Saturday, March 18, 2017

Yet another Over The Hills battle !

Another super outing with Over The Hills as Stephen wanted to try his Peninsula British against my French.
We decided to reduce the number of Artillery units to a maximum of 2 per 250pts (will likely allow Russians 3) as we find them pretty powerful and they can dominate a game if too plentiful.

British units are pretty tough having a base 8 strength (Highlanders 9) but with a really excellent trait of being able to conduct Defensive Fire AND Countercharge enemy Foot making them very to deal with (both feel that points wise they are a tad cheap but hard to fix) and means they act pretty historically.

French do get benefits for charging in Attack Column but this can be thwarted by not winning first round of combat (forced into Line or -1 fatigue) also we discovered today that when rolling to hold fire with units if a Column fails and shoots it too is forced to try to deploy into Line.

Game saw 3 Foot and 1 Mounted Brigade each with French having a mere 3 units of Line more than the British ie not enough to make a real difference.

Game was a bloody affair with French attacking mainly in Column and destroying a unit of Portugese Foot but losing 2 units to a counter charge by British foot on my left.

A steady drain of casualties occurred elsewhere with the superior British inflicting several hits more.

Both Cavalry Brigades cancelled each out being reluctant to charge with only their respective Horse Guns affecting the fray.

A French Brigade was shattered with its opponent a mere 1 Fatigue from a similar fate.
We called the game at that point.

Great stuff again

















Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Over The Hills another bash

Having enjoyed last game so much we decided to give Over The Hills another outing today.
We used French (Stephen) versus Prussian (yours truly) circa 1813/14.
We used points system to generate 250pt forces and I rolled up terrain from North Europe listing and we diced for set edge.
I had 2 large Infantry Brigades and a Light Cavalry Brigade.
French fielded 3 Infantry and 1 Cavalry Brigades.

Another excellent game and we discovered that Closed Column is a superb formation for Infantry facing Mounted as automatically adopts Square when Cavalry charges.
It also moves twice as fast as Square and can shoot when forming Square.
Only real downside is that it can suffer like Square from shooting.
Cavalry really cannot deal with fresh supported Infantry as they take a -5 whilst Infantry gain +6 making it a done deal that Mounted will suffer greatly (pretty much like in Shako).
We also discovered that Brick Villages are also massively tough to assault.
Really need to soften up such targets with Artillery to have any real chance.

Now that we have the basics sorted the game plays really fast with only a few of the Optional rule interactions requiring us to look up rule set.

Rules are most likely our go to set for Divisional (3-5 Brigades) size games as they have nice mix of playability and period flavour.