artillery

[meliadus]

In LAOK's some army's have 1 gun per 2-3 battalions, there is also mention of battalion guns in it, so a couple of questions.
1, Does battalion guns come under the amount of guns you are allowed as mention in the list, or are they a seperate entity all together.
2, The period we are doing is WSS are all armies allowed battalion guns.

May thanks

[CplJohn]

Hi,

Artillery in Black Powder is very effective. This is because the system covers nearly 200 years of artillery development ( The guns at Colenso during the Boer War to the guns at Blenheim ). The period covered by LAOK see's artillery at the very begining of its development into a proper battlefield arm.

So, the answer to the question is: as a rule of thumb, allow only x amount of ANY type of artillery to Y numbers of battalions. Even battalion guns can be effective at close range ( those three dice really hurt anyone trying to close with you ). The advantage of battalion guns is that they can move ( if you are using the rule that bigger guns cannot move once in place ) and still provide close support.Heavier artillery was not a close support weapon in the way it was to become from Napoleonics on.

Too many artillery pieces on board will skew your game, making artillery a real battle winner, which it was not at the begining of our period ( by the end of the SYW all sides had recognised its value and most armies were deploying much more artillery than they were at the start ).

At risk of making a sweeping statement, I believe most armies of the WSS should be able to have battalion guns. Off the top of my head I cannot think of any who would not.

You might try the following minor rule amendments to, if you want to use more artillery: reduce battalion guns to a maximum of 1 or 2 dice no matter what range they fire at ( eg no 3 dice for cannister ) and do not allow guns to fire in support of infantry being charged unless the charger is specifically targeting the guns ( in most situations, infantry charging infantry will recieve fire from supporting battion guns if any part of the chargers base touches the artillery base ).


Thanks for your question and let me know how you get on!

[meliadus]

Thanks thats cleared that up i thought it might be that, but was not sure

Again many thanks...