"Understandung the "Brigade rule" in the "Tercio" rule set" Topic

The text of the rules are free available, so I hope it is ok if I quote them here:
"Units with the Brigade rule belonging to the
same regiment will be able to act
simultaneously. …When a Unit has to act you can designate
the units affected by this joint order and
activate all of them sequentially, one by one."
My understanding of that rule:
Normally I activate one unit, then my opponent activates one of his. With the brigade rule this procedere is altered: as soon as the protestant player can activate a unit, he might activate up to 6 units (four battalions and two shot companies attached). After that the catholic player tries to activate a unit. Is that right?
My problem with that break of protocol is that my opponent can pour out more lead anyway and that his concentrated and orchestrated shooting is enough to break small units (my shot companies). My bigger squadrons (catholic infantry formation) are very likely to suffer a damage, so they have to test to follow any order.
I could improve the shooting ability of my infantry to bring them up to par ( I donīt want to), but I cannot match his ability to harm my army before I can retaliate. That harm will keep some units even from shooting, cause I will not be able to activate them at all.
And the worst of it: it takes away the fun part of the rules, cause it is obvious what my opponent will do. The need to guess what the opponent will do before you lay down your orders is the exciting part of the game, but right now my opponent doesnīt even bother to keep his order secret.
Are we doing it right or has covid drained my brains completly?

That's how it works. I would suggest halving the size of his brigades. That would allow him to lay out some fire power and conceivably put a whomping on you with some good die rolls, yet still give you a chance to weather an attack and launch your own melee whomping.

The rules state that brigades are ideally four units so six (4+2) sounds like taking the Michael. The Tercio rules specify what a brigade consists of in the 'army lists' and I've seen nothing that big, 3+1 being the biggest. By going beyond what the rules are designed for it is not surprising that they become unbalanced.
In the full rule set all units in a 'brigade' have to belong to the same regiment and that has to be commanded by another subordinate general who costs points.
Also, each unit still has to activate separately not just once for the brigade, you may be doing that already but it wasn't clear.
These are a really fun set of rules with clean, elegant, and often novel mechanics – if your opponent wants to use brigades he ought to limit himself to the brigade structures in the rules and not make his own up.

The basic problem is that he chose reformed battalions and I want to game the bohemian revolt. As stated in the rules, his formations were predominant in the mid of the XVIIth century, my large squadrons (still 3/2) are rather from the beginning of the TYW.
In FoW terms it was an Early War/ Late War match up.

We both added shot companies to our regiments, as the diagramm for the foot regiment allows it as option, but that is not the point (so far we played with 3 battalions+2 shot comps regiments). Even with 3+1 it still 8 shots from the move, 15 /16 shots stationary.

I do agree that the rule mechanics are really nice and make for highly interesting games. I guess we will house rule that the brigade rules are the swedish form of the coordinator trait, maybe only possible for veteran units.

Your opponent is still using over-large brigades so trimming it down to what the rules allow will help a bit. His brigades can also only act together if all covered by a single order card and thus must all activate when the order is played (each unit testing for activation). You can't put the same order card by each unit and decide which to activate together, it's all or none decided when order cards are placed. So if you get a sacrificial unit in the way he will have expend all brigade's units against that.

The exception is if you can force one of his units to react then it immediately breaks up the 'brigade' as you place the same order card by all the units in the brigade that the reacting unit belonged to.

Finally, as he will activate a lot of units at a time if he's using brigades it should mean that he will use up all his orders before you, leaving you with several consecutive order activations at the end of the turn so perhaps you could seek to exploit that?

Hope this has helped.

Be great to see some photos of your games or even better an AAR.

@BillyNM: I actually prefer to keep guessing what my opponent plans, so if he has to declare what units will follow the brigade order I have more information than I want. I can use the eagle-eyed trait to reveal his intention, that is enough for me.
Would be funny to change a brigade order with "Schemer"…

@dogtail, clearly you have the full rule-set which as you say does help counter the 'Brigade' advantage. I must admit the opportunity for the use of 'Schemer' against a brigade order had not occurred to me – I like it!

I understand that the way I asked my question could lead to the conclusion that I am highly critical of the rules or that I think they are flawed. But it is the opposite: in my opinion the order system is top notch.

Written orders that work, I am baffled.

The "game engine" is in my opinion so flexible that I thought about gaming napoleonics with it. A full regiment with two shot companies looks like a french brigade to me. I even bought a book in spanish about tercios. Although I do not speak that language.

I do believe that creating confusion and deceiving is the path to glory. And I know that my opponent will fool me time and time again. And I love it.

My gaming buddy and me are thrilled. And we havenīt started with commanders yet. I guess that will be even more fun.

cheers!

Likewise a big fan, I've just been emailing a friend about running a campaign using Tercios for the battles.