I really enjoy playing new games and writing about them for this blog, but sometimes the pressure (mostly from myself) to play the latest game on my shelf means I don’t make enough time to revisit old favorites. I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful whiner, I really appreciate that thanks to review copies I can try so many new and exciting games and I feel privileged to play as many new titles as I do, but at the same time I find myself gazing longingly at old friends, wondering when will I play them again.
Earlier this month I decided to abandon my sense of obligation and pull one such old friend off the shelf. Men of Iron (MoI) is where I started my wargaming journey, and is easily the series I have written the most about. Of the games in the series, Arquebus remains a favorite, but also one I haven’t given enough attention to either. So, I decided to set up and play through the next two battles in the scenario booklet. I had no thought that I might actually write anything about it, this was purely for fun, but having revisited this system after a long time away from it I have some idle thoughts I’d like to scribble down. I make no promises for this to be top quality analysis, this is instead back of the envelope musings from spending time with an old friend again.
Battle design
In my review, I criticised the latest entry, Norman Conquests, for it’s somewhat bland scenario design. Too many of its battles featured nearly identical armies facing off against each other on a functionally blank map. Both sides started only a handful of hexes away from each other, so within the first activation they would collide. This criticism rang even more true to me as I was revisiting Arquebus, because Arquebus has amazing (and, at times, completely wild) scenario design.
The opening stages of Ravenna. The French army is impressive in scale, but has a slightly messy command structure and must attack a well fortified Spanish position. Both sides have ample artillery to bombard each other with as well.
I previously played Fornovo, probably the best scenario in the whole series. Fornovo has an enormous river that runs down the middle of the map that the Venetian player has to cross to engage the French before they flee the field. The water level will rise at random intervals, which makes it even harder to cross. This scenario creates such an interesting decision space and generates endless stories. It’s phenomenal.
As I’ve dug deeper into Arquebus the interesting design decisions continue apace. In this volume, I think you can see Berg getting really experimental with his design and pushing his system to see how far it will stretch. In this session I played the battles of Agnadello and Ravenna, scenarios 3 and 4 in the scenario booklet.
I, probably foolishly, crossed the trench as the Spanish to eliminate the French guns. This removed the threat of bombardment but opened up the potential for a large French counterattack. Meanwhile, up top the Spanish have entrenched to make it harder for those French guns to hurt them.
Agnadello didn’t get too spicy but it manages to do a lot with a little in terms of how it lays out the battle. For one thing, it has terrain to consider. There are irrigation ditches and a small trench that both sides have to navigate. The Venetians are initially set up in a strong position behind the trench, with an extended wing of their army available for a potential encircling attack. However, the French have artillery which can goad out the Venetians and force them to attack. The terrain is just enough to make it frustrating to maneuver and force interesting considerations on how to position your forces without being overbearing or a rules nightmare. The challenge of the terrain also makes it easy to overlook that most of the units start only two hexes from each other, since the terrain makes that distance feel so much more potent.
Agnadello also has an interesting option for the French player to consider with regards to their reinforcements. If the French reinforcements arrive, the Flight Points level for the French increases significantly, making it harder for them to flee. However, their arrival is based on a die roll and the French are under a timer for the scenario. I usually ignore the timed options for MoI scenarios, but in this case with the French failing the Reinforcements roll several times that timer pressure suddenly felt very real. None of these are brand new systems, but the way they were used in this scenario made me appreciate them more than I had previously. Overall, Agnadello is not a significant departure from the core of MoI, but it is an excellent execution of that system’s strengths.
Ravenna, on the other hand, decides to redesign a core element of the system. A mild criticism I have had of MoI in the past is that if you have large numbers of Battles to command you almost always just activate the same 2 or 3 over and over again, leaving whole wings of your army with nothing to do. In Ravenna the French have at least half a dozen individual Battles, but to allow for this Berg heavily modifies the activation system. The French now play a simple push your luck style game where they can pick 1-3 Battles to activate, but they have to roll a d10 to activate them with worse odds the greater the number. Do you really want to activate all three of those Battles? Well, yeah, but is it worth the risk? This is an excellent little adjustment to the core game, and the kind of spice that makes MoI what it is.
The French activation table for Ravenna
These scenarios also makes me excited to keep exploring Arquebus, because I’m sure there are more interesting decisions waiting for me in future scenarios. At the same time, I don’t want to rush and play them all now since with Berg’s passing I know I won’t be getting any new ones so I must savor what I have. I sincerely hope that future non-Berg entries in the series take the lessons of Arquebus to heart and don’t hesitate to play with the core systems to make each battle feel unique and exciting.
A reposition of some Spanish units helped blunt the French attack some, but it was too little too late and the French managed to kill enough Spanish units to force them to flee the battle.
Time and medieval battles
Scale is incredibly important in wargame design. It has significant implications that will shape how a game plays and what it prioritizes. This is most obvious when comparing things like operational vs. tactical scale, which in turn have an impact on the unit size represented by the counters and how many turns there can be in a game. While I enjoy discussing why a certain scale was chosen and whether it fits the topic, I think we can sometimes be too rigid with our conceptions of scale. Further, I think those notions tend to be based on an understanding of warfare rooted in modern history.
Initial set up for Agnadello. Look at all that terrain! A luxury for a medieval (or early modern) battle. Please ignore the fact that the Venetians are using the Swiss standard, I couldn’t find the Venetian one at the time and it was the closest in color.
Medieval battles are a tricky thing. We lack the levels of detail we have for a modern battle, so understanding exact troop deployments and movements is usually impossible. They also usually only lasted a few hours, so how do you take a game scale that’s designed for day long battles and use it for something that maybe lasted two hours? Or at least, how do you do that and make a game that is still satisfying and fun?
I think there is a silent brilliance in Men of Iron’s turnless structure in terms of how it captures the inexactness of time in a medieval battle. Rather than obsessing over what happened at a certain moment in the day, or comparing your progress vs. the historical timeline (which usually doesn’t exist), in Men of Iron you fight in a liminal space. You know time is progressing with each activation, but you never worry about exactly how much time. It embraces the fluidity through which we must understand medieval battles rather than trying to force a modernist perspective onto it. It’s a small touch, but I think it’s kind of brilliant.
I Like big flight points and I cannot lie
There are two little design choices in Arquebus that really help it to sing. One of them is that the core units you use most of the time, either pikemen and shield and buckler soldiers, have the staggeringly high flight point value of 5. In original Men of Iron, 5 flight points was a value reserved for if you somehow got your king killed, like an idiot, but in Arquebus most of your army has this value.
The French guns moved up along the bottom of the map to get within a closer bombardment range, while up top the French moved to behind the irrigation ditch in hopes of goading the Venetians into attacking them and suffering the negative combat DRM.
The second choice is the introduction of combination missile/melee units, think pikemen with crossbows or arquebus units included in their strength. These units are able to shoot in the movement phase and then immediately shock attack a potentially disrupted enemy unit. Of course, they could also have been disrupted by the enemy’s inherent missile units, and may even find themselves shocking a powerful melee unit where they themselves were disrupted but their enemy wasn’t - woops!
What these two things do is give Arquebus the ability to swing wildly in one direction or the other. A flank collapsing can wrack up flight points at a staggering rate, possibly ending the game, but at the same time while you may feel like you’re very far behind if you had one good push this turn maybe you can turn the tide with some lucky rolls. That feeling that you’re still in it helps to keep the game exciting while at the same time the fact that each unit is worth so many flight points can help ensure that the game doesn’t overstay its welcome when things do decisively turn against you.
Not that every game in the Men of Iron series should adopt these ideas (although some future titles might benefit from experimenting with them), but rather this helps Arquebus to stand out from its predecessors. You can see the differences in the warfare from something like Men of Iron where you really needed missile fire to disrupt the enemy line before charging in (although, arguably, given how strong the missile units were you maybe just wanted to use them for everything). The tempo of an Arquebus battle feels different and doesn’t necessarily bog down into as much of a grind as some other entries in the series. You don’t need to eliminate most of the enemy’s army, just enough of the core fighting force, and then the rest will buckle.
The Venetians opted to meet the French on their terms, leaving their initial defensive positions to attack. At the southern end they largely managed to neutralize the French artillery, while up north they proved surprisingly effective despite the irrigation ditch in the way. However, there is a big hole in the middle of their lines now, can the French exploit it?
Both of these elements help to enhance the chaotic feeling of the battles of this period, how unpredictable they could be an how insecure your position was even if it looks like you are winning. For some they might be too swingy and chaotic, but I come to MoI for the chaos so for me this is almost perfection.
In Praise of engagement
I also love the rules for units becoming Engaged. While it potentially clutters up the game as you have to place those little white counters between units, marring the game’s beauty, they are worth the aesthetic cost. At its most basic, I like that they ensure that there is no blank result on the combat results table (CRT), which I find underwhelming in any game. I want stuff to happen when my units fight.
More than that, though, I think the most important part is in the small line that says that once units become engaged you can’t shoot missiles into that combat. This seems like such a small thing, but I have complained extensively about how missile units are too powerful in Men of Iron as a whole. With the Engaged rule you can lock out missile fire and force the two sides to handle things in hand to hand combat, or at least if you want to take missile shots you have to break the engagement and disrupt your own unit first. It’s a small change, but it’s another thing that reduces the power of missiles and encourages hand to hand fighting. In that regard, it feels like another corrective to the original Men of Iron’s dominant archery, and I love to see it.
The French were ultimately unable to exploit the gap in the Venetian lines before Venice (thanks to lucky continuation rolls) was able to fill it in. A series of Retired results for the French pushed them over their lower Flight Points total as they couldn’t quite make the Reinforcements roll on their final activation.
The series’ pinnacle (so far?)
On the whole, Arquebus shows how Berg iterated on his original work in Men of Iron. He didn’t just take that core system and tinker with the edges, making very minor adjustments to units and then just setting up several nearly identical battles for them. Each new entry in the series makes adjustments to the original which adds a new perspective on both the historical subject and on what the Men of Iron system can be. Revisiting Arquebus, which was Berg’s final volume in this series as a designer, I think it is the pinnacle of the series’ design and reinforces how I felt that Norman Conquests didn’t fully live up to that potential. I forgave Norman Conquests this to some degree because it sacrifices that interesting perspective to partially gain the ability to be a great entry point into the system. However, I sincerely hope that future entries in Men of Iron remember that Berg was always making changes to the core and that they should look to Men of Iron as not just a core ruleset, but as a foundation for future experimentation.
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