This is where we started - Scotty looking to get into my refused centre and me looking to sneak around his right flank. The Tercios deployed in their traditional triangle formation pointed at the enemy but the much more rapid Swedes came on at pace.
You can tell it was a good game when I utterly forgot to take enough pictures until we ended the game! Roughly, Scotty turned my left flank which left me dangerously exposed (enough to charge a Colour Regiment in the front with Gendarmes to stop them turning the flank of a Tercio!) but my light horse kept me in the game doing sterling work dinging up cavalry enough that I shot one off the board with heavy artillery.
In the centre, the Tercios ground into some Colour Regiments because I was a little too hesitant and unsure of how well they could take artillery. Turns out, well enough. I was lucky to fight two Colour Regiments one-on-one and the power of the Tercio bore out as they made it through the devastating charge potential of the Swedish infantry.
On my right, a stalemate between two Colour Regiments and my Landsknechts who, supported ably by some caracoling Reiters (who never got to shoot!) and some cavalry held on until a Tercio powered into the flank of a Colour Regiment and saved the day although with no way to stop the cheeky Dragoon who ran through a marsh and sacked my baggage!
So here's where we finished up:
Scotty sacked my camp a turn before I got to his and I broke. I had one round to finish off two of the Colour Regiments and ding one up a couple of other things to salvage a draw but in the end it was 22 - 19 (I broke on 19, Scotty on 20!) and a thoroughly good game!
Do I like Tercios? Yes. Are they good? Maybe. In period, I can see they'd be devastating. I definitely wasn't aggressive enough with them and, faced with charging infantry like Scotty's, they didn't really shoot much of anything or take advantage of their weird, multi-sided nature.
They're very slow and very tough and in this game, a musing Scotty and I had had during the week that if he could win big on a charge with his Salvo infantry he could beat me one-on-one but if he didn't, I'd grind him into paste, definitely proved to be true. And grind is the operative word - we had the same with the Landsknecht Kiel in a shoving match with a Colour Regiment that took me the whole game to win!
And a couple of things off the modelling bench:
Flames of War
In the absence of some 2pdrs for my MW Pacific Australians, I present their air support:
This is Alice, a PBY Consolidated Catalina flying boat and one of my favourite aircraft of the war. She's the right scale for Flames and is so much more fun than a couple of Kittyhawks. I don't quite have a full set of markings but getting some RAAF roundels was what was needed to at least get her to a point where I'm happy to have her on table.
Warhammer 40K
I've also got on and finished another Rough Rider, and started three more, so they're moving along now I'm happy with the palette and the technique:
The random pop of orange or green, depending on lancehead type and my predilection for painting melta bombs in orange (maybe a nod to the original Space Crusade? I can't remember...) kind of makes me smile against the relatively muted background. There's a lot more khaki than my regular Cadians but that's part of the charm.
Next Time
Rough Riders and maybe some more Early War Germans...
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