There’s Popery in them there woods.
When Slitherine first introduced me to Pike & Shot at the beginning of the summer, I didn’t think much of it. This iPad-bound wargame models 16th- and 17th-century battles on a very big scale — but it started life as a mod of Battle Academy, a WWII game that zooms things in to a company-level scale. How well could a game engine designed to simulate 20th-century armoured manoeuvre warfare possibly replicate giant clashes between musketeers and cuirassiers?
Pretty damn well, as it turns out.
You don’t need to be an expert on the period to get the most from the battles. The introduction to each lays out the tactical picture nicely.
Quick caveat first: I’ve been playing a PC press build of Pike & Shot for this preview, so I won’t talk much about the UI, which no doubt will see some modifications before this game makes its way to iPad sometime after it launches on desktops this winter.
Pike & Shot is a turn-based wargame that covers thematic territory that a lot of you won’t have delved into in a wargame before (unless you played Musket Smoke). No Nazis, no Confederates, no bug-eyed space monsters. Instead there’s Bohemians — and by that I don’t mean Allan Ginsberg-quoting flaneurs, but Eastern European Protestants.
I’ve played three campaigns in Pike & Shot: the Thirty Years War (which will come with the game) and the Italian Wars and English Civil War which will be expansions. This is not my best period of history by a wide margin (which is, of course, George Clooney’s run on ER, 1994-99) and Pike & Shot has sent me scuttling to Wikipedia and Amazon to read more after every battle. It’s good stuff.
A schematic of the Battle of White Mountain from 1661. You’ll be fighting this one in Pike & Shot. (Hopefully more ably than me.)
As is Slitherine’s usual M.O., historical fidelity is paramount. Your goal isn’t ever to annihilate the enemy, just to rattle their army enough for them to turn tail and run. Your units are giant formations of musketeers, halberdiers, mounted hussars and the like, and the squared-off unit art has been modelled on contemporary drawings and paintings of battles from the 1700s.
Your units are rated on size (a squadron of boyars might number 200 riders and a juggernaut tercio might have ten times that many pikemen), ranged power, melee power, and power at the point of impact — which is to say, the shock value when they charge into another formation.
This isn’t an era of precision shooting, so firing a volley of muskets into an enemy formation’s flank might only produce three or four casualties, but your goal isn’t to kill — it’s to unnerve. Some scenarios hand you a smaller, lower-quality force in a superior position and exploiting the game’s morale system is one way to tip the odds in your favour.
We need to hurry up and finish this rout before those Arkebusiers on the right get back and spoil my beautiful Cannae.
In one battle, I commanded a scrappy band of Transylvanian Protestants facing down a massive Catholic Hapsburg force. The proud centrepiece of this Hapsburg army was three enormous tercios — pointy Death Stars of infantry organised in a square formation with pikes pointing in every direction. This is a game where hitting a unit on its flank is an almost sure-fire way to get them to break and run — but tercios (with their porcupine formation) cannot be flanked. There was no way my rag-shoed Romanians were going to be able to go toe-to-toe with that.
My plan to was hide mounted hussars in the forests on the edges of the map, inviting the tercio-led Catholic line to attack my heaviest-armoured Transylvanians at the center. The Catholics take the bait, and I make with the squeeze play — not attacking the tercios, but the lighter units guarding their flanks. My hussars hit them from the sides, causing them to fragment and then rout from the field. The panic spreads through the Catholic army like a virus, rattling even the mighty tercios.
That sounds tidy, but believe me, it wasn’t. The poor saps that I obliged to hold the center against the tercios did not have a great time, and in the final accounting there were almost as many deserters from my force as from the enemy’s. But the difference was enough to win that time. Just about every battle I’ve fought so far has come right down to the wire, so I consider the scenario design top-notch. It’s either that or I suck.
Facing down guns in Bulgaria.
Though there’s a clear family resemblance, this game plays very differently from Battle Academy. The sound effects and unit “feel” really succeed in making these battles feel epic in scope, quite unlike the intimate knife fights of Battle Academy. There’s no agile Panzers here — your maniples manoeuvre like hungover sumo wrestlers and need an entire turn or more to turn around — so foresight and planning matter. Routing an enemy unit is something you have to think about carefully, as well — units engaged with a formation that decides to break and run will be so full of bloodlust that they’ll pursue, often right off the edge of the map. You can turn this to your favour by sacrificing some low quality scrubs to lure an enemy unit off the field, but sometimes they come back a few turns later.
Pike & Shot is mostly a blast to play. There’s some downtime once melee is joined — you can’t issue new orders to a unit that’s going mano-a-mano with another, and if most of your army is in melee you’ll find yourself hitting “next turn” having done nothing except utter a little prayer. But that’s rare, and most turns are full of meaty tactical decisions.
Like most of Slitherine’s 2014 releases, this one’s coming to PC first and iPad soon after (async cross-platform multiplayer is in) and Slitherine tell me that we should expect this one sometime this winter.
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