The luck of the Irish

I posted recently that I thought that the Austrians' luck in the Bohemian Blitzkrieg campaign was about to run out. I haven't changed that opinion, but can report that it hasn't happened yet. Yesterday, in the Battle of Niemes, Maquire (Macquire? McGuire?), exiled son of County Kerry, lost, but not that badly. Given that he had spent much of the time so far not doing anything (apart from the uncharacteristically effective raid on Frederick's supply lines), this was somewhat unexpected.

A quick look at the campaign map will show that this was only ever meant to be a holding action while the much larger Battle of Sobotka takes place. The battlefield was probably as good as it could be for the Austrians and the pre-battle roll up gave the Austrians a defensive position including earthworks, but the Prussians had a much larger, mostly better army. When their commander rolled 'purple' (that's the colour of the bead used to mark his quality;there is a proper term for it, but I can't remember what it is), gaining them a Brilliant Leader card, and Maquire rolled up as poor (a red bead), gaining them a Command Indecision Card, things looked even worse. However, and somewhat paradoxically, it was when I drew appalling morale chips - the absolute bare minimum and then only after drawing for a second time - that there was an improvement in my prospects. In such circumstances I really had no choice except to get rid of my morale as quickly as possible and then withdraw; the rules requiring zero morale before this could take place.

The odd looking Austrian deployment was at least in line with Maquire's low rating, although post battle discussion did reveal that I had more flexibility in setting up my earthworks than I had assumed. My plan was to use my artillery to knock off stands from the advancing Prussians, morale challenging whenever possible, and also use morale chips to attempt to rally in all circumstances where I had lost stands myself. The asymmetrical Prussian deployment left my grenzers (the one element of Austrian advantage in troop quality) with an empty flank in front of them and so, opportunistically, I advanced them and decided to try to use these as well as the artillery to cause casualties. These units shot up the Prussian artillery (good) and then routed when faced with cavalry thereby using up morale chips (also good). I was able to withdraw without any of my other infantry or my cavalry having entered the battle at all. Both sides caused 1 SP of damage during the battle and although I had mentally budgeted for another 1 SP of post-battle pursuit damage I rolled well and that didn't happen either. All in all it could have been a lot worse.

Lessons learned:

• The morale chip rules have always been a slight quirk in Piquet. I think our amendments  make them better, but it would be hard to claim total intellectual coherence.
• I should have moved my badly positioned artillery sooner. The rules allow them to move reasonably quickly, this should be taken advantage of.
• If the battle is scheduled to take eight moves, the attacker shouldn't be afraid to use them all.
• I think Peter fell into the same trap that I did the previous week. The campaign objective of destroying stands means that if one gets the chance to knock off some stands from an enemy that will shortly withdraw then one should take it, even if under other circumstances one would use one's initiative elsewhere.