"TYW- What about the Tercios?" Topic

3 Posts

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Tango01	10 Dec 2025 1:14 p.m. PST
"One of my biggest struggle with completing this project has been the representation of the massed infantry Tercio of the Imperial forces versus the the layered Brigades used by the Swedes. The woodcuts for Breitenfeld (1831) show the Imperials in their Tercios with 4x sleeves of gunners each and the Swedes in their smaller brigades. The balance of the forces seems to be roughly 1 Tercio = 1 Swedish Brigade in overall strength, with the Swedes holding the advantage in firepower. Warlord's rules seem to address this issue by adding another pike block to the existing formation increasing its width by 33%. Changing to single unit basing makes this somewhat troublesome. My challenge is twofold: 1) Come up with a viable way to represent the formation on the table and 2) Find a way to represent the difference meaningfully within the rules…" Dartfrog 6mm Blog link Armand
BillyNM	10 Dec 2025 10:50 p.m. PST
The free online rule set Brevis Tercios by Liber Militum includes some description on how to represent different formations, albeit the army lists are only in the full rule set which you have to buy. There's also a lot of discussion on formations and representing them (at a smaller scale) on Elendril's blog at: elenderilsblog.blogspot.com IIRC most sources seem to agree that the Spanish were no longer using the ‘classic' Tercios formation during the Thirty Years War. Good luck.
DFLange	11 Dec 2025 10:00 a.m. PST
Good information on the older style Tercio vs. the new style Tercio and how to depict them in older rule set Field of Glory Renaissance. Generally they were evolving closer to the Pike and Shot formation found later in the TYW.