Archers v. artillery

[Erpingham]

Agreed that Castillon fortification was probably a fortified camp rather than a field fortification.  We should note though that the guns which caused the English trouble were field pieces, not siege guns, and were not pointed at Castillon itself but defending the obvious line of approach. 

Fortified artillery camps were not uncommon.  For an English example, see Northampton.  The Burgundians had a fortified defence line at Murten/Morat - where the Swiss didn't bother shooting at it, they just rushed it.  The Italians have a fortified artillery position at Fornovo - like Northampton, rain affected play.  Hemminstedt revolves around a field fortification with artillery as does Cerignola.  There are doubtless more - the idea persisted into the 16th century.  The purpose though seems to have been to prevent the position being overrun rather than protecting the guns from return fire.

[aligern]

Babur may well have been defending against elephants, the arm which his opponents had a plenty and was most  dangerous to his largely cavalry army.  However, though his opponents had many cavalry, most of those were bow armed .
At Castillon the French presumably took into account the strengths of their enemy and thus designed their camp with fortification and guns to deal with a relieving force with substantial archery .
Anthony is quite right, for a period there are many exampkes of gun camps, whether fortified carts, or earth, stakes and wicker. Likely this is about attempting to integrate non mobile firearms into the array and protect these slow firing weapons from other missiles and from assaults.
Roy

[Patrick Waterson]

All of which suggests people liked to take care of their artillery and protect it - or rather its crews - from those nasty men with missiles.

Which brings us to: in a wargame, in which artillery is stuck in the middle of a field (table) and is shot at by longbowmen under a particular set of rules, how effective should that shooting be, and with what result?

This will very much depend upon whether we adopt the idea that battlefield artillery would be given at least a complete set of pavises or similar anti-missile screening or whether it would be left unprotected, gunpowder-era style.  In the first instance, missilery will be to all intents and purposes ineffectual; in the second, the first volley will slaughter the crews or at least disable enough of them to prevent the operation of the guns.

Personally, I would go for the missile screen approach, given the illogicality of leaving static artillery crews exposed and the historical tendency of opponents to rush batteries rather than shoot at them.  If this line of thinking is accepted, then artillery would be - at least from a frontal aspect - almost invulnerable to archery.  If it is assumed that no such screens would be used, then the effect of archery would be the same as against unshielded men wearing whatever armour the gun crews use.

To consider Mark's earlier thought:

Medieval guns were horribly unwieldy.  You would not chose to add the extra encumbrance of mantlets for a field battle.

Such guns would not expect to move in a field battle, and any extra encumbrance of mantlets or similar would be trivial compared to the weight of the gun itself.  Weight for weight, a crossbowman's pavise is a greater encumbrance than an added screen or mantlet for a gun.

[Erpingham]

I think Patrick has pulled out a couple of rules-worthy points there.  Tactics for attacking an artillery fortification do seem to be consistently that, if you were going to take it on, you didn't mess around trying to shoot it to death but close assaulted it.  We can assume a general ineffectiveness of shooting at emplaced artillery with some justification.  This doesn't entirely answer Andreas question as there seem few "guns v. archers" battles in the open.

Another was the immobility of guns and the need to emplace or at least pre-place guns.  This isn't an absolute - the Burgundians were known to put light guns in the van to cover river crossings, which is a bit more of an offensive use (though obviously in this case, the attacker is controlling the battle tempo so this doesn't need to have been that quick tactically).  And at Flodden, the English guns came into action off the march.

[Mark G]

Don't most rules give a protection bonus for defensive works and camps though?

Which sort of covers the examples above of guns with big chunks of wood protecting them, while leaving guns without as normal.

I don't count wagons as artillery.  Also not aware of any rules that do either, wagons are wagons and some may contain guns. 

Seems to me that guns are unprotected, but can be placed in fixed defenses just like infantry, and receive bonuses for defending them.

I'd like to hear about foot archery engaging guns in a battle.

[Patrick Waterson]

Yes, period, weight of artillery and whether it can be shifted around the battlefield on wheels will make for considerable variation in mobility and perhaps in the degree of protection actually employed.  At Crecy, the guns (if we allow their existence) seem to have been fairly light (just over 3-inch calibre) and mounted on wagons, which would have allowed mobility if they were not already part of a wagon laager and which would have permitted some sort of anti-missile screens to be mounted.  Villani does not claim that the Genoese managed to shoot any gunners, which might be indicative.

I am still feeling towards an answer for "guns v. archers" battles in the open, but at present can only conjecture that as artillerists were both scarce and potentially highly vulnerable to archery, anyone who did not want to lose them would presumably allocate some form of anti-missile protection, even if only borrowed pavises.  Naturally, this need not mean that everyone who employed artillery would be so solicitous about protection, and I suspect that the degree of protection provided (if any) would be in inverse proportion to the number and power of the guns.  Turkish guns, for example, were often chained together as a defence against assault, but I do not recall mention of them being pavised or mantleted in the field.

I'd like to hear about foot archery engaging guns in a battle.

This is precisely the problem: it appears they did not, or did so too rarely or inconspicuously for chroniclers to notice.  We are still looking for an instance of foot archers thus engaging guns.  If you can find any, it would be helpful.

[Andreas Johansson]

I don't count wagons as artillery.  Also not aware of any rules that do either, wagons are wagons and some may contain guns.

FWIW, DBMM classes the larger Hussite wagon-mounted guns as Artillery, not War-Wagons. Triumph! may be meant to do the same - one of the options for Hussite artillery is "houfnice" (Czech for "howitzer"), which is the the name DBMM uses for the heavy wagon-mounted guns, but I don't know if the Triumph! writers took the term from WRG or if the word necessarily denotes a wagon-mounted weapon in a Hussite context.

Back closer to my original question, absent much evidence what should happen if unprotected artillery is shot at by massed bowmen, it would seem a decent design-for-effect to make it unpleasant for the gunners, the better to encourage players to follow historical precedent and put their guns in field fortifications.

[Jim Webster]

I don't count wagons as artillery.  Also not aware of any rules that do either, wagons are wagons and some may contain guns.

FWIW, DBMM classes the larger Hussite wagon-mounted guns as Artillery, not War-Wagons. Triumph! may be meant to do the same - one of the options for Hussite artillery is "houfnice" (Czech for "howitzer"), which is the the name DBMM uses for the heavy wagon-mounted guns, but I don't know if the Triumph! writers took the term from WRG or if the word necessarily denotes a wagon-mounted weapon in a Hussite context.

Back closer to my original question, absent much evidence what should happen if unprotected artillery is shot at by massed bowmen, it would seem a decent design-for-effect to make it unpleasant for the gunners, the better to encourage players to follow historical precedent and put their guns in field fortifications.

To match history we might want to get to a situation where archers see artillery in field fortifications and don't waste their time shooting, but just charge in instead.
However we might run into problems here with rules because some don't let archers or missile troops charge into melee with enemy they can shoot (even if it's ineffective)

[Mark G]

In the absence of evidence, might it not rather be the case that a gun (almost certainly singular on a field) was not worth the volley of arrows?

This mirrors horse and musket.  You don't send formed infantry into range, they die before they get to make the volley.  Without multiple times and canister, the other side of that equation may be relevant.  The number of arrows needed to be certain if eliminating the gunners makes them a wasteful target when greater threats remain.
You send skirmishers once you know there is no cavalry threat.

It's different against a formed defensive line, the gun may even be a weaker point given the low rate of fire.

Also, consider the position if the guns themselves in a field battle, how many attacks centre on that point, and how many attacks would block the line of fire.

So perhaps if we try looking at deployments with guns in the open against forces with decent bow strength.  Where do they end up relative to both the enemy bow, and the main attack?

I'm sure some WoTR ospreys show cannon in the middle of a bill / knight advance.

Is that accurate and typical?


Is so, would it not suggest that archers have better things to do than waste all that arrow supply on a gun?

[Erpingham]

I don't know if the Triumph! writers took the term from WRG or if the word necessarily denotes a wagon-mounted weapon in a Hussite context.

Hussites seem to have used three types of guns - handguns, wagon mounted light guns and heavier-calibre houfnices, which were on a wheeled carriage.  They seem to have fought from within the wagonburg, so probably won't provide us with much artillery v. archer data.

[Patrick Waterson]

In the absence of evidence, might it not rather be the case that a gun (almost certainly singular on a field) was not worth the volley of arrows?

If it was worth mounting a charge to capture it (e.g. Formigny), then it would definitely be worth a volley to knock it out and save all the time and effort involved in that messy close-quarters business.

In any event, even if historical archers for whatever reason declined to loose their grey-goose shafts at guns, their wargaming equivalents have no such scruples and are unlikely to take 'not allowed' for an answer.

Back closer to my original question, absent much evidence what should happen if unprotected artillery is shot at by massed bowmen, it would seem a decent design-for-effect to make it unpleasant for the gunners, the better to encourage players to follow historical precedent and put their guns in field fortifications.

This I consider a good idea in order to avoid tabletop situations whereby artillery is placed in the open in the secure knowledge that it is invulnerable to opposing missiles.

[Mick Hession]

In the absence of evidence, might it not rather be the case that a gun (almost certainly singular on a field) was not worth the volley of arrows?

If it was worth mounting a charge to capture it (e.g. Formigny), then it would definitely be worth a volley to knock it out and save all the time and effort involved in that messy close-quarters business.

A volley of arrows is only useful against artillerists, not the guns themselves. I suspect once within bowshot the crews would abandon the guns and get out of range until danger had passed. That seems to be what happened at Formigny where the English captured the guns then tried to drag them off the field back to their own lines; if they'd left them in place the crews would have just reoccupied the position and resumed shooting.

Cheers
Mick   

[Duncan Head]

A volley of arrows is only useful against artillerists, not the guns themselves. I suspect once within bowshot the crews would abandon the guns and get out of range until danger had passed. That seems to be what happened at Formigny where the English captured the guns then tried to drag them off the field back to their own lines; if they'd left them in place the crews would have just reoccupied the position and resumed shooting.

Does this suggest that rules need a "suppressed" result for artillery being shot at?

[Mick Hession]

A volley of arrows is only useful against artillerists, not the guns themselves. I suspect once within bowshot the crews would abandon the guns and get out of range until danger had passed. That seems to be what happened at Formigny where the English captured the guns then tried to drag them off the field back to their own lines; if they'd left them in place the crews would have just reoccupied the position and resumed shooting.

Does this suggest that rules need a "suppressed" result for artillery being shot at?

Possibly, though I'm always wary of basing anything on a sample of 1  - in this case the guns were unfortified so perhaps it's something to consider for unemplaced artillery.   

Based entirely on Wikipedia I gather the Ming used artillery extensively in 1413/14 against the Mongols who were of course primarily archers, though mounted. I know Chinese sources don't "do" narrative like western sources but do we have any details of the interaction?

Cheers
Mick

[Andreas Johansson]

Possibly, though I'm always wary of basing anything on a sample of 1 

One wishes all wargame rules were based on samples that big 

A "suppressed" result is probably not going to happen in Triumph!, it's aiming at a DBA-like level of complexity and a combat outcome that only applies to a single fairly rare troop type doesn't fit well with that.