Bavarians Coming My Way!

While painting did not get much press in March as gaming and other topics came to the fore, the painting desk was not idle.  Actually, a number of painted figures are queueing up at the light box for their turn in front of the camera.

First out of the box sees a return to the fledgling FPW project.  At year-end, enough Prussians were painted to field a Prussian Infantry Division.  Well, almost.  The division lacked its cavalry complement and leaders.  Prussian cavalry and generals were the first purchases of 2025.  Hopefully, they will work into the painting queue soon.

Until then, the first of several planned Bavarian infantry regiments marches out from the painting desk.  When the Prussians were purchased years ago, Bavarians and other Prussian allies were really an afterthought.  Given that, only enough Bavarians were purchased to field one, 48-figure infantry regiment.  Artillery made it into that order, though.  More Bavarians will be needed, for sure.

Off the painting desk today is the Bavarian 1st Infantry Regiment.  These three, 16-figure battalions are all from Lancashire Games.  Great looking figures and a pleasure to paint.  I look forward to painting more of these fine figures.

What else is on the painting desk?  Perhaps it may be no surprise with the recent work and attention to WotR but two bodies of 28mm Perry Foot Knights are seeing work.  First, though, two units of Biblical foot are finishing up.  Still awaiting their turn at the photo booth are a number of SYW/WAS 15mm regiments of cavalry.

Give 'em a Bloody Nose!

Peter (Grid based wargaming) and I joined up on Wednesday (Thursday for Peter in New Zealand) to exercise the latest iteration of my WotR rules.  The rules saw a few changes after my first game trial and post-game discussion with Richard (My Wargaming Habit) the week before (see Trial By Fire...).

Changes for this trial run included:

• Disorder state dropped
• Response Test Results modified to reflect disappearance of Disorder
• Defend and Reserve orders given more distinction for Response Tests
• Support modifier decreased from +2D6 to +1D6. 

The battle was laid out as before with three Battles/Wards in each army facing off opposite one another.  Peter commanded the Yorkist Army (red dice) while I commanded the Lancastrian Army (blue dice).  As we rolled for leader attributes, Peter's Center Battle came up as "Timid".  We would see that Sir Timothy the Timid was anything but!

Battle Array

Lancastrian Army

Yorkist Army

Battle Recap

Having not played the rules, Peter ordered all of his wards onto the defense at start.  The Lancastrians ordered their three wards onto a mix of orders with rightmost ward on Maneuver and the other two wards on Engage.  The Lancastrians were planning to take the fight to the enemy!

Lancastrians step off to close the distance.

The Lancastrian Left was first to come under fire as it advanced toward the enemy.  Under a hail of arrows from the defending longbowmen, Lancastrian archers fell back behind their block of melee troops.  As the Lancastrian MAA supported by billmen closed upon the Yorkist longbowmen, these archers decided that standing in the face of such might was a reasonable option.  They were wrong!  The Lancastrians MAA hit the archers with great force.  Having suffered moderate losses, the archers fell back behind the cover of their own melee troops.  The Lancastrians came on and smashed into the awaiting Yorkist melee line.  The Yorkists were driven back onto the archers but losses were light.  Exhausted, the Lancastrians did not press their advantage. 

Lancastrians attack!

Buoyed by the success to their left, the center Lancastrian ward advances toward the enemy to their front.  Again, Yorkist longbowmen drive off Lancastrian archers before falling back, themselves, through their own lines as the Lancastrian melee block threatens.

Under orders to engage the enemy, the Lancastrians pile into the awaiting Yorkists.  In the clash, the two melee lines hack and slash in a prolonged battle as the two combatants wear each other down.  Finally, the Lancastrian will to fight breaks and the Lancastrians retreat toward the rear having suffered mightily. 

Central Lancastrian ward goes in!

Fighting is hot and heavy...

until the Lancastrians have had enough!

Seeing the center Lancastrian ward give way, the leftmost Lancastrian ward redoubles its efforts against its opponent.  The Lancastrian melee line goes in again.  Again, the Yorkists are driven back behind their covering archers and cling to the table edge.  Again, the Lancastrians fail to follow up and finish them off!  Each army has seen one success and one setback.  One pair of unengaged Battles to go.   

Situation mid-battle.

But wait!  The fighting is not over in the center.  Sir Timothy the Timid in the Yorkist Center successfully changes his orders to Engage and attacks!  Shooting a volley of arrows to soften the enemy, the Yorkists advance upon the enemy archers.  The Lancastrian archers are driven back as the Yorkist melee line comes on.  With the Lancastrian archers moving to the rear, the already wavering melee line is now exposed.  The Yorkists smash into this body of men and destroy the MAA in the front ranks.  The surviving billmen retire back behind the relative safety of their archers.  There is no relative safety on this battlefield.  The Yorkist melee line continues forward.  Already out of sorts from their earlier efforts, the Lancastrian archers fail to react and are scattered by the crush of the enemy.  The Lancastrian Center has broken! 

Yorkists attack again!

Driving the enemy back...

and destroying Lancastrian MAA! 

Carnage is not over yet.

Back on the Yorkist Right, the situation looks dire.  With its melee line just clinging on and its archers scattered, the Yorkists prepare for the attack they know is coming.  They do not wait long.  The Lancastrian melee line comes on and hits the Yorkists.  In the chaos of battle, the wavering Yorkists actually manage to repulse their attackers!  Huzzah!  

Yorkists in a tight place!

With its center gone and its left repulsed, the Lancastrian Right sets into motion.  Sensing victory is close, Peter quickly changes the Yorkist Left's order to Engage and marches forward.  In a hail of arrows, Yorkist archers drive off their enemy counterpart.  As the Lancastrian archers retire, the Lancastrian melee line is uncovered.  The Yorkists crash into the enemy and the enemy turns to run.  This retreat uncovers the Lancastrian archers.  The Yorkists hit the unsuspecting archers and they break for the rear!  Disaster!  Not only are the archers in flight but the retreating Lancastrian MAA are caught from behind and cut down.  The Lancastrian Army has broken!    

Yorkist Left on the attack!

Lancastrian MAA prepare to stand...

but they cannot and the archers are scattered.

Lancastrian Right is broken and on the run.

With the collapse of the Lancastrian Right and the Lancastrian Center gone as well, this battle is over.  Fighting lasted about two hours.

Victory to Peter and his Yorkist Army!  Well done, Sir!  Sir Timothy the Timid, with his heroics in the center, may need to lobby for a new nickname! 

Now, one might think that the title of this post refers to the Lancastrian Army getting a bloody nose from this horrific defeat.  No!  Peter has been fighting off a cold.  During play, Peter had to step away for a few minutes to address a bloody nose.  While my Lancastrian Army was utterly defeated, it was I who gave Peter a bloody nose!  Ha!

Great game and great fun.  Thank you, Peter, for a very enjoyable game.  Until we meet again.

Games of a Feather...

...Group Together.

When WSS' Great Wargaming Survey respondents are asked to list their Top 3 wargaming periods (see Wargaming Period Preference), the counts of wargaming periods from most to least popular are as shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1

The previous analysis examined a selection of demographic attributes shown to hold some influence on wargamer's choice in periods.  Relying on aggregated counts only, descriptive statistics were utilized in making inferences on general tendencies.  In today's analysis, we drop the path to descriptive statistics and examine period preference using predictive analytics through the lens of cluster analysis.

What is cluster analysis?  Simply, cluster analysis constructs a grouping of objects (period preference) so that objects in the same group (cluster) are more similar to each other than to those in other groups.

Cluster analysis is a statistical technique used to identify and classify homogeneous groups of similar objects or data points into clusters based upon their characteristics or attributes.   Such objects within the same cluster are more similar to each other than to those data points in nearby clusters.   Cluster analysis is an unsupervised machine learning technique.   "Unsupervised" reflects that analysis results do not rely on any predefined labels or categories.  Instead, machine learning techniques "discover" patterns and structures present within the data itself.  Cluster analysis can provide a powerful exploratory data analysis tool capable of revealing hidden structures and patterns even within complex datasets.

What are some questions that cluster analysis may answer?  For me, a few questions to consider are:

• Using only gaming period choice, do distinctions between historical and non-historical gamers emerge?
• Do some game periods tend to cluster together? Which ones?
• If distinct groups emerge from clustering, are these distinct groups intuitive?

The first step in cluster analysis (after wrangling the data into shape for analysis) is figuring out an optimal number of clusters.  With 5,995 respondents having up to three period choices each, these resulting responses are aggregated and classified using cluster analysis.  Only respondent choices are utilized in building this model.  Figure 2 illustrates the initial dendrogram showing how each of the twenty wargaming periods group.

Figure 2

What does Figure 2 suggest?  The answer depends upon the number of clusters chosen but clear clustering emerges.  What can we infer from this initial dendrogram?  Without examining the dendrogram more closely, it may be difficult to identify any meaningful inferences at a glance.  This is where identifying the number of clusters comes into the analysis.

Starting from the right-hand side of the chart and drawing a vertical line down through the first two branches of the dendrogram tree identifies two clusters of gaming periods (see Figure 3).  This is the two-cluster solution.  The two, distinct clusters are highlighted.  What does this first and primary division suggest?

Figure 3

The two-cluster solution clearly and cleaning bifurcates the twenty wargaming periods into two, distinct groups.  The two groups identified, with no ambiguity, cleave the Historical periods from Non-Historical periods.  Well, perhaps a bit of ambiguity.  Pulp falls into the non-historical grouping.  Perhaps that makes sense since Pulp identifies with a wide genre of adventure/RPG gaming including a broad brush of character-driven adventure gaming with Steampunk, Horror, Gangster, Back of Beyond, etc.  Notice that Pulp groups with the non-Warhammer Fantasy/Sci-Fi periods.

The result illustrates that historical wargamers generally tend toward historical gaming while non-historical gamers generally tend to remain within non-historical genres.  Notice within Non-Historicals that Warhammer periods show distinct separation from other Fantasy/Sci-Fi periods.

What if we want to see more granularity instead of the very high-level, two-cluster solution?  We move the vertical bar to the left and cut across the dendrogram a second time.  Moving the vertical cut to the left, the dendrogram is bisected across three branches to identify a three-cluster solution as shown in Figure 4.  Note that the three-cluster solution keeps Non-Historicals separate and intact. Historicals, however, are further split.  As seen in the two-cluster solution, the split in the three-cluster solution is intuitive in that the Historical groupings are clearly split between Modern and Ancients wargaming periods.   Interesting that the Ancients gamers tend to separate from the Modern gamers with seemingly little interaction between the two groups.

Figure 4

Staying with the Ancients Historical Gaming Periods for a moment longer, Figure 1 shows wargaming periods Ancients, Medievals, and Dark Ages hold ranks 7, 8, 9 in the period popularity summary. As a test of data reliability, I was curious if the period ranking would remain the same across two distinct groups.  I conducted an informal survey on the Society of Ancients (SoA) Forum to address this curiosity.  The question asked was,

Figure 5

Although the sample size is small at 26 responses, the ranking seen in Figure 5 from the SoA survey maintains the same order as in Figure 1.  That is, Ancients then Medievals then Dark Ages.

What happens to the clustering solution as we move from the three to four-cluster solution?  Moving to the left and cutting the dendrogram one more time to reach a four-cluster solution shows that the Modern Historical cluster is split once again.

Figure 6

In a four-cluster solution (Figure 6), Non-Historicals and Ancients Historicals clusters remain unchanged.  Rather, with this cut, Modern Historicals splits into two groupings.  This bifurcation seems to carve out Musket & Rifle periods from more Modern periods.  We could similarly group these into Pre and Post-20th Century groupings too.

What about grouping of Old West and Age of Sail/Pirates into the Modern camp?  This is an odd grouping, isn't it?  Well, given that counts for both Old West and Age of Sail/Pirates groups were low as seen in Figure 1, variability and fuzziness in grouping is possible.  In Figure 7, I label this cluster as Hollywood Historical.  The grouping with Historicals suggests that Hollywood gaming tends to come from Historical wargamers and not non-Historical gamers.

Figure 7

I could continue crawling out on the branches of the dendrogram tree, pruning along the way, but for now, I stop at the four-cluster solution with the Hollywood split.  Did I manage to answer some of the questions originally set out at the beginning of this analysis?  To recap...

• Using only gaming period choice, do distinctions between historical and non-historical gamers emerge?
• Indeed!  The two-cluster solution identifies this bifurcation early on.
• Do some game periods tend to cluster together? Which ones?
• In the 2024 survey as well as in previous cluster analyses, wargaming period preferences tend to group within the same clusters.  There is some movement between survey years but generally, groupings remain consistent.
• If distinct groups emerge from clustering, are these distinct groups intuitive?
• The two, three, and four-cluster groupings identified were given (what I consider) intuitive names.  Now, other labels are possible but cluster labels identified here seem to capture the component periods.

This exercise in cluster analysis produces some interesting and hopefully logical tendencies as responses are grouped by wargaming period preference.  Keep in mind that these groupings, wherever pruned, are brought to light by simply examining respondent choices in game period and using the tools of machine learning.  Notice, once again, the clear and early distinction between non-historical and historical game periods using no more input than a survey respondent's period preference.

Hope you find these results of interest as well.

Trial by Fire (and Melee)

After writing about my take-aways from Dr. Jones' presentation on The Challenges and Pitfalls of an "Authentic" Medieval Wargame and the robust commentary that the post generated, I wondered why I began my Wars of the Roses (WotR) project in the first place.  With the compelling challenges laid before me, did I second guess my decision a little bit?  I did.  While the period may offer challenges and pitfalls to the wargamer, Medieval combat offers a style of combat not seen in exactly the same form in other periods.  Besides, I enjoyed building up moderately-sized armies of Perry's handsome 28mm plastic figures.  Despite any reservations and with armies already built, it would be a shame to scrap the project without even giving the period a reasonable effort.

Armies arrayed for battle.

With that, I created a (hopefully) working version of rules to put to the test.  Given the reservations brought up in the discussion in the link above, I wanted to see if the period could be gamed with enough decision points to make for interesting and challenging contests.  Richard (My Wargaming Habit) graciously accepted an invitation to put the rules through the paces in a first trial run.  Richard has posted a battle account of our test game and offered his First Impressions.  Richard's account is a good one.  I recommend visiting his blog to check out his thoughts on the game.  I appreciate Richard's feedback and insights.  Our post-game discussion will filter its way back into my thought process for consideration and possible rules' amendments. 

In this trial run, each army comprised three equal Battles/Wards but leadership was variable.  Before the battle began, we rolled for leader attributes for each command.  Richard chose to command the Yorkists (red dice).  Richard's Yorkists wound up having Inspiring, Brave, and Cautious commanders.  My Lancastrians (blue dice) ended up with Inspiring, Brave, and Timid commanders.

Battle deployment

Let's see how the battle played out.

The Yorkists begin battle all on Reserve orders.  As the Lancastrians advance, the Yorkists hurriedly change orders to meet the Lancastrians.  After an exchange of arrows from the longbowmen, the Yorkist Right attacks.  Passing through their own bowmen, the Yorkists push forward.  The Lancastrian bowmen, now opposite a thick body of enemy, fail to stand in the face of such imposing might.  They fall back behind their melee lines.

After an archery duel, the Yorkist right advances...

and the Lancastrians are pushed back.

The Yorkist melee line crashes into the Lancastrian melee line in close combat.  Lancastrians are driven back with loss, uncovering their own bowmen.  Caught a second time, the bowmen are forced back again.  Stopping their pursuit, the Yorkists hold firm control over the enemy's left having pushed the enemy back quite a distance.

In pursuit, Lancastrian archers fall back
 in the face of the enemy. 

In the middle of the battle lines, the Yorkist Center Battle wins the archery exchange.  Lancastrian archers are compelled to retire behind their melee line.  Without hesitation, the Yorkist commander leads his melee line of MAA and bill through his archers and into the enemy.  Fighting is vicious and many men fall.  Still, the fighting continues until the Lancastrians can take no more.  The Lancastrians fall back but the Yorkists do not pursue.

While the Lancastrian Center is being driven back, an extended archery duel opens on the Lancastrian Right.  With casualties mounting in both bodies of archers, a point quickly comes where Yorkist bowmen have had enough.  They withdraw back through their melee lines. 

Clash of MAA in the center.

Lancastrian Center falls back
 as an archery duel on the right begins.

Current state of the armies.

Now the time has come for the two melee lines to close.  In the initial clash, losses are heavy to both but the Lancastrians are the ones to fall back.  Seems the Lancastrians are being pushed back all across the battlefield!  After a brief respite to regroup, the Lancastrian Right advances back into the fray.  Again, the Lancastrians recoil with the Yorkists in hot pursuit.  The Lancastrian body of MAA breaks for the rear leaving the billmen isolated.  The body of Lancastrian bill holds its ground putting up a terrible fight.  The Yorkist MAA are destroyed before the Lancastrians fall back.  

Melee lines clash in the center...

and on the right.
The Lancastrians fall back.

Lancastrian MAA fall back after suffering heavily.

Lancastrian billmen stand alone.

The Yorkists do not let up.  Forward they come on again.  This time, the Yorkist Left pushes the archers forward to attack the Lancastrian bow.  Discarding their bows, the archers struggle for supremacy.  Finally, the Lancastrians gain the upper hand and the Yorkist archers scatter.  The Yorkist Left breaks!

Yorkist archers attack in an attempt to destroy the enemy.

Yorkist Left Breaks!

Back in the center of the battlefield, the Yorkist melee line goes in against enemy archers positioned in the front line.  Having taken heavy losses earlier, Lancastrian bowmen are trampled.  The bowmen rout but the fatigued Yorkists do not pursue.

Lancastrian archers vanish in the center.

With the Lancastrian Army pushed nearly off the battlefield on both wings and army cohesion showing great stress, the Lancastrian Left attacks!  Fortunately, the Yorkist Right has been roughly handled as well.  In the initial clash, the Yorkist Right loses its lead melee line of MAA.  In a follow-on attack, the Yorkists lose the billmen as well.  The Yorkist Right breaks!  As the Right breaks away from combat and with the Left already broken and disengaging, this battle is over.  The Lancastrians pull off an unexpected victory!  

Lancastrian Left goes in again!

Breaking the Yorkist Right!

Now, looking at the battlefield once the dust settles, we see just how close the Lancastrian Army was to breaking itself.  Had two of the three Lancastrian Wings taken only one hit more, the Lancastrian Army would be the army retreating from the field.

Lancastrians on the verge of collapse.

Wow!  This was a tight game that I figured the Lancastrians were going to lose after seeing initial Yorkist successes everywhere.

Richard's Yorkist Army pushed my Lancastrians around like they had no weight.  With heavy fighting, each encounter weakened us both.  At the end, both armies were teetering on the brink.  Luckily, my Lancastrians managed to get in the final and decisive blow to send the Yorkists reeling.

That was really tense and exciting fun.  Thanks to Richard for his thoughtful play and helpful suggestions along the way.  Game took about two-and-a-half hours with discussion throughout.

Did this feel like a Medieval battle?  Did the rules achieve my goals set out?  I will save those thoughts for a follow up retrospective on the rules, themselves, and the lessons learned from this initial trial by fire.  Foremost, the rules survived First Contact, and I enjoyed the game.  Another test is on deck for next week.