Is this game supposed to be realistic ?

[Filibert]

Each turn represents 15 minutes. Yet, in this window of time, units do ridiculously low damage to each other, such as two units of 400 harquebusiers firing at each other resulting in only 15 losses ! Some foot units walks only 400 meters on normal terrain, which I calculated means they walk at a pathetic speed of 0,4 m/s ! Granted, moving in formation can be hard, but there should be at least an option to relax the formation and order the men to do this thing called "running" or "haste".

But what baffles me the most are the losses resulting from muskets and artillery fire. You would think a 15 minutes barrage from a battery of several cannons against blocks of pikemen would do some serious damage... Nope, just 30 losses and 1 170 survivors !

I tried editing the .pdt files, but it is so complicated and contrived that you might as well learn C++ and write your own game. Because each scenario has its own .pdt, and each .pdt is just a series of numbers that the official Notes do a very bad job of describing. What. The. Hell.

[agmoss99]

As you say, each scenario is different so I can't comment on the specifics. Weather and unit quality also make a difference.

Powder weapons weren't very effective and had a very slow rate of fire. Nothing like Napoleonics. I recommend you try advancing at Flodden against the English longbow.

[Filibert]

Actually, there was no ballistic improvement until the generalization of rifles in the second half of the 19th century as shown by the Graz test (the Austrian military tested original weapons from the 16th to 18th century and measured the velocity, accuracy and penetration of the bullets) :
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MC...7669/22312
http://firearmshistory.blogspot.fr/2016/...rms-i.html

According to Thomas Digges in "Stratioticos" (1590) muskets effective range was between 75 to 150 meters. Humfrey Barwick (English officer of the late 16th century) claimed he could hit a man at 100 meters every 40 seconds with his own arquebus.

Although I agree that rate of fire was not as fast as flintlocks, I believe 15 minutes of musket fire (which roughly equates to 15 salvos, multiply by the number of shooters...) should do more damage than that. Even if accounting for misfires.


I'd like to have more practical evidence on this subject (albeit without the inconvenient of losing a limb or my life in a real battle )

[-72-]

Each turn represents 15 minutes. Yet, in this window of time, units do ridiculously low damage to each other, such as two units of 400 harquebusiers firing at each other resulting in only 15 losses ! Some foot units walks only 400 meters on normal terrain, which I calculated means they walk at a pathetic speed of 0,4 m/s ! Granted, moving in formation can be hard, but there should be at least an option to relax the formation and order the men to do this thing called "running" or "haste".

But what baffles me the most are the losses resulting from muskets and artillery fire. You would think a 15 minutes barrage from a battery of several cannons against blocks of pikemen would do some serious damage... Nope, just 30 losses and 1 170 survivors !

I tried editing the .pdt files, but it is so complicated and contrived that you might as well learn C++ and write your own game. Because each scenario has its own .pdt, and each .pdt is just a series of numbers that the official Notes do a very bad job of describing. What. The. Hell.

Actually the 'official notes' do a pretty decent job of explaining things - but you know, sorta ... where to start ....

I'm going for artillery. Artillery in this time period, as well as immediately after was solely solid shot (no cannister, no grapeshot ... nothing like that existed.). Rate of fire was extremely low and I guess technically speaking the artillery arm might not even technically been manned by soldiers but rather tradesmen. But again the point being ... solid shot - not shells, nothing is exploding back then - more or less you got really big rocks being shot slowly.

Pikemen doing damage - you know that's an interesting one, in that the most impact that pike units had in this period was one of shock - you'd drive an opposing unit away before they hit.

Muskets (and arquebuses -since you are going to be finding more of those) - imo are rated with too great a range. I find it difficult to buy that a musket of the period would be shot at 400 meters.

Movement- well this is movement as an army - not what a guy can manage as a pace in hiking a field - completely different things. You also are trying to keep some pretty compact formations due to command control (they wouldn't just start running at the other side -not and maintain any sort of formation ...).

In all fairness, though I will have to point out that I am not going to go digging through my own source material and cite where I got this from (and I did not have anything to do with ratings in REN).

The question that I have is - do you really need to rate each individual battle as a PDT, nevermind what is in the game files?

Personally I couldn't care less about field tests of weapons -it is more about how did armies fight then - and if a musket could hit anything 1 out of ten times or whatever at 400 meters -it still doesn't mean that armies shot at each other at 400 meters back then in reality. That one is a bit of a debate -I guess you know what side I come down on that discussion... in favour of how the armies fought.

[agmoss99]

Thanks for that Steve. I was a playtester for the game and I still love it now. As I say, it's nothing like the Napoleonic games.

A friend of the wife is actually a fully qualified operator of a demi culverin (not her day job I hasten to add): can't be many around and certainly not female. She backs up what you say about solid shot (basically stone balls) and rate of fire, and that gun crews were not the professionals of later times.

[-72-]

Thanks for that Steve. I was a playtester for the game and I still love it now. As I say, it's nothing like the Napoleonic games.

A friend of the wife is actually a fully qualified operator of a demi culverin (not her day job I hasten to add): can't be many around and certainly not female. She backs up what you say about solid shot (basically stone balls) and rate of fire, and that gun crews were not the professionals of later times.

I knew that you were in the credits, Andy :) I never got to play anyone but Kevin much and that was at the final stages ( I wasn't around before that). I was mainly a WWII and Civil War person in terms of what I generally read and studied when it came to my gaming -so I guess REN changed that.

I can't really take credit for saying that about the artillery - it was just something that I had read in a few places. It probably was something Geoffrey Parker wrote among others.

I think a couple of other things that are important to point out about artillery of that period is that because they were highly immobile (in a field battle context) - that often times 'taking them out' equated to chasing off the crews (which would come back after a position was reoccupied. 

Also their primary function was geared towards wall-breaking in sieges; use on a battlefield was secondary. There wasn't any concept of a 'grand battery' in a field battle -I imagine this being due to its battlefield ineffectiveness.

Technically pikes too were more often than not used to intimidate an opponent out of a position. I guess the idea was (from the defending side) -did you want to get skewered ... a lot of the time the answer was, 'no... we have to move' ... before contact was ever made. Pike pushing pike was a relatively rare occurrence  (read that too somewhere ... not sure where -it's been awhile.).

Shooting - musket is a bit of a misnomer in that really at this point pretty much all of the shoulder arms were all matchlocks, and they had a much longer reload time... add this to the 400 men example but realise that the entire frontage of a mixed pike/shot unit was not going to be much more than about a 100 meters -and then understand that you are only going to be able to put a finite amount of men doing different things in a given set space on a map (and also recoginise that there is a bit of abstraction even with that because units in actuality were not designed around a hexgrid but around how many men that these people back then reckoned they could control (and by extension ... how many of these the next leader up the command could effectively manage). What I am saying is that even in the 400 man shooting example - in reality you are not having 400 guys shooting ... it might not even have been 100... probably 60 - 80 (as an educated guess) -and even then they would have been using a formation that sort of resembled a marching band shooting and retiring or advancing or staying in place -in order to achieve any sort of rate of sustained fire.

Noting too that most men in this period did not carry much ammunition on them so they would run out often. Even in the English Civil War period it would be about 12 pre-made rounds hung on a bandolier.

And in the formation above I also touched on movement -- it is not going to be about guys just running at each other ... those guys would be known as a target rich environment ... for the horse arm. Run will-nilly at the other side in a battle you'll get rolled over -they knew that one hundreds of years before the period covered by REN.  The French tried doing it to the English in the 100 Years War (there are a couple of famous examples where it didn't work out so well for them: Crecy and Agincourt) ... so basically REN is a stage in military science evolution ... no earlier or later than its own period.

I'm not saying that REN is perfect (no game is going to be ... knowing it is part of the equation), and as I said - I didn't do the design on REN, so I am not qualified to speak to specific decisions made there.

[-72-]

After a month I just have to say ... this discussion fizzled pretty quickly.   Maybe I'll takr the opportunity to get a bit more in depth -since it seems like there will be ample time to dig into things.

The one thing with the Musket and Pike series, as it relates to the title, 'The Renaissance' is that from what I have read there can be some difficulty in differentiating what it the title, and what is the engine.  Usually it seems that they can be considered one in the same:  that is incorrect. 

It is also fair to mention that this is not really going to be a priority - and will take awhile to get some things together. I really do want to get Delbrueck's set of 4 -which covers a lot of territory. Maybe there is something to the contextual approach.

[agmoss99]

Well I think I've said all I want to. It's a far better engine than Napoleonics. It is realistic. Certainly there is room for improvement in some of the scenarios - I left feedback on Seminara which I recently completed, for instance.

Changing a few Optional Rules can make quite a difference too. Rout Limiting OFF for instance makes your army that more fragile. But generally I play with it on, simply because unit qualities are far lower than in Napoleonics, and routing is far more common.

The Renaissance covers quite a lot of time and territory. And it's a generic term. But I'd say the battles covered are comprehensive and representative of the variety of that period. Each scenario has quite different parameters to cover different weapon and unit types. Siege warfare v open combat.

[-72-]

What I think I hear you saying Andy is that it would be better to have a new thread.

Really my point was that there is a difference between the title, Renaissance and the engine for the Musket and Pike series. I took the OP's comments to be about a combat model, and there are more than a few ways it can be tackled within the engine.

The scenarios in Renaissance would be dictated as much by the points awarded in the OOB file per unit (that isn't the engine that set those values -but rather the scenario designer) -but anyway, if the point was maybe using a new topic for a discussion is better than using one where some guy shows up, makes 2 posts and pffft disappears -is a better way to go, then I will take that on board.