Terra Ferra

The World of Terra Fere a wargame campaign

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2nd_battle_of_hoy_notes

The 2nd Battle of Hoy

(The Wargame)

This battle had been waiting for several months as other thinks intruded, not least building this site. In the perpetual quest yet another set of rules had been acquired. 'Balance of Power' by Mark Sims of Crusader Publishing. Andy and I decided to give them a go and I decided to resolve the long awaited (at least by me) 2nd Battle of Hoy.

The rules are written for large battles between friends. I make that distinction about friends as the Orders section of the rules is effectively none existent! It details how rules are changed but not what they do. I contacted mark and his response was that the rules were for multi-player games were the commander gave a verbal order and the Corps commander followed those orders as best he could. Like I said a game for friends. Despite Andy and I being friends we decided the impact of jettisoning the orders steps in the rules was minimal so played the game without.

The battle featured two Hoysee brigades vs two Flamboyance divisions. I expected the battle to resolve around the open right Hoyseeian flank. I suppose in a sense it did but not as I had expected. As suggested in the rules the terrain was quite dense but reflected the earlier battle. The whole game broke down into a uncoordinated cavalry attack on my open flank and a further series of uncoordinated assaults on my well dug-in infantry and guns! Just before reaching his first Morale check he declared a withdrawal to preserve the Regular Division he had thrown against my entrenchments while the Reservist had 'milled around' in front of my right flank helped n their indecision by a lancer regiment behind the hill on the extreme flank.

What of the rules? They are a clean set with a quite quick resolution. we had to 'house-rule' a few issues, interpenetration, we allowed it but counted as an obstacle, and rocket batteries,(as a pseudo-Austrian, you have to have rocket batteries!) we counted them as Medium Smoothbore but alway at long range. Even with orders the command-control is possible too light a touch. Leaders effect initiative, Melee, and morale, by allowing a number of free morale fails, but as you only start to test after 50% loses the forces are pretty well used up by then any way. One feature which was popular was the random leader casualties. Each turn you test all leaders on the table with a 1:36 change of having to roll again on the leader casualty table. we both lost leaders this way. Andy, despite loosing two leaders, thought his was a hoot! we did make one mistake a firing stand may roll a number of dice but still only cause a maximum of one hit. We forgot that and allocated hits per dice. In reality this only effected the heavy artillery so did not make too big a difference to the end result

Conclusion:

We enjoyed the game and will use the rules again for our next outing. I think our long term preference however is for one of the Fire&Fury derivatives.

In the Campaign I rolled for each battalion with 50% casualties with a 50% chance of dropping a grade.

2nd_battle_of_hoy_notes.txt · Last modified: 14/08/2016 07:49 by mikep