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War of 3 Kings rules questions

Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 9:21 am
by Gordon Hazelton
About to try out Battle of Clonard having finished reading the rules have some questions that we couldn't work out:-

1] Routs & Pursuits - Do these occur immediately upon taking the morale test or do you wait until the compulsory moves phase that occurs at the beginning of the first turn. If they occur immediately do you then rout/pursue again at the beginning of the turn

2] Casualty removal - rules say you remove a base upon reaching 50% casualties but then seem to contradict by saying that with 3 base infantry they is likely to occur at 2/3. Surely with 3 bases once reaching 50% you remove 1 base and 2 bases at 2/3.

3] Dismounted dragoons - 2 stand squadron. Does that have 1 stand of dismounted with 5 figures and 4 stand regiment - 2 stands of 5?

Re: War of 3 Kings rules questions

Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 3:50 pm
by flick40
I'll take a crack at these.

1] Routs & Pursuits - Do these occur immediately upon taking the morale test or do you wait until the compulsory moves phase that occurs at the beginning of the first turn. If they occur immediately do you then rout/pursue again at the beginning of the turn.

This one is more complicated. The idea to move compulsorily items at the start of a turn was to remove some tabletop complications that would arise from if they were moved right away. I'll defer to the author for clarification because the answer is yes and no.

2] Casualty removal - rules say you remove a base upon reaching 50% casualties but then seem to contradict by saying that with 3 base infantry they is likely to occur at 2/3. Surely with 3 bases once reaching 50% you remove 1 base and 2 bases at 2/3.

Personal preference really. I don't remove them at all unless it's Horse consolidating squadrons. Reason is you have a casualty sheet. The idea of the rule is to keep the troops, the visual appearance of a line, on the table as long as you can. In reality the officers would try to keep their lines as long as possible by pulling men from the back rank. Eventually you don't have the men to keep a regulation length. That's when you would notice a difference in width both on the table and on the battlefield.

3] Dismounted dragoons - 2 stand squadron. Does that have 1 stand of dismounted with 5 figures and 4 stand regiment - 2 stands of 5?

For every squadron you get a 1 stand of dismounted dragoons. You would need 3 squadrons of mounted dragoons to get 3 stands of dismounted dragoons. How you model it is up to you but for casualty purposes 1 figure is holding horses minus casualties already taken equals whats left. i.e. a full 3 sqdn dismounted = 15.

Hope that helped

Re: War of 3 Kings rules questions

Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 6:24 pm
by quindia
1) Something to keep in mind - 90% of morale tests come at the end of the previous turn. For example - taking casualties from artillery forces a morale test, but you don't actually check morale and apply the results until the end of the turn. That is also when you try to rally fleeing units - the Rally order allows you the opportunity to try, but you don't test until the end of the turn (as opposed to when the order marker is revealed). One exception of course is in the charge phase. If a failed charge results in a rout it is more convenient to carry out that move at that time. However, you don't move them in the charge phase and again in the compulsory phase at the top of the next turn.

2)Flick is correct - it's personal preference. I tend to not remove infantry stands at all. Technically when a unit is reduced to half strength, you would remove one stand...

3) 1 squadron of 2 mounted stands of dragoons = 1 stand of dragoons on foot plus a horse holder stand if you are so inclined..

Re: War of 3 Kings rules questions

Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2019 11:54 am
by TheDutchGuy
Apologies for restarting an old topic, but the original poster's question about Routs&Pursuits is similar to something that popped up in a game I played yesterday.

'1] Routs & Pursuits - Do these occur immediately upon taking the morale test or do you wait until the compulsory moves phase that occurs at the beginning of the first turn. If they occur immediately do you then rout/pursue again at the beginning of the turn."

The above question doesn't realy get answered. Could somebody please clarify this a bit more? My friend and I decided that if a morale test is failed at the end of combat and the result is a Rout or Retreat, the required movement happen immediately. Is this correct or should it happen in the 'Compulsory movement' phase of the following turn? We dediced during the game that the rout/retreat happened immediately, but noticed that with compulsory movement happening again at the start of the next turn, troops were routing at a very fast pace.

From the answers provided above I understand that 90% of morale tests come at the end of the turn. Am I correct in thinking that a morale test at the end of a bound of combat is an exception to this (like testing to charge)?

Re: War of 3 Kings rules questions

Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2019 9:14 pm
by Adam Hayes
We tend to do the morale checks for melee loss and any rout / retire moves straight away so that we don't for get them when the compulsory moves comes around. (Only puts things out of order when there are multiple close combats going on.) AFAIK the routers do not get a "second" rout in the compulsory move phase.