Battle of Liscarroll using Baroque

[d_Guy]

The Battle of Liscarroll (Sept 3rd, 1642) was the first large pitched battle fought between the newly formed Irish Confederation and the Protestant Anglo/Irish ("English Government") forces.

The Irish had approximately 8000 men (mainly pikes) and the English around 2000 (with better than a 2 to 1 musket to pike ratio). Each side had 400 to 500 horse. The fighting was initially fairly even but the English horse managed to hit some of the Irish foot in the flank resulting in the Irish army being routed.

I played the game twice (with different formations for the Irish) using the standard Baroque rules (although I had to mess with the army lists a bit). The standard rules allow me to play in a small area and move the games along briskly.

The full reports are here:
Liscarroll One https://inredcoatragsattired.com/2016/07/17/liscarrollscenario-development-wargame/
Liscarroll Two https://inredcoatragsattired.com/2016/07/27/liscarrollscenario-development-wargame-continued/

But to summarize:

In the first battle the Irish are drawn up with pike blocks in the center and on either flank a brigade of pike heavy musket and pike units (with poorly armed militia to the rear). All the horse is placed on the far right flank.

The musket-heavy English advance rapidly so as to employ their significant advantage in fire power:


The English musketry is holding off some of the now attacking Irish but also taking casualties at points where contact between the opposing forces are being made:


The cavalry fighting on the Irish right is disastrous for the English. The English Commanding Officer, Lord Inchiquin, is killed and the English horse routed. The remaining Irish horse then take the English musketeers in the flank:

With their right flank now shattered the English army is routed. In the end it was a close run thing with the Irish army only 4 VDT from themselves routing.

Since Liscarroll may be a rare (and possibly singular) example of Spanish tercio formations being employed (the Irish commander would have been particularly well versed in their use) in battles on the Celtic Fringe.  Fighting a second battle gave me a change to use LTE Baroque units.

The Irish are drawn up as before but in only three massive foot units (rather than the eight used in the first battle).


The English were a bit more circumspect in quickly advancing their horse but pull in toward the center to protect the flanking musketeers. The English then advance to bring their muskets to bear:

It turns out, in this case at least, that the tercios can take a lot of fire and still be quite formidable, rather like dreadaughts against light cruisers. Once they make contact the English units had very little chance.
The coup de grace was the English horse being defeated in detail once again by the Irish. Below Lord Inchiquin looks on as the victorious Irish horse once again command the field:


This replay wasn't even close. The English were routed without the Irish losing a single VDT.

These games were fun to play and now I'll move on to a larger version of Liscarroll using Baroque with some of my in-house modifications.

[Leman]

Good looking game and report, but it does leave me little perplexed. If the massive tercio was so all-conquering, why did it then go out of fashion in favour of smaller pike and shot units? Is there a problem with the rules that gives the tercio, at this late date, a massive advantage over the mid-C17th pike and shot unit?

[Techno]

Good stuff, Guy.

Cheers - Phil

[petercooman]

Nice games!

[d_Guy]

Leman,
Yes, my expectation was that the English would shoot the tercios apart and they did score lots of hits. The problem was with the brilliant cohesion test rolls I was making for the Irish, the hits didn't get translated to casualties. In fact most of the Irish casualties came from hits on already disordered units. Having a command piece with each tercio didn't hurt either. Keep in mind too that the Irish were close to 4 to 1 in foot. Finally, contrary to all previous experience using guns in Baroque, the Irish artillery was effective. So - I don't think there is anything wrong with the rules.

Incidently I probably overdid the VBU on the Irish units by one or two points to boot!

[Steve J]

I look forward to reading these as my rules arrived today

[Steve J]

Hmmm, the links don't work for me for some reason

[paulr]

Links worked for me

A couple of interesting games

[d_Guy]

Thanks for the comments gentlemen (and checking my links, Paul  )

Steve I hope you'll like Baroque. I am still very well pleased by all of the interesting decisions it forces you to make.
Not sure about your problem with the links. If you have the time see if copying them directly to your browser will do the trick.

[Steve J]

Still no joy . This is what comes up when I click the links or copy and paste them:

Secure Connection Failed

The connection to inredcoatragsattired.com was interrupted while the page was loading.

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

Learn more...

[fred.]

Links work for me, too.

Very interesting games, and write ups. I'm starting to look at Baroque as a set of rules, probably for the Williamite wars first, so its good to see battle reports, from the same area, if not quite the same time frame.

Reading the linked blog post about the historical battle, do you think you rated the Irish cavalry a little too highly? It sounds like the Irish infantry were generally in a better position and better condition than the English, but folded pretty quickly when they suffered a reverse.

Its very hard when reading an account of a single battle, and translating it to a game to know when the actual results were the most likely outcome, or they were the equivalent of one side rolling several 6s!

On one of the photos you show two peg board style trackers. The black and white one I think is for tracking army morale. What is the four coloured one for?

[d_Guy]

Fred, thanks for the thoughtful comments.

The black and white counter is essentially army morale. Baroque uses a victory point system in which an army adds up the values of all its units to arrive at a total. This total is then degraded by unit damage, loss and certain other events. When the army point total reaches zero the entire army breaks. There is also a provision for each command to reach a break point (usually three or four commands per side). The system puts a good deal of weight on not allowing damaged units to be further degraded, so careful management of resources is important.
The mechanics are really pretty simple, as a solo player I use the counter so I have a running tally. The other counter is a twelve turn counter staring in green and going down to red. In my limited experience seven or eight turns is usually sufficient to resolve a baroque battle (assuming opposing forces are not separated by a large distance)

To be honest I don't know how to evaluate the horse, particularly in Ireland, most particularly in 1641 - 1642. I made up a unit type called "retinue horse" to reflect that both sides seemed to be a collection of troops of horse (most beholding to a specific person) that had never worked together. A couple sources mention that Inchiquin attempted to caracole but it was badly executed. I ended up making the retinue horse gallopers (GA) more for how they behave in Baroque than for any other reason. I also set them to an average discipline level more for their exuberance and quality of mount then experience and training. But you are quite correct that I could have easily rated the Irish horse to highly (and made all the horse the wrong Baroque type).

The Irish certainly were better rested and fed then the "English" at Liscarroll but every thing I've read about the first year of the war in Ireland suggest they were still in a transition from a poorly armed mob to a disciplined and reasonably well equipped army. The English, a significant portion of whom were trained soldiers, were better equipped and disciplined. Again I may overrate them however.

While Baroque is designed with buying equal armies in mind it does provide some very clean and easy ways to make adjustments for historic battles. So far I haven't been very good at the replication history 
The Irish had spectacular sequences of rolls with their horse in both games and with their tercios in the second AND I was really trying to have the English win! 

Good luck with the Williamite wars using Baroque. I'll be anxious to see your batreps (and pics)!

[fred.]

Thanks for the explanation of the morale and turn counter trackers. In our games we are usually rubbish at keeping track of turns - even though we own a number of spinners and other devices to track turns.

On the few times I've tried mapping historical battles to game scenarios it can prove very hard to take something that seemed particularly important to that battle and map it to the game rules and stats.  One option with the Irish may be to give them the Recruits special rule.

I think Gallopers is probably the right cavalry type for Baroque. It seems to cover a wide variety of troops!

I am on with assembling my armies - I've sorted through my figures, and re-assigned pikes to give a lower ratio. Which gives me several more complete regiments, which is good. And I have some cavalry in front of me to paint. But I fear this will be a long term project as I don't think it will fire the interests of my gaming buddies.

[d_Guy]

And I have some cavalry in front of me to paint. But I fear this will be a long term project as I don't think it will fire the interests of my gaming buddies.

One of the few advantages of solo play - you only have to fire one's own interest  (of course, as you say, much more painting)

Thanks for mentioning the Recruit rule!
Rule 8.1.6 stuck at the bottom of the page and I didn't retain it!  Yes - that would have probably translated to several more casualties for the Irish. One of the huge disadvantages of solo play - no real-time discussion and the ease of missing essential thing when stuck with one POV!

[Leman]

Tbh I always paint at least two opposing armies from any conflict, so for example I have 10mm French, Spanish, Imperialist and various Italians for the Italian Wars. There are a number of people at the club I attend who do not or cannot paint.