Dominion of Pike and Shot
Hot on the heels of ‚Dominion of the Spear‘ now comes ‚Dominion of Pike and Shot‘ with added artillery bombardments! There seem to have been a flurry of blog posts on both sets recently, but mine have been languishing in my blog post backlog as I usually stack up a couple of months worth. Anyway, here is my contribution.
Unsurprisingly this set covers Renaissance warfare from the late 1400s to late 1600s. This is a period I have repeatedly tried to get into, and I’ve been through a few iterations of published rules and some homegrown stuff but never really got anything which satisfied although I’d really like to fight some more of the major battles of the English Civil War and Thirty Years War.
Anyway, the whole left flank/centre/right flank/reserve approach of DoS worked great for Ancients and is equally applicable to this period, and mirrors the approach in my favourite rules for the period ‚Marston Less‘ which uses a three column grid.
The rules are very similar to their Ancient cousins, with a brief description of the mechanics, a longer description of the design decisions and dozens upon dozens of Army Lists for various theatres and periods, plus a QRS.
Again like their ancient cousins, units are differentiated as fire or melee and with extra characteristics to make them more (or less) formidable. It is all about the matchups, like DBA, but without all the geometry. There is a scenario book in the offing, but I was impatient and just bought the rules as between Cassells ‚Battles in Britain‘ and ‚Europes Tragedy‘ about the Thirty Years War, I have zillions of scenarios to try out.
Anyway, having had a brief look at Edge Hill (again) , I decided to just try out a generic early ECW engagement. 1642 Royalists vs Parliamentarians as I wanted to get some toys on the table and roll dice. I’ll do this blow-by-blow as there are some new unit types and mechanisms.
The respective armies. The toys are my generic 2mm pike and shot/horse and musket units albeit originally painted up for the WSS and Twilight of the Sun King in the main, with the pikes, tercios, Gendarmes etc added later.
Royalists (top) have 2 x pike units (with some muskets) and 1 x musket unit (with some pikes) plus 2 x elite cavaliers (melee cavalry). They are the attackers and deployed with the cavalry on the wings and their musket brigade in the centre with the pike heavy units in reserve.
The Roundheads have got 3 x musket units (with some pikes), 2 x melee cavalry (pistols) and 1 x artillery unit. These are all average units so the Royalists have an advantage in melee cavalry as theirs are elite. The artillery is a new unit type and most effective against armoured infantry, which neither side has. I put this in reserve, which may have been an error, so the Roundhead front line was also cavalry on the wings and infantry in the centre. Melee cavalry have an advantage over musket heavy infantry. Artillery benefit from flanking fire if there are gaps in the enemy line, which was why I put them in reserve.
First round. This edition of the rules adopts the method of each side choosing one sector to fight for activation, (my least favourite) although the other two methods can be used. The very first thing which happens is each side fires an artillery bombardment on one enemy sector, needs a 5+ to hit and in this case both sides missed.
The Royalists then attack with their right hand cavalry, but the melee is inconclusive (despite needing 3+ and 4+ to hit respectively). In the centre the Roundhead muskets blow away the Royalist musketeers and a pike unit moves up into the gap.
Round 2. The Royalist cavalry rout their opposite numbers and the Roundheads put their artillery onto the left flank. If I can thin out the Royalist lines, I may get a +1 bonus for flanking artillery fire. No such luck however as the Roundhead musketeers miss and are routed by the Royalist pikemen (who get a melee bonus vs musket infantry, but attack second).
Once per game each side can attempt to rally one of their destroyed units. The Roundheads manage to rally their cavalry and put it back in reserve.
Round 3. The Royalist cavalry dodge the artillery barrage and ride down the Roundhead guns. Well that went well. The infantry fight in the centre is inconclusive.
Round 4. The Royalists rout the newly rallied cavalry (again) and there is no hope of recovery now. The Roundheads put their infantry in reserve up against Ruperts cavalry.
Round 5. In a flurry of musketry one of the Royalist pikes is routed and with no reserves left, the Royalist centre is now open. The cavalry battle is inconclusive.
The Royalist try and rally one of their units to plug the gap and fail.
Round 6.The Royalist cavalry once again fail to rout their opposite numbers, and the Roundhead musketeers with their open centre advantage rout the remaining Royalist infantry. Reduced to one unit, the Royalists lose.
Even though I need to get my head around the new unit types a bit more (and some of the changes to combat resolution), that was really good fun and well with 5 US dollars! When I ‚ve got a bit more time I’ll set up some more scenarios to try. Alan on The Stronghold Revisited has done a bit more with this version and has a few suggestions on the treatment of mixed pike and shot units, as at the moment the match ups don’t seem quite right with Pike heavy units being considerably better than musket heavy ones, whereas irl it was the other way around. ECW pike only units were definitely second rate, they aren’t the same as Landschnechkts charging a bunch or arequebuses, so I’ll probably adopt the idea of ‚mixed‘ units. Alan’s ideas here: https://hordesofthethings.blogspot.com/2025/04/dominion-of-pike-shot-ecw.html
I need to play around with the some scenarios and the rules a bit more before making any big changes though. I’m quite drawn to using ng some variant of Populous, Rich and Rebellious to do a TYW or ECW mini campaign and using DotS as the battle engine.
My main focus has been on Dominion of the Spear as I’m working on a mini campaign participation game covering Alexander the Great using DotS as the engine, so expect a flurry of posts on that at some point in the next few weeks.
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Autor: Martin Rapier / The Games We Play