Compromise

sempie Haziran 03, 2022

There have been a few articles recently about compromise and the decisions we, as wargamers, make to play our games. Whether that be on unit size, figures used and units depicted. It is something we do every time we play.
There was a moment yesterday as I was visiting "The Other Partizan" at Newark (for more photographs go to this blog http://thewargamingmegalomaniac.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/other-partizan.html ) where I had a "blimey I never thought about that" moment. It was while looking at the terrific Dutch wars game from Northstar (see above). Here they had shown a small section of a battlefield and it suddenly struck me that the road was raised well above the fields. Additionally the fields were criss-crossed with ditches. Until that moment I had not really thought about the field conditions for the War of the Spanish Succession, much of which was fought in Flanders.
Was the terrain like this?
Were roads raised above the fields as much as this?
Thankfully the answer was no. ( http://campcromwell.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/in-marlborough-country-ramillies.html is an excellent little blog with a post on this very subject).
But it still got me thinking about what compromises do we make on the tabletop for scenery & terrain. If a battle looked like that above how would we have played it? Would that raised roadway have been almost impossible for a pike and shot unit to clamber over? Are those ditches going to cause disorder and disruption?
Too often (and I'm as guilty as the next man) troops are allowed to cross hedges with only minimal reduction in movement and order.

This photograph from a preservation zone in Cornwall is of a rural lane that hasn't changed in over two hundred years apart from a bit of pruning presumably. Would you still only reduce movement by half a move or so to allow your battalion of pike and shot to cross it? What about this banked road (in the Cotswolds)?