A Cold Week In Naarden – battle tips #5 – Winterkeep.

I’ve been in quite a few campaign battles. I’ve seen a lot of successes and fails with these missions. Here is a quick run-through of what works and what doesn’t with these 8 battles.

Battle 5 – Winter Keep.

This battle is epic.  You have all the special and advanced unit types in one big battle.  This battle is the most complete sense of Musket Smoke in terms of a major battle with everything.

Obviously both sides are going to plug the two holes and move the mortars and howitzers close to the centre trees.  It’s fun trying to decide what units you want to combine on the top and the bottom areas.

In general, you want to keep your cannons away from the mortars as the smoke will make your cannons mostly useless.  Or maybe you want to shut down your opponents cannons with howitzer smoke.  Usually though, your just going to mortar/howitzer what is behind the tree line.  And usually, you will move your units there to be burned alive..   I don’t know why..  but we all seem to do it.

A lot of us tend to gather a group of cavalry units and bust open one side and then come charging in.  This does a lot of damage but if cannons and muskets are waiting for you then your likely to lose all that cavalry very quick with both sides taking roughly the same amount of man loss.

The goal is to take out the keep but I have never seen this battle go that far.  All the games I played generally came down to who can keep their artillery alive the longest.  Keeping your man count up is also big on this map.  Usually this battle ends when one player gets demoralized and falls back after suffering too much loss.

Impatient rush tactics can be a fun blood crunch but they can also become predictable after a while, even with various different unit combinations facing each other.  In terms of entertainment value I believe this battle is best done slowly and patiently.  I have had rare games where a group of cavalry snuck in behind the enemy (hiding near trees) to cause havoc.  Those more patent games were more fun (and interesting) in my opinion but either way this map is always a blast to play.

Next battle:  Artillery Transport