"H.Y.W Battle strategy Question" Topic

In the HYW battle i simulate i usually fight with the English..something very convenient because the longbow fire power and defensive stance make them very difficult to beat and also some how boring to fight with..Recently i tried to fight against them with a typical French army..knights..cavalry etc and i was annihilated!
But it was very interesting and fun for me to fight with the French..any tips on how i can go about against the English?
Regards
Nicholas

Prevent them from occupying strong positions and from having time to deploy carefully. Keep them on the move until they are exhausted, pick off their supply train to reduce their ammunition supply or just wait until you can force battle on them on a windy and rainy day.
Alternatively, focus your attention on the innumerable small actions that were the 'norm' of medieval campaigning; French men-at-arms are just as capable as English ones.

What "ugly" said: Bertrand du Guesclin was the first French commander to refuse battle under the preferred English circumstances.

French MAA are even more capable in mounted combat than English MAA, being more accustomed to it routinely. So small actions are going to favor the French, which was du Guesclin's method. Also, there is little or no difference in French archers and English Yeomen in "skirmish mode". The genius of the English system was training of thousands in massed volley combat. Archer for archer in aimed shooting would greatly reduce the differences between them.

There is a simple rule of thumb for engaging English armies and that is "on the move". If the English have time to dig in (literally, with their stakes in line), then don't attack them frontally, seek the flanks.

But, realistically, if a French army comes up frontally with an English one "dug in" defensively, the provocation on the French MAA might be intolerable and they will have to make a morale test to NOT attack/charge. du Guesclin made sure that his troops were not massed into a single army facing an English army. He kept his troops broken up in small, discrete forces with orders to harass and ambush and hit and run. That way, the defeat of some of them never resulted in a general defeat, while the English suffered the attrition of constant harassment. It worked very well to stymie the English efforts to acquire territory or conduct sieges.

Also, the French became quite as adept at chevauchées as the English. Forces encountering each other in this manner would by nature be on the move, thus neutralizing the "English system" of awaiting attack with masses of archers in a defensive position….

thank you both so much…any rules you would recommend that would suit best this period? Also i use both 15mm and 25-28mm..you think the size of the miniature will use different rules?
i am an Impetus and Tactica Medieval fun..

Depends on what you wnat I suppose…if you want a game with model men-at-arms and archers/spearmen, there's any number of options, including Impetus (I've never seen Tactica, so I've no opinion there). If you want something firmly rooted in history you may be as well to just make up your own rules. I've yet find a half-way decent set of historical rules for England, France and Scotland in the 14th Century. You might be as well to start with something like DBA and make your own adjustments, after all you only really have men-at-arms, spearmen and archers (longbows and crossbows) to consider for big battles. For a great many small battles you only really have men-at-arms.
You might do well to look at English-Scottish conflict in 1332-6 (ish) for ideas; that was the 'proving ground' for the practices of the early stages of the HYC. Check out Scalacronica (which I think you can get on the web); it's that rare beast, a chronicle with lots of military material which was written by Sir Thomas Grey; a career soldier of the day.

"I've yet find a half-way decent set of historical rules for England, France and Scotland in the 14th Century."

I would be interested to hear what you feel are the shortcomings of the commonly used rule sets to represent warfare in this period.

I never concerned myself over the size of miniatures preferred. Whatever fits on the base works fine….

I assume you want battle winning (not war winning strategies).

Look at Fromingy where the French fixed the English to the front and then hit them on the flank.

DBA3.0 does a decent job for the HYW (though like most systems English yeoman are a bit underpowered – use Shooters from HOTT).

Using DBA you can try and wrong foot the English by pitting mounted knights aganist dismounted MAA (see Verniuel for an historical example) while trying to use pavisers & dismounted MAA aganist archers. Try to use short flank hooks (the French tried this at Agincourt but got "funneled" by the woods – might well have worked otherwise).

The dynamic differences between the armies should make for some great games and plenty of different tactical ideas from both sides.

TomT

The French found that advancing on foot with pavises would get them up to the English archers. of course you have to have pavises with you!

The French had a problem that wargamers do not have. They kept trying to get to the men at arms and did. not concentrate on the English archers. If you can get to the archers with the pavises to the front you can kill off the archers and outflank the English knights.
The afrench could also get through the arrow storm by using armoured horses. At Agincourt they failed, but only because of tye stakes and hot allocating sufficient knights to the task, but the idea was a good one .

Verneuil and Formigny have been mentioned albeit simplistically. I'd add that the former was lost not because of any deficiency in the Italo-French cavalry charge, but because of a failure of the cavalry to follow into the English rear. Possibly this was because once the cavalry got through the English archers (without routing or destroying them as a fighting force!? – those were some dodging archers alright), they saw the baggage train in the rear, but more significantly, they saw a sizeable defensive baggage guard, or reserve. These happened to be mostly light troops and the least effective in the English army, but the Italo-French cavalry could not know that. So rather than attempt to turn on the rear of the English archers and MAA that they had just charged through, they moved on to deal with the English reserve. Having dispersed these, an apparent failure to resist the temptation to loot the baggage train occurred. But the time they had completed their plundering, the English army had routed off the dismounted French MAA of the main battle line and surrounded the Scots and were intent on killing as many of them as possible. There were evidently enough English troops to face the Italo-French cavalry, who "prudently" rode around the flank of the battle and took themselves away.

Formigny was only finally lost by the English because further French forces arrived on their flanks and rear. Prior to this event, the English yeomen had issued from their stake line and attacked the French artillery and were battling to drag them away to the English lines. How that would have worked out, without more French arriving, is impossible to say. I have played out this battle, and the forces have enough parity (before the other French arrive), to result in a stalemate….

Codsticker…Army lists are generally, if not universally, unconvincing, tending to be based on a rather selective approach to contemporary evidence, but fortunately that's about the easiest thing to overcome. The chief problem I suppose is trying to cover way too much of a time period in one set of rules, so armies of -say – 1290 – have the same virtues and weaknesses of armies from the same country a hundred or two hundred years later – coupled with a design envelope to ensure that a re-run of a particular battle with have the same result without necessarily having too much grasp of the nature (or even size) of the forces. There is also a tendency to assume – despite the evidence- that small armies would have the same proportions as large armies from the same countries. I once saw a game based on Culblean – in order to make it 'work' the game managers had reduced the shooting effect of archers to a very low degree rather than take note of the fact that there is no evidence for an archery element at all.
Additionally there are structures which make 'knights' (men-at-arms) reckless and likely to charge off toward the enemy regardless of circumstances or orders…there are examples to be had, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Divisions of troop-types are n't uncommon either. I've seen more than one game with bodies of 'knights' and of hobilars charging about as separate mounted units, ignoring the role of the hobilar a s mounted infantryman rather than a cavalryman.
In a specifically Scottish context you can find examples of immobile circular schiltroms as being the 'normal' – or even the only – form of deployment for Scottish spears/pikes, despite there being only one example of a battle fought in that style…Falkirk, which is probably why it did n't happen again. Likewise Scottish men-at-arms being less heavily armoured and more lightly mounted than their English counterparts; the evidence for the latter being one word from one line of a poem written 50/60 years after the event and he evidence for the former being one line form the same poem – but the line in question refers to the infantry, no the army as a whole and is extremely suspect as being no more than Scottish propaganda….and not to mention the famous Victorian invention of the Scottish medieval short bow.
Archery…devastating in the right circumstances; in the wrong circumstances, not so much…in fact, if a longbow dominated army could n't find the right circumstances it just avoided battle entirely. In order to make Crecy or Agincourt 'winnable' rule designers tend to over-egg the pudding somewhat. And then there's the thing that rule-writers and figure designers love, but historians can't really identify as a significant element; the great body of unarmed/unarmoured men trailing around with medieval armies to be thrown into action as cannon (arrow) fodder.
At the moment we use an adjusted version of DBA (ish) and get reasonable results, but I'd be keen to find something better. We're going to have a shot at Hail Caesar – we rejected it initially, but I think we may not have fully understood the system.

i can see many members here have a vast knowledge on Hundred years war history.
So from your experience which rules would depict more accurate and are historically more accurate for this period?
I am no asking about the more fun rules but the ones people who have experience in war gaming for this time would prefer for Historical accuracy.

ps. can you also recommend a good book on the period.I have Read the ''Crecy war''

I use the rules my friends and I made up years ago. link

It is mechanically accurate, while obviously lacking in period-specific details.

(I disagree with the pov that rules must apply specifically to a subject in order to produce accurate results on the table top. That is true in some limited instances but is not true when comparing various weapons or tactical systems: bows of a given weight and construction, arrow types, armor material and coverage, training and drill, all can be identified from original sources and plugged into "the game". Then, anachronistic comparisons/confrontations take on a whole new depth of interest!)

Desmond Seward's book The Hundred Years War is a good overview. link

Uglyfatbloke…. all very interesting observations. To a degree it sounds like a significant part of the problems is a combination of 'army list ' restrictions/requirements and special rules. Wouldn't it be a simple matter of trimming away the bits you don't like from a game system you do like? Hail Ceasar seems like the kind of system you could easily do that with.

Codsticker – we do intend to have another look at hail Caesar. At the moment we're mostly pre-occupied with developing a system for WW2 company-level actions…typically a company in attack and a platoon or platoon+ in defence. Medieval battles of the WofI and HYW may well be our next rules project.
There's nothing wrong with whatever rule set people enjoy – having fun is the primary objective after all – we're just pathetic history geeks here, and we like tables with a lot of toys on the table- hence the extremely brutal fast-play rules in the ACW gamer emag recently.

any tips on how i can go about against the English?

Force the English to attack a fortified artillery encampment. That's what the French did at Castillon in 1453.

The English were roundly defeated and the battle marked the end of the HYW.

Recently i got a copy from ''the Flower of Chivalry'' rule book.
Any comments on the rules?worth giving them a go?

Here I the additional rules for DBA 3.0 I used to recreate Verneuil but they are useful for most of the HYW:

1. By this date in the Hundred Years War English archers had acquired both armor and close fighting skills making them, in historian Matthew Strickland's words, "universal soldiers". To reflect this ability give all English archers a CF of +3 against Foot (like Shooters in Hordes of the Things).

2. Similarly crossbowmen had steady increased in both armor and the power of their weapons. While gaining in power the crossbows now had to be drawn by mechanical devices and cranks, further slowing their effective rate of shooting. To reflect these changes, troops identified as "Heavy Crossbows" have a CF of +3 against t Foot but shoot only in their own bound.

3. Vernieul saw the first large scale use of metal horse barding to counter the effect of missile weapons though smaller scale use of barding had been tried at Poitiers and Agincourt. To reflect the effect of barding, Mounted Elements identified as "barded" count as a Foot target against Distance Shooting (but not in Close Combat).

A few additional notes re Verneuil. Accounts of the battle have become a bit confused by Michael Jones colorful re-telling. He chooses to ignore Wavrin's eyewitness account re the fate of the Italien charge "[T]wo thousand English archers, who as was said had repulsed the French cavalry…when they saw their enemies flee, gathered strength, and were a great cause of the victory;"

Though some of the French/Italiens may have raided the camp (it was surrounded by horses making this difficult) most were driven off the archer reserve which then intervene to swing the battle to the English.

Verneuil is an example of a battle won by the English on a flat plain with no help from terrain and chosen by their French opponent. So we should not overestimate the terrian issue for the English. Likewise Crecy and Poitiers were won before the use of stakes so this too should not be overestimated. Massed archery, however, should not be underestimated. Nor did the French neglect attacking the archers as is often claimed. Quite the contrary they tried repeatdly to overcome massed ranged shooting but to no avail. They did better by concentrating on the men-at-arms who were at least less numerous. (This may account for the initailly success of the Lombard charge at Verneuil as it seemed to be aimed at the English men-at-arms in the center rather than repeat the failed charges of Poiters and Agincourt aimed at the archers.)

TomT

Verneuil: My first reading of the battle was emphatic that the Franco-Lombard cavalry rode THROUGH the archers and then continued on to attack the English baggage guard. Seemed clear enough. Then, subsequent readings, such as your overview, give me more and more versions, all citing "original sources" or even "eyewitness" by Waurin, to come up with variations amundo. It is most annoying, predictable and distressing. Some things never change. And retelling battles differently is one of those things which never change….