Sunday, April 9, 2017

Homecast Hills and the Battle of Twinkenham

 I went out this week and bought a new card reader for my computer. Below are some of the home cast hills.

     Using the 2mm blocks on a small board has been most enjoyable, however, without a clear goal the battles tend to be repetitious.  I decided to make a small campaign, using a straight line campaign. There are five towns along the line (the line representing the Old King's Road) with five towns along it. The two armies will first meet in the center town (Twinkenham) for their first battle. The invading Bluvian Army is pushing for the important crossroad at Oak Grove; the Redian Army is trying to push the blue army back to Old Harbor, from whence the invasion started. Both armies start with a six unit army drawn from One Hour Wargames, with additional reinforcements in the form of 3 units from the OHW lists.  The campaign shall go on until either one army captures its' goal or concedes the campaign due to losses.
The two hills made from my mold are on the left, the rest are the poured freeform hills.

The hills with troops on them.

The Bluvian Army approaches Twinkenham. The Blues are heavy on cavalry, having two cavalry and one dragoon regiments. The dragoons have ranged fire and are excellent for skirmishing, however, are weak in close combat.

The Blue cavalry pushes forward to try to take Twinkenham village.


The Redian Army pushes its unit of Dragoons forward to engage the blue cavalry.  

The red army eliminates one cavalry stand on the right and their artillery hits  the other cavalry in the center, which loses one stand.


The blue dragoons (left center) drives back one red regiment. The blue cavalry on the right drives back the red dragoons. It looks like the battle might be over already.

The reds counterattack.

The reds manager to break the blue cavalry on their left. The reds also bring forward their reserves on their right. The last couple of games I have allowed the armies to keep up to two units off the board as reinforcements. They can be put on their back line during any of their turns. 

The blue cavalry in the center hits one red regiment hard and drives them back in panic.


The blue cavalry breaks the infantry unit, then turns on the reds artillery and takes one gun. The blue dragoons hits the red infantry outside of Twinkenham.




The battle at this point from the Redian side. The blue cavalry is in position to overrun the last of the red artillery, or attack the Redian general. All Redian infantry have suffered losses; the Bluvian infantry has two infantry regiments that haven't suffered any losses (the blue reserves can be seen entering the board at top. ) The Redian retreat.  The Bluvian general  holds his cavalry back;  he might need them and for reinforcements is only going to get one dragoon regiment. The Redian losses for the battle are 925; the Bluvian 400.                                                                                                

6 comments:

  1. Good luck with your campaign. The effort put into create a campaign and background always seems to provide a reward with additional interest and depth to the games.

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    1. Years ago I started a campaign. Before then it was quite easy feeding troops into a meat grinder. Once involved in the campaign, I realized that it is important to conserve your troops.

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  2. A nice, simple campaign to string together a series of battles. What I like is that there is no need to predetermine the type of battle or scenario for subsequent actions. I do like that town, and all!

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    1. On several other blogs there are some ideas on campaigning that I hope to try out after this campaign. As for the battles, it is easy enough to decide who is the attacker and the defender. Next battle will find the Redian Army trying to defend Scottsdale from the invaders.

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  3. Sorry, late to the post. I really enjoyed this and look forward to further posts. Love the straight line campaign idea.

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  4. The straight line campaign is a great starting point for campaigning. I have started a couple of campaigns before using this method. If this was a one off battle, the Red commander would have battled on. However, as all units had suffered losses and the Blue army had two fresh units, common sense dictated to conserve his forces for the next battle.

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