Friday 14 June 2013

Bad timing!

Last night I went down to the Durham club as we were due to carry out some more map moves in the SYW campaign. It turned out to be quite an interesting evening. In short, the Hannoverians retreated to Munster after their defeat at the hands of the French, who managed to shake off their 'demoralised' status. The Prussians advanced steadily into Austria, capturing the fortress of Brunn ( I think) before investing Vienna. The Austrians in the meantime had stripped their capital's garrison to the bare minimum to have a chance of holding out and combined it with another Austrian field army near Prague. The Prussians failed in their siege attempts, were hit by an epidemic of dysentery and were harassed by Austrian light troops so much that they were cut off out of supply, helped by the handy placement of an Austrian army across their lines of communications. Frederick was not a happy man, brooding over what to do next as a sat on his field potty. In the East the Russians were demonstrating outside of Konigsburg, trying to get the Prussians to face them in open battle. Maybe next month. Meanwhile, the Hannoverians failed to rally from their 'demoralised' status so the French attacked them. Too good an opportunity to miss we thought. Dave threw to see how many of the Hannoverians would be downgraded as a result being demoralised and threw a 9! That's 90% of the enemy army downgraded from line to garrison status. Minuses on shooting, morale, combat and hard to manoeuvre. The armies are quite even numerically. In terms of foot, there is a very slight advantage to the French, but the French have significantly more horse. The Hannoverians were nevertheless up for a fight, which will begin next week. They will be on the defensive  and as usual will probably cram all their troops into one half of the table, but if the French can't win this one decisively well...........and the bad timing? Yes, very bad as I am away on holiday for 2 weeks and will miss it all! I expect I shall have to keep in touch via text!

Finally, hello to my 60th follower Neal Croudace and to John the Red who made the trip to the Durham club this week and has been coopted into the French army for next week's game.

1 comment:

  1. Hi

    Enjoy your holiday mate!! looking bad timing for me as well as almost certainly going to have to spend Thursday evening in Runcorn. Good to meet up in person and lets home our Armee Francaise can do the business over those cowardly Hanoverians. Hope to be back the following thursday to find out if we did

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