Battle Report - War of the Spanish Succession

Hello All,

Time for another Wednesday Wargaming Battle Report!

This time around we are playing Maurice, a 6mm 18 Century game, but we just have armies from the WSS. I have my French from when back when we were playing this game previously at the club, maybe 5ish years ago, Serge has some British that just got finished. All the models are Baccus 6mm, I think they have a newer range now but I am not sure.

They let you choose and take National advantage cards, so the British had Lethal Volleys (better chance to disrupt with musketry), and the French have En Masse (Infantry can deploy En Masse) and A La Bionette (Better chance to win combats attacking). We had reasonably similar armies, both with regular infantry and cavalry with some artillery.

I think it is going to be a bit harder to give a report for this game as it happens in shorter bursts vs the normal turn structure, so bear with me. The mechanics are based on drawings cards and using them to activate groups of units and get bonuses.

Here is the initial deployment, I am set up to defend, so the British have to march in and take the gold coin objective. I have all my mounted to the left, a small force of infantry, all my artillery ready to shoot, and then a bunch of infantry. The British are lined off with cavalry in columns on each side.

First bit of action the British Infantry advances, and I reply by bombarding them with cannons. No effect.

The British send up some columns of cavalry so I advanced a few units into musketery range to put pressure on them, idea is to defend the flank, but also to waste time and delay the main infantry coming in, not looking forward to all the shooting!

Next go the mounted changes formation to massed and take a bit of fire.

The cavalry made a great charge, but with mediocre results, doing a few disruptions, but also taking some and bouncing to get shot up again.

Seeing that charging was not that effective the British start to march forward again. But I played the bad maps card which let me add an area of rocky ground. So I put it right in front of my artillery.

Finally got some good hits with the artillery that weren't just removed, and the British mounted withdraw out of firing range as they were getting hammered.

The British lines is getting perilously close now. My plan all along was to move my mounted around to the infantry's flank after they game in unprotected, and now was the time I had to do that. But I decided something else aws more important, I guess moving the infantry up a bit.

The British move fully into volley range, and things start to go bad.

Lots of people firing shots now, so disruptions getting spread around. My cannons are doing a great job, but it is not good overall. I decided to just charge with my mounted straight on while I still had them. This achieved little of value.

A few turns later and big things have been happening. Lots of dead units on both sides, but feels like mostly mine. My mounted reduced to 1 stand, and allot of infantry ground up by the shooting. My artillery has been doing good work thou. This put us not to far away from army morale, but I was at 3 so could loose at any moment. The British let a good chance slip by about now, and I started to come back.

My artillery reorganizes to find new targets!

Here we are at the end, I was down to like 3 points of morale again, had used a card to increase it and got a couple of low morale rolls. Whenever a unit dies you roll a D3 to see how much it goes down by. I think the British had around 5. So could go either way really. It was getting late and neither side had a particularly good chance of breaking anything on the next go. So we called it a draw, pretty close overall.

A bit harder to see the 6mm stuff in the pictures but hopefully you get the idea.

Thanks;
Mike