Roll Call Sharp Practice Game 5 French v British

The last game of the competition saw the French matched against Jenny's British army. The scenario this time was to capture a British spy who was in a walled compound nearer to the British deployment point than the French. The French were limited to deploying a single officer per turn and, initially, I assumed this would be the same for the British.

However, it quickly became apparent that this wasn't the case and the British had no deployment restrictions! As a result they had got to the spy, got considerable forces around the compound and were ready to escort him off the table before the French even arrived.

At this point the scoring system meant that there was no point in either of us continuing so we did the score at that point and played on for a while:

The British advance Line Infantry on either side of the compound which is held by Light Infantry. The spy is already uncatchable moving back to the British deployment point with some more Light Infantry:

British Line on the French left are engaged by Voltigeurs while another group of Voltigeurs on the right exchanges shots with the British Light Infantry in the compound:

The French Horse Artillery (out of shot in the centre) opens up on the British Line and they take more losses:

They attempt to advance but are now under heavy fire:

The French Fusiliers form an impressive line but don't have anything to shoot at!

The British Line on the French left have taken a pasting and start to fall back:

Half the Fusiliers advance to open fire and put even more pressure on the British:

The British Line flees. On the French right desultory skirmishing has resulted in a few losses for both sides:

At this point we called it a day.

So, after my second SP competition what do I think? I enjoyed playing both competitions, the people I played were all great to play and there was none of the exploiting loopholes (or even barn doors) in the rules that I thought might happen.

However, I'm not sure I'll play again for a number of reasons:

a) The scenarios are very unbalanced on average and really need looking at again by someone who has played them several times. Games 2 and 4 were reasonably balanced perhaps, I think Game 1 is hard for the allies and game 5 was just impossible for the French. The moveable deployment point for the Spanish gives them a huge advantage in most of the scenarios and made game 3 very hard for the French.

b) The balance between the French and Allied army lists is also poor. The French have very limited choices and their Line Infantry are rated poorly with no possibility to choose veteran units (there must have been some!) or add interesting allies. The Allied player can choose between British (with a number of different choices for the infantry), Portuguese with good cheap skirmishers or Spanish with the moveable deployment point and the cheap but very effective Militia (and even Line troops that are better than the standard French Line).

c) The scoring system. You only score points for achieving the mission (maximum 4 points), how many morale points you have left at the end (maximum 5 if you had no losses) and your officer traits (complicated to work out and somewhat variable). As you don't score anything for damage inflicted on the enemy once you have achieved your objective or think you can't achieve it there is no point going on as all you will do is lower your own score through losses largely. To encourage people to fight on you should definitely score points for enemy losses.

d) The officer traits could also do with balancing as many of them are orientated towards the Allies (such as always firing controlled volleys which the French can't do).

At Britcon I think 5 of the top 6 players used Allied armies and I'd be surprised if it was not the same at Roll Call (I left before the results were announced). The Allied entries also go much quicker than French ones.

It's obvious that unlike most other periods in competitions (and I'm used to playing 'competitive' periods) that the people who play SP don't take it seriously (which is good) but it's a shame that it seems to favour the Allied side so much.

It would also be nice to be able to use other armies such as Austrians, Prussians and Russians but I suspect that the organisers and maybe the players don't want to play unhistorical match-ups or play on 'generic' terrain which is fair enough really.

I might enter again as I don't want to play ADLG competitions, FoGR outside the one day Oxford competitions has very few entries and Blucher competitions seem to have died off (plus they didn't use Scharnhorst which is the most fun part).