Agincourt and the use of Stakes

[Mark G]

Just be careful with the game effect of that "victory".

If your longbows are powerful in the rules, and your stakes make them safe from melee threat, you might end up with a super army that renders all opponents too difficult to play .

And consider the scale of your battle.  Does it model deployment from camp, or does it start much closer to the point when the action starts?  If it is the later, you have taken something pre game and made it a tactical feature for one army, and turned a defensive tactic into an offensive game trick.

Just because we think something happened, doesn't always mean it helps your game to include it in the rules, as it is always the special rules that unbalance things.

[Erpingham]

Mark has a point.  I think this is the one occassion I can think of when stakes were moved.  It needed time and, possibly, certain ground conditions.

Mark's point about battle phases is also worth bearing in mind.  Stakes are more associated with pre-battle preparation than tactical manoeuver phase.

[nikgaukroger]

However, we also need to bear in mind that many (most) of the battle we fight are 1 offs without the strategic, political, and psychological factors that applied in history. For an example and army may well attack in a situation where we would think it daft in our one off battle, but other factors applied which effectively forced their hand.

Also fro Agincourt in particular we must recall that the English only had their stakes because they had gotten wind of the French plan to use a mounted attack on the archers as opposed to their then normal approach of fighting on foot (which needed no stakes to counter in the English experience). Cutting the stakes whilst on the march shows it was something of an emergency response, albeit one that worked well and then became a standard part of the English repertoire 

[T13A]

Hi

I do not see it as a 'victory'. And I'm not overly bothered about winning a game or losing, providing it's a good game. However, I do like rules that I play to reflect what happened in real life (as far as we know), hence my query in the first place.

In this case with the 'To the Strongest!' (TtS!) ruleset, it will be a 'difficult activation' to emplace or dig up the stakes for later use which should lead to some interesting tactical decisions for players as it no doubt was for the English commanders at Agincourt.

And with regard to Agincourt, I'm left wondering if it should be harder (in TtS! terms, a 'difficult' rather than a 'normal' activation) just to get the French nobles moving in the first place, but that is probably a new thread. 

Cheers Paul

[Erpingham]

And with regard to Agincourt, I'm left wondering if it should be harder (in TtS! terms, a 'difficult' rather than a 'normal' activation) just to get the French nobles moving in the first place, but that is probably a new thread. 

Cheers Paul

Always up for a new thread on Agincourt

In terms of getting the French army moving, I suspect it had no intention of doing so until the Duke of Brabant and his contingent arrived, for political reasons.  To have the English advance and start shooting surprised them and, given their chaotic command and control set up, they found it hard to respond quickly.  So either a difficult activation or a certain amount of uninterupted action for the English before the French respond (depending perhaps on when you start your refight).

[RichardC]

If you wanted to preserve the point of the stake could you not have a simple collar of wood (or metal) that would go over the point with a smaller inner diameter than the stake itself.  The mallet would then bang on the collar with the archers working in pairs (one holding stake and collar and the other the mallet).  I don't know of any references but it would be pretty simple to do.

Cheers

Richard

[Erpingham]

Later versions were indeed iron bound, though whether they used the collar idea, I don't know.  The Agincourt ones, being improvised on the march, would just be plain wood though.