If the Lard spares us

Is it right to say I'm a fan of the Great war? Probably not. I can't really see me "cheering on" any war in any form which is largely what I consider being a fan of something involves. But I do have a definite interest in it. Quite aside from the geopolitics, which are also interesting (god, I must be old to have typed that), the military advances are huge. Arguably bigger than it's sequel, WW2. The armies of 1914 are almost a world away from those of 1918 and the horrific baptism of fire to get those changes will always be one worth learning about.

As a brief aside here I'd just like to say that I absolutely love Blackadder but if you watch it as a documentary you're an idiot. Queen Elizabeth was not an adult child, Wellington did not maintain discipline purely by shouting and British generals did not mindlessly feed a generation into a machine gun mincing machine. They arguably should have learned lessons faster and taken into account serious pertinent information that was available to them from (then) recent wars but these are points for a more serious and academic bit of writing than my wargames based ramblings.

That being said, Oscar Wilde may actually have been a convicted whoopsie even after writing his pamphlet "Why I like to do it with girls", I haven't looked into it.

Now, the meat of this post is about gaming bigger scale battles than I have previously, with my "previously" entirely being platoon size punch ups across the trenches in 1916 and through the "Kaiserschlacht" of 1918. My birthday "party" during lockdown was umpiring a double blind video-called game of the summer offensive with two friends! That was a really fun game using "Through the mud and the blood" which only slightly derailed when one of the players went out. Then the second one got bored waiting and so went out as well. I can't think why lockdown wasn't more effective.

To expand my Great war gaming I've been fiddling about with several rulesets as well as learning about more theatres and armies involved. One of these was, to my mind, the absolute curveball of "If the Lord spares us" for brigade size games in the middle East. I mean, who wants to game WW1 in the middle East? Well after a few minutes looking into it, me actually. If nothing else gripped you about it there is still Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab revolt to get stuck into. 

And plenty of other parts had gripped me. 

This was all before more properly reading the TFL "Play the game" Great war collection and seeing the potential for games on the western front with expanded artillery rules and in East Africa, somewhere I'd never even given a second thought to. The first thought was about Lake Tanganyika which I had played some games around with a naval wargamer several years prior. 

All this without even mentioning Gallipoli.

My most notable issue with the game was, and is, that I don't have a middle east collection. I do intend to remedy that eventually but for now my Great war painting is on the edge of starting the Russian front properly having just done a few bases of Russian cavalry.

Before I reached this stage of investigation, around early 2018, Great escape games released "1914", a game of brigade size actions on the western front set in the early months of the war. Frankly this is selling the game short as everything in the rules will make it plausible to play any year of the war and probably on every front with only a few small additions here and there. Naturally with a cry of "tally bally ho!" I headed off to the first wargames show I could and picked up a copy of the rules! I didn't get the models as they were to my mind a deeply suspicious 12mm range and so I did like any right minded gentleman would do and expanded on my existing 10mm collection but shhhh! Don't tell Great escape games. Their models are actually very nice and I wouldn't want to discourage them.

So armed with many bases of completed 1914 British and Germans (mounted on the recommended 50x25mm base) I started looking at the necessary adaptations to play ITLSU set in the first months of the war. As it turns out, the similarities appear to be more than the differences. For example Flanders is probably lacking a few occasions of "loose sand" compared to the area surrounding Kut but mechanically I reckon loose sand and marshland would probably have similar effects on battalions of soldiers trying to march through them.

So what else will I need to do? Obviously sort out if the bases can be compatible of course!

I started looking at the ground scale compared to the base sizes and what that represents. Now, I am not a mathematical sort but not completely stupid either, however this particular bit of back and forth between inches, feet, yards and meters had me feeling like Rimmer revising for the astro-navigation exam.

At the final tally I've gathered that in ITLSU one inch is 62.5 yards while in 1914 one inch is 25 meters (which a quick Google conversion search tells me is just over 27 yards) so ITLSU covers an area very roughly twice the size of a 1914 game in the same space.

After this gentle introduction I really started to twist myself in mental knots.

Keep in mind now that I'm using the British as a universal "standard" battalion size across several nations, years and theatres to work this out and in truth all of it is variable.

According to ITLSU a battalion would attack on a front approximately 500yds wide so if each base is about 1 inch wide (which mine are being 25x25) then I calculate 8 bases is the "average". Handily this is the equivalent of 4 of my 1914 bases which in that game is also a full size battalion. Unhandily an ITLSU full size battalion is 16 bases. I'm going to assume that this is 2 companies advancing ahead of a further 2 companies but it does mean that a 1914 battalion is covering half the ground in a game that already represents half the same area.

It's around this stage I decided I'm probably overthinking things.

Part of my issue with using the same bases in both games is that in ITLSU a company is 4 bases with 2 "hits" each and can be moved around individually whereas my 1914 bases are essentially fused together. In our one test game the biggest problem players were having was keeping on top of when a "base" had lost "half a base" as most of our bases were actually two bases together even though I had made a few "single" bases to mix in and facilitate easy "base casualty" removal which honestly may have only additionally complicated matters.

I don't see what the issue was.

...... 

base.

As I just mentioned we have had a practice ITLSU game where we attempted the rules "RAW" (that's "Rules As Written" for the uninitiated) and while it went ok there were a few questions that arose and a couple of issues that became apparent. The main one being that a battalion of 4 companies was taking up an awful lot of table space. They also seemed remarkably fast.

I have made a post on the Lardies forum to try and address my rules queries but when it comes to fixing my cross-game miniatures usage problems that's one I'm unlikely to find help with. Seeing as my calculations up to this point are giving me a headache and the word "base" has lost all meaning, at least in part from the amount of rewrites this has required, I'm going with these house rules;

As a battalion is 4 companies I'm going to say one 1914 base is a company. It won't have the same maneuvering flexibility as the suggested basing and the deep target bonus may require some thought but this should be the easiest fix. It will also have 8 hits, losing firepower as appropriate for losses. Each company will potentially last longer in a battered state but also won't have a shrinking footprint so should level out.

This has the useful visual shorthand where each of my bases has 4 men on it so each model represents 2 hits. Cavalry companies often have 6 hits which ties into my 1914 cavalry having 3 models per base.

I am also clinging religiously to the line in the rules that says "like all TFL games base sizes aren't critical".

As for the speed issue and considering that I want the game to FEEL like I'm commanding large forces that seems like a simple one - swap inches for centimetres.

If a game has a timed element to it then the altered speeds will need taking into account but otherwise I think this will be a good improvement for my needs.

What I can say with absolute certainty is that when I do get to sorting out some middle Eastern ITLSU armies I'm just going to stick with the suggested base sizes!

Being a fairly irregular blogger I may well return to this post at a later date to chart how this project goes if only to confine my now excessive uses of the word "base" to one place.

Until then, "keep watching the skis"!