Is this game supposed to be realistic ?

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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.