War of the Roses Tactic

[nickdives]

Gents,

those horrible Perrys have forced me to build up a Lancastrian Army, with a couple of units of Yorkists (the rest postponed whilst I finish anoth project!) At present I have:

6 x 24 Longbow
9 x 12 Bill/Dismounted Men at Arms
1 x 12 town and country bill
2 x 12 Scottish Spear Allies
1 x 4 Mounted Knights
2 x Gunnes
And a slack handful of commanders.

Whilst based for FOG, I also have Poleaxed II and Medieval Warfare. After some background reading the emphisis with appears to be with mixed Battles of both Polearm and Bow, however watching a few games at the club the bow and polearm were formed in seperate BGs. What is the best way to deploy for WotR, historical with mixed BGs or FOG with seperate BGs?

[grahambriggs]

Well, in FoG the BGs need to be seperate. However, you could view a Battle as being a number of BGs, some Longbow, some MAA. They do work better together than apart. The longbow start in front and pepper the enemy. The MAA come to the front if the Longbow are threatened, or to finish off a damaged enemy.

[AlanYork]

I have a Yorkist army and I've found that deploying bow in front of bill doesn't really work. The bow shoot for a while then move behind the bill where they spend the rest of the game doing nothing. (By the time you've finished trying to get the bow out from behind the bill into a better position the battle is usually over). If the bill are Superior then the Average bow can't even give them rear support.

Putting the bow out on the flanks seems to work better and it's not an unhistoric tactic as bowmen were often used as flank guards.

I've played about with various set ups for WOTR, steadfastly refusing to use the multiple 4 base BGs of bill that the list author allows me to have (this isn't the Hundred Years War and neither are they zippy Roman cohorts) and what seems to work best is big units of bill in the middle (I use 3 "battles" of them with some Northern Border spears) with bows on the wings to shoot up enemy mounted.