Auckland Wargaming Club

The AWC’s roving gamer in the UK, Ben Hill, conducted the following ‘e-interview’ with the Field of Glory writing team at the beginning of December (2010), the answers to the questions are from the whole team of writers who are involved with FoG.

1. Has FoG evolved the way or ways you thought it would when writing it?

Yes very much so. We seem to have a broad following of clubs, social gamers, historical re-enactment players, campaign players and competition players. We wanted to create a set of rules that would appeal to different audiences and that seems to have happened. It has been great to see the quality of the entire FoG series that Slitherine has put together and that together with the Osprey art makes the books a great read.

The following is the latest FOGR update from Richard Bodley-Scott originally posted on the FOGR Yahoo Group detailing the army list books for the recently released Field Of Glory: Renaissance rules:

There will be six army list companion books for Field of Glory: Renaissance, covering the armies of Europe and the rest of the World throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. The first book, Wars of Religion, will be published at the same time as the rules, and covers the armies of the first half of the 17th century in Western and Central Europe, in particular those of the Thirty Years War and English Civil War.

The second book, Trade and Treachery, covers 16th century warfare in Western and Central Europe, notably the Italian Wars and the various conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the initial turmoil of the Reformation.

The third book, Clash of Empires, covers Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the 16th and (in some cases) 17th centuries.

Why ME? Since the international success of The Lord of the Rings movies, New Zealand has been identified (rightly or wrongly) in the eyes of many as the home of Middle Earth. MEDBAG is a site dedicated to keeping people around the world informed of DBA and HotT activities in New Zealand.

DBA is quite popular overseas, where its small scale and quick play time allow enjoyable one-day competitions, where six games can be comfortably played. These can be themed to a period or have some sort of campaign mechanism. The liveliness of the DBA community is attested by their Fanaticus Website. In New Zealand the game is quite strong in the South Island, with a number of DBA competitions in recent years in Timaru and Christchurch. It's also a rule set that is being offered at the IWC next February and has 17 players already registered.

Below is a first attempt at an unofficial points system for the Napoleonic game - Lasalle.

Lasalle contains a number of set army lists for the main armies. They provide a great introduction. But they only reflect a fraction of possible lists. Playing the same few army lists repeatedly against each other could get dull fairly quickly.

This points system below tries to address this.

Using this points system and the excellent (and now free) Nafziger army lists, players can construct any number of armies that are consistent in size with the army lists in the Lasalle book.

I would love to say that the points system above was based on careful consideration of the relative merits of units, simulations of performance and a large number of test games. Alas no. Instead it was a rather crude attempt to back-fit the army lists in the book. What points system could generate something so that the Core Lists were all about the same points, and the Support Lists were about the same points?

FOGN (Field Of Glory: Napoleonics) is a regimental game where 1 unit is a regiment. It has small units (1200-2000 men for infantry) and large units (2000-3000 men). This means it is an in-between scale game (sort of like Principles of War), where you can change formation into things that look like column, line, square and skirmish but aren't really (and in practice you stay in one formation for most of the game in FOGN).

One of the big challenges facing the club today is the debate in Ancients Gaming between DBMM and FOG. As in many other clubs and wargaming groups around the world at present there is a split between gamers who prefer FOG and those who prefer DBMM - luckily the AWC at least has no odd Ostriches still sticking to DBM (of course there is nothing really wrong with that if its your thing, but its a position causing a 3 way rules-set split of gamers in some areas so doesn't help unify the scene)!