More Pike & Shotte

So we had another go at Pike & Shotte and once again it proved very enjoyable. James has outlined the set up here and will hopefully report on the battle complete with photos in due course, so I'll just note a few random points.

• This was a more complex and larger game than the first. It would easily have lasted another evening had our busy schedules so allowed. 
• As James writes in his blog, he tinkered with the standard troop types and statistics to reflect his view of how things were. I am in no position to comment, but I would point out that things might have gone more smoothly had the handouts he gave out contained the numbers he wished us to use instead of seemingly random entries which he repeatedly superseded with corrections. Just a thought.
• We used the blunder rule - which seemed OK to me.
• The movement element remains the favourite part of mine. It needs some adjusting to take account of the actual base sizes being used, especially regarding interpenetration. I'm still not convinced by the proximity rule, but it may well be that there are subtleties still to be revealed.
• I also like the fact that that one cannot rally back to full strength and there was talk of importing that rule into the house versions of Piquet/FOB.
• There were still some extreme results in melee. These aren't unknown in Piquet anyway and, as Peter pointed out, it might be a function of using saving throws. It wouldn't be at all hard to work out the maths of, say, D12 vs D4 compared to 8 D6 versus 2 D6 hitting and saving on different numbers; but I can't be arsed. Let's accumulate a bit more anecdotal evidence first.
• I felt that the game flowed better than under Hell Broke Loose in a way that was hard to put one's finger on. James said that the table looked more like a Renaissance battle and that seemed an astute observation. I can't particularly think what aspect of the different mechanics would be behind that, but again it's worth keeping an eye on.
• I think we are all agreed that the rules for commands breaking need to be a bit more sophisticated, with units weighted in some way. I would suggest that should also apply to the calculation of support in melee. It probably wouldn't matter in a horse and musket period, but here an arquebus unit plus a small pike unit could count as twice as good for support purposes as a colunella consisting of exactly the same numbers of troops; which doesn't seem to make much sense to me.