20th Century Piquet

Absolutely no-one has asked me to elaborate on my theories about Piquet in the modern world and therefore I feel it is incumbent upon me to do exactly that. For the purposes of the exercise I shall treat all Piquet family games (i.e. standard, Command Piquet and FoB) as the same thing even though they are clearly not. And, of course, it's worth remembering that the only Piquet that I've ever played has been with the Ilkley Lads, both before and after the great Old School schism, and for all I know they play it completely wrong.

Anyway, back to the theory. My view is that in a generic ancient style combat ('sticks and stones' in the words of Mark Dudley) there aren't any real opportunities for command and control. After lining them up it's just really about moving them forwards until the battle lines clash. The card/initiative elements of Piquet work brilliantly at modelling the friction and fog of war. How effective will missile fire be? Will both wings and the centre move together or will one part of the army be more aggressive than the other? In those few circumstances where some sort of coordination is appropriate (e.g. the switching of the Hastati, Principes and Triarii in Punic Wars Roman legions) then one will get the required combination of cards/initiative often enough to make it work, but it's not guaranteed. Oh, and even here the three types of cards (Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery) aren't really enough and one has to add in a special one for Elephants.

Zoom forward to the twentieth century and having only three types of cards definitely don't work - why is an 88mm (or 2pdr) a/t gun reloaded on an artillery card, but the same thing on a Tiger (or a Crusader) is reloaded on an Armour card? - and the command and control which is required to be modelled is of a somewhat higher degree of complexity. In this case the necessary card/initiative combination will rarely, if ever, arrive.

I do have thoughts regarding the Horse and Musket period, but can't be arsed to write them. And naturally I don't have any practical suggestions to address the points that I do raise. Although presumably you are all impressed by me being the only person in the world to remember Command Piquet.