After Kirchendorf : thoughts on 'In Deo Veritas'

As promised, in this post I will give my impressions of the In Deo Veritas Pike and Shot period rules for  'big battles' following my recent game based on their Battle of Cheriton scenario. Overall I'm quite positive about it, though there were one or two issues worth raising.  I'll also show a few more pictures of  the game in progress.

 

First the  plus points : 

Simplicity - there were no really  complex mechanisms,  only 'D6' dice are needed. Tests for unit disorder, wing fatigue and  army 'general will' involve one D6 and a few modifiers. For combat, units usually roll 1 to 3 dice, it's always  4,5 or 6 to hit or save, and variable factors for advantage or disadvantage will add to, or subtract from, the number  of dice rolled. All quite easy, and to me has quite a nice 'old school' feel - '4,5 or 6' takes me right back to Charles Grant and 'Battle'!   Charts with modifying factors are quite short, easy to assimilate. It would also be simple to add your own modifiers if you wanted to 'tweak' the rules. 

They read quite well: the rules are set out in a logical order, with not too much detail up-front.  'Army Composition' comes first and starts with Commanders, then the Wing concept, then different troop types are described in plain English  (  'the most common unit of the period was the formed infantry unit of between 900 and 1200 men. Frequently called a 'Brigade', each unit represents a grouping of regiments' ) - technical stuff about how many hits they take or shots they fire can wait till later. I found that made it easy to assimilate information in gradual stages.  The explanation of different parts of the rules generally follows the turn sequence - Orders, Movement, Combat, Retreats, Pursuit, Cohesion (wings), General Will ( army level ) - all pretty sensible, and the writing is pretty clear and easy to understand. 

Scale: use of the 'Brigade' as the basic unit  ( 900-1200 foot, 400-600 horse ) is sensible for battlefield units in larger battles.  There's not a specific 'figure scale' - the Brigade is defined by its base size, so you can decide whether to use 6mm ( or even 2mm ) figures and pack loads in, or 10mm/12mm/15mm with less figures in the Brigade.  

Orders and Move sequence are quite neat - you  move  a 'Wing' ( from either side ) at a time, using a  card draw - the order that wings move in can  be crucial and is effectvely random, giving some uncertainty of outcome. You could rationalise this as different Wing Commanders responding more or less promptly to orders, which feels right.   Orders are given each turn, but at the level of a whole  Wing - so you are only issuing maybe four orders per turn -   and are v. simple,  just Attack/Hold/Withdraw.  

Vive la France..

 I very much liked the use of Levels of Disorder - Sound/Disordered/Disrupted/Routed/Destroyed - as the main mechanism for the effect of combat, rather than tracking casualties. I suspect that  reflects the period correctly - the deep blocks of pike and shot units depended on keeping cohesion, probably more than on simple numbers of losses.  It was obvious to use counters ( e.g. coins ) with the number of counters indicating disorder level - casualty markers could be even more appropriate. Simple!

Sensible combat outcomes - units hit by fire, or losing a melee, suffer increases in disorder level, may be forced to Recoil or Rout,  and can be destroyed completely if losing by a wide margin or suffering enough hits. The 'Recoil' result  makes it sensible to keep a sufficient distance between front and supporting lines,  allowing front-line units to recoil without disordering the second line, and that feels right, too. The simple  interpenetration rule allowed a second line unit to step forward and replace a first line unit that was halted by artillery fire - straightforward.

Wing 'Fatigue' seems sensible - once a Wing suffers  routed or destroyed brigades, it can be fatigued (i.e. demoralised) triggering automatic 'Hold' or 'Withdraw' orders.  Similarly 'General Will'  for the whole army. It looks like with 1/4 to 1/3 of the army's  brigades routed there is a 50/50 chance of defeat -  .go over 1/3 routed and it gets more likely. Finally the after-battle 'Pursuit' mechanism is fun, simple but effective and a useful device in campaigns.

Turn 2, imminent action

 I did have a few issues, though:  

The melee combat mechanism felt a bit long-winded : although the 'hit' and 'save' rolls are simple, the problem is that you have to roll for Unit 'A' to hit, then Unit 'B' to save those hits, then Unit 'B' to hit, then unit 'A' to save those hits, and then finally compare the number of unsaved hits for each side to get the result.  When the armies got to grips, with melees all along the line, I ended up with 7 or 8 sets of melee combats to do as above, so that could be up to something like 30 die rolls! For a solo player, that started to feel like hard work - though I suppose with two players it would be less work for each.  Hmm.. do we really need the 'saves' part?  Could we just combine the charts of variable factors for 'hits' and 'saves' into one, and have one die roll per unit instead of two? In melee that would still give 'opposed' die rolls so both players involved, but less drudgery..

Shooting ranges : admittedly I probably shouldn't have halved all the movement rates and shooting ranges to fit my small table.  The 'normal' move distance for an Infantry Brigade is 12 inches, and their muskets have a range of 3 inches. Once I halved those, trying to measure  1.5 inches for musket range (and one inch for cavalry pistol/arquebus fire) became a bit ridiculous. Even at the unmodified 3 inch musket range, it felt a bit awkward, and of course if Unit A starts its move less than 12 inches from Unit B, then A could charge into contact in one move, wihout ending a move within musket range. There's a mechanism to deal with that - Unit A stops at musket range and both units exchange fire, before A closes in for melee, if not stopped by B's fire.  That does give an authentic-feeling sequence of events, with units advancing, giving fire and then charging home, but it also adds two more sets of 'hit and save' die rolls per combat!  

Now I've always had the impression that effective musket range was really quite short - even in Napoleonic times, probably not much more than 100 yards, and I suspect that 40 yards might be more realistic ( and by the way, how terrifying must that have been, and how did anyone have the courage to do that? ), and as a result I can't help feeling that we might be better off simply rolling musketry up with melee into something called simply 'combat',  which occurs when units get sufficiently close to each other. This seems even more appropriate when playing 'big battles', where the basic unit is a Brigade. The player represents  a General, and  he doesn't know or care whether the Yellow Brigade defeated their opponents with a musket volley only, or by charging home - they probably did both, anyway. So maybe we don't need to replicate the combat at  such a level of detail?  I think my halving of the distances and ranges perhaps just served to emphasise this point. 

Turn 5, fighting all along the line

Cavalry are, in general, all the same ( fully armoured cavalry get an extra 'save' die, but that's about it ), and I wondered why the 'Trotters vs Gallopers' or  'Dutch vs Swedish style'  concept that appears in other rule sets was not used - I feel that is a big part of the 'feel' of the period. I suppose perhaps the rules are taking up my point about not going into too much detail? But it felt like something was missing somehow. It might be addressed by simply adding a variable - one exta 'hit' die for 'Gallopers' charging at 'Trotters',  perhaps? 

I was confused by the 'Impetuous Pursuit' rule, used when a unit losing a melee retreats, and the winners may pursue - as so often the ECW Royalist cavalry would, for example. If the losing unit ends its rout move within 18 inches and line of sight of the winning unit(s) then the winning unit(s) must test to see how it.. responds to the opportunity to attack the enemy at his most vulnerable  says the rulebook - but in the earlier paragraph on Retreats,  Routing Units use the March Column move rates.. They must attempt to move the full distance..  For a cavalry Brigade, the March Colmn move is 27 inches -so if Prince Rupert's regiment gets the better of some of Parliament's   'old decayed servingmen and tapsters' and put the latter to rout, the Roundheads will be 27 inches away at the end of the rout move, and the Royalists won't even get to roll a die to pursue, whether they want to or not. Hmm.. have I missed something?  As a result, the only Impetuous Pursuit that happened in my game was by an Imperial  cavalry unit against a French Infantry brigade - none of the many routed cavalry units were pursued by their vanquishers. That seems to be wrong, doesn't it? 

For the life of me, I can't find a mention of Dragoons dismounting or mounting-up. There's a rule for changing formation between 'normal' formation and March Column ( it takes a full move), and there's a rule for deploying/limbering  artillery ( e.g. field guns - a full move without moving to deploy, may then fire ). But Dragoons dismounting - no mention. Hmmm... have I just missed it? 

I didn't make much use of commanders ( army generals and wing commanders ), I kept things very simple by not attaching them to units, simply kept Wing commanders  close to their units, so as to keep all brigades 'In Command' - if 'Out of Command', units cannot move toward the enemy. The command radius is 6 inches, so the units of a wing have to be quite close together. But in the Cheriton scenario in the rulebook, both sides have three units each of  'commanded musketeers' - Company sized units, deployed in the woods to the East of the battlefield. Those units are very likely 'out of command' right from the start, given the specified deployment. So they should not be able to advance against each other, unless their Wing commander personally comes over and leads them - which would leave the rest of his wing 'out of command'. I suspect a special rule was intended, to the effect that these detachments don't have to be 'in command' to operate normally. But I don't see any such rule. 

by Turn 6, French line has swivelled to along the road

That's about it, I hope this has been of some interest.  I may have outstayed my welcome! I should add that the above are only my personal opinions, you are entirely free to disagree with them ( please feel free to use the comments area  below )  and  if I am factually wrong on any of them, I am happy to be corrected. Overall, it was positive experience using these rules, I enjoyed the game and most of it felt 'right' for the period. The organisation of armies  into Wings which are ordered and moved as a whole, and the use of Disorder rather than casualties seemed particularly good - my favourite parts, I think.  The influence of Frank Chadwick's much-loved 'Volley and Bayonet' rules is strong, I suspect, and that's no bad thing. 

I had also hoped to have a look at a rival set of rules - Twilight of the Divine Right from the Pike and Shot Society / Wyre Forest Wargamers.  But I've banged on for far too long about In Deo Veritas, and as a result I haven't even fully read Twighlight..  so that will have to wait for another time. It will be interesting to compare them, as both sets of rules are for a similar 'big battle' scale of game, and obviously in the same period. 

I'd better get on and read those rules, and next time I should set out the details of a battle to be played with them, so we can see how they play.  Meanwhile I hope this was interesting and/or useful; keep well, everyone.

 

  

 

  

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