Lace Wars – The P&S successor game we almost already have

[Hoplite1963]

I recently been persuaded to play the Minden scenario for Pike & Shot (P&S) with my long term wargames partner, after we had also refought the same battle using the historical scenario in the JTS 7 Years War game.

While I am a big fan of P&S to be honest I had been a bit sniffy about post 1700 scenarios for particularly those for which there are scenarios in other games that have games engines designed specially for the period.

I must say however that I was pleasantly surprised. The linear warfare of the period is particularly suited to the visual effect you get from the moded P&R graphics with the associated regimental and unit flags etc. To be honest from a visual perspective I think the P&S engine would work better for an 18th Centaury game than the FOG II one as its better at depicting large numbers of troops
My big reservation was the fact that you did not have to choose between line of battle and column of march and when for your infantry formations to make that all important switch from marching to fighting formation.

Looking at the games engine however I don’t think it would be that big a deal to introduce as this already caters for an automatic switch between mounted and dismounted formation for Dragoons.
Also for Sengoku Jidai (SJ) the game engine has already been adapted to add army and divisional commanders.
My guess is that for a “Lace Wars” follow on game using the SJ/P&S engine you would only need the following.

1. Allow a player to try and change the formation of close order infantry between Colum and line (with the possibility of failing to do so and becoming disordered in consequence)
2. Add in the commanding and subordinate generals introduced in SG.

Additionally you might want to think about the following.

1. Increase the maximum number of units per side to facilitate larger battles.
2. Increase the number of pro and anti imperial factions to facilitate the moding of unit textures for individual regiments and their unique uniforms and flags perhaps have 20 to 30 extra “Placeholder Faction’s a, b c” for each with identical textures just to facilitate this.

So why not ? given the labour of love that scenario designers have already devoted to extending P&S beyond its original envelope I believe the product would be well received by existing owners of the game and would not require as much work as a completely new title using the engine employed for FOG II.

Don't ask don't get
Kind regards
Ian

[Paul59]

2. Increase the number of pro and anti imperial factions to facilitate the moding of unit textures for individual regiments and their unique uniforms and flags perhaps have 20 to 30 extra “Placeholder Faction’s a, b c” for each with identical textures just to facilitate this.

Hi Ian,

Actually the number of factions in the game is irrelevant for the modder who wants to create extra textures for his scenario.

The limiting factor is the number sub folders that the game will allow in the UNITTEXTURES folder. There is a hard limit, I forget how much it is exactly, but it is something like 26. However it is also possible to take advantage of the fact that some models are actually visually identical, so once you have used 26 (?) textures for one model you can switch to using a different model that looks exactly the same and you then have another 26 possible textures.

When I designed my Great Northern War and Nine Years War scenarios for P&S I was obsessive over getting the flag and uniform details correct for each regiment, and I was never limited by the system. The 64 unit limit for scenarios was a big problem though. Luckily with the new version of the game engine, that FOG2 uses, there is no limit on the number of units per side, so if there is ever a new version of P&S that won't be a problem.

cheers

Paul