I've had a bit of a busy week with family and work commitments keeping me from the brushes. Among other things I had to dig through a lot of boxes looking for documents from a long time ago. It'll work out well in the end, but it is annoying in the meantime. But enough complaining, I did manage to get quite far along with what will now be next week's shiny new unit, and I did push myself to finish a small unit of light artillery.
The Swedish army of the 17th century had a lot of artillery. Gunners were trained to fire in various ways to leverage the power of their weapons. Flat trajectories over open ground could cause havoc by bouncing cannon balls among the densely packed ranks of foot and horse that many armies of the time operated in. Dispersing the formations led to increased vulnerability against cavalry creating a nasty version of rock-paper-scissors. At the same time, the Polish-Lithuanian cavalry was well trained and knew how to maneuver in open formation, only forming dense ranks at the last moment of a charge, diminishing the power of gunnery and musketry. By Fire and Sword being a Polish game, this tactic is of course represented in the game for added historical flavour. They are however missing a special rule for artillery shooting against targets in woods. Some 17th century gunners were trained to fire at the trees instead of the men. The idea was that tree trunks would explode in lethal splinters much like cannon balls hitting a wooden ship. Nasty stuff, no doubt. Perhaps I'll play around with some ideas of house rules for this.
Part of why I enjoy gaming the 17th century is the transitional side of things. It's clear that a lot of very intelligent people (as well as some less so) threw everything they had at trying to figure out how to fit field artillery and muskets into warfare. The eponymous pike of the wargamer's "Pike and Shot" era started the 17th century as a necessity of western arms and was largely gone by the end of the century. At the same time, this was a pre-industrial era, and while efforts were made to standardise production, the level of manufacturing technology still resulted in a plethora of different calibres and designs of guns. Wargamer has taken this to heart, and the artillery unit packs come with different casts for the guns in another nice nod to historical conditions.
Finally I leave you with an action shot of my new unit taking aim at a distant unit of Cossack infantry, just to throw all the carefully aligned history out the window. Or maybe not, given how often soldiers switched sides during this period of history. But this specific unit of my collection will be Swedish. At least for now.
And the points tally:
2 x 3 x 2 points = 12 points for the infantry sized gun crews
2 x 4 points = 8 points for the two guns
Resulting in a total of 20 points this week.
Kristofer we are all very familiar with "real life"getting in the way of what really matters: painting miniatures! That said you have managed to turn out some really excellent gun crews indeed! Setting guns and crews up in the way you did, with great and realistic poses and in a scenic basing that ties them in with the rest of the army, really enhances the overall look. Awesome work!
Cheers Sander
