brook. As his army retreated back towards the famous hills, skirmishers and other screening forces were trying desperately to buy some time to allow the rest to construct defensive works.

The vanguard of the British regulars along with some supporting light infantry companies pulled back towards the brook to deal with the entrenchments they bypassed earlier. An overwhelming assault was mounted against the La Reine brigade which suffered catastrophical losses due to, well, the roll of luck, and was thrown out of the position in confusion. In the meantime, on the south side of the river, British and Provincial troops made a push on the redoubts prepared before the British landing. Although they stormed the position, they could not make it any further.

Ultimately, the remaining French pulled out by using boats and canoes. Artillery had to be left behind and it was quickly taken over by the British during their movement phase. On the other hand, sloppy play had left some precious British supply unprotected, and the French made a dash for it capturing more supplies to replenish their dwindling stores and improve that (un-factored) morale. It was hauled in their retreat back into Fort Carillon.

The leader counters above are fresh – (almost) the latest version although I did make additional changes tonight so these are obsolete now! I mean I made them yesterday! The rest are old, some really old, and as can be seen, we just ran out of stuff and replaced some of the abatis with blank chits.

As Sweden – once again – won “something”, I am going to post a bunch of images from my visit at the Black Watch Castle and Museum in Perth, Scotland.

A must visit!

While listening to the Eurovision song contest, I am making some big updates to the counters graphics. Of course, this is just my vision as the artist will take them as input and create his own versions.

Moving an element a couple of pixels here or there… tweaking a color while learning the intricacies of Inkscape’s Countersheet extension. Yes, I definitely want everything to be right there, and not “just”.

For clarity, I came up with e.g. the following small changes.

Here monsieur Montcalm has received a yellow-ish box around his leader value. In playtesting, it wasn’t obvious which counter was a leader and which a combat unit. Well, now it’s fixed(?). Colors make such a difference!

The green circle with a “1” is the leader bonus – green means positive! And… red is negative – as with the fresh and untried Berry regiment’s 3rd battalion below.

One more small, recent update is the “Reg XXXX” – Montcalm was the highest-ranking French leader and can only lead regular infantry units. He wasn’t too impressed by the irregular troops, especially the native Americans (Indians) although understood their value in the vast forests of North America.

Below, I smeared the soldier as I am using some, well, “random images” for illustration during testing 🙂

Artillery is divided into several categories based on weight, so I made it easier to quickly identify units’ “weight class”. It’s those three “o”s with the yellow-ish background . Three is heavy; If it is less like medium, well, you’ll have less “o”s. More weight means more troops are needed to unload them from boats or to pull them into the frontline.

The iron vs. brass topic is still under consideration. I am not sure if it will make it to the final product. You can overload both types of cannon with extra powder, and they both will burst at some point, but is there any real difference?? Oh well, decisions decisions!

(“Legal nonsense”:) All graphics currently on the counters are for testing purposes only and will be re-created by the artist.

Today I wanted to print out my latest counters and logged in to GitHub as always. Hmm, no counter*.csv files anywhere to be seen… ehm, what? Then I thought what was I doing late last night – in a hurry. I did git rm c* and such. Eeek – it actually removed all files starting with “c” and not just the obsolete ones that I actually wanted to get rid of.

Thought #2. This is why I use git. It stores everything. I mean everything. So some googling later I right-clicked my freshly installed GitHub Windows desktop client and selected “revert changes”. “Push upstream” (or something). And it’s all back there!

The learning is that “rm” [remove] only the files you really want to remove. Nothing more, nothing less.

Our game continued the other day and we got some action on the map! The British army was pushing hard to engage some French troops that were trying to buy time to allow last minute entrenchments built on the heights of Carillon. The die rolls seemed to mostly go against the British and their casualties kept mounting.

Head-on attacks were conducted just to see how combat works 🙂 Morale loss due to casualties is not yet factored in, so the British & American troops just kept coming. Maybe not so ahistorical, after all…

While I am generally quite satisfied how the game plays overall, I will make small tweaks here and there to factor in for more historical feeling although some will undoubtedly argue just the opposite to be the case 🙂 I’ll try to limit the complexity and make the information easily available that is needed frequently, whether it is e.g. movement multipliers or combat modifiers. Another topic I am quite mindful of, is the clutter on the map – are there too many counters and if yes, what can I do to alleviate this?

The counters we use are actually rather old, I am still missing (test) art for some types completely and none of the ones we play with are in any way final. Nevertheless, I have been able to pick up many improvement ideas for clarity, whether being a bigger font size or some marker to separate combat values from leadership valuers. Truly golden feedfack so far!

It is quite tedious to create new counters manually, but looks like I have no choice as it will give us a much improved test environment when we can play using semi-realistic (final) counters. Final does not mean like the art is final but more like these are the elements I expect to see in the final product.

One of the mechanics that I am still trying to validate is the casualties. At the moment, I have made a compromise with the larger units by making a step loss in some cases to mean losing two strength points (SP), instead of just one. So, first of all, in most games a step loss flips the counter over to its weaker side and a second step loss eliminates it. Not so here. Each SP is about a hundred men and typically a hit in combat is one step loss equaling to the loss of one SP. To keep the number of counters a bit more manageable, I decided to have some of the step losses in large units as two SP. So instead of losing ~100 men, a large unit loses ~200 men. There are multiple counters for a given unit to represent this and their sizes go roughly like this: 9-7, 6-5, and 4-2 indicating there are three individual counters for the unit. The largest one is 9 (front) and 7 (back). If the unit suffers a single step loss being 9 SP strong, it will flip over to the backside with 7 SP and thus suffers a 2 SP loss.

Non-Indian infantry losses are marked on the “initial casualties track” by keeping track of the actual SP losses – 4 SP means 400 men. All of them are not permanent losses as some stragglers will return to the unit, or are mentally shaken or just lightly wounded. Once your losses reach 4 SP on the track for e.g. the regulars, the next day you can bring 1 SP back as reinforcements for that unit type. The remaining 3 SP will move to the “permanent casualties track” and will be included in the victory point calculations. However, each SP returning to combat is just a single SP and you’ll need two of those to flip that 7 SP counter back to the full 9 strength points.

Rangers, grenadiers or Highlanders cannot receive replacements. You need a computer to keep track of their casualties!

The current art is indeed a bit different from the above-seen test map. I definitely like it better as it has a more historical feel! Coloring is not final until it actually goes to print…

The map is quite big indeed. This is a draft version of the whole battlefield as of now, early May. It will eventually be cropped down, as a good chunk of the area has relatively little gaming value. The largest area to be removed is the wilderness on the bottom of the map (east side) and also, to some degree, the left (south) edge isn’t important game-wise. They’ll be trimmed at some point.

Below is a detail of the La Chute river connecting with Lake Champlain. A victory location has been added (and no, likely won’t be that exact hex) close to the sawmill. Also, the waterfalls are now on the river. A stream hex side is clearly different from a river. There are quite well-defined elevations, and finally, a die roll is required to navigate around that swampy island on the bottom when trying to reach the lake from the river. With a bad roll, British boats have to take the northern route and will become exposed to the artillery at Fort Carillon who have ranged their weapons well in advance.

Oh, the red line visible on the lower right hand side is just a “six hex range indicator” from the fort. Shot and shell might start raining on approaching troops around that line 🙂