Game 3

September 1741

Versailles
The King of France`s Chancellor, le Duc de Brissac, has stated that if Algiers does not fall to blockade this month by French forces it is likely they shall stop offensive operations against the Islamic Caliphate. The reason he gave was that it appears probable the land and sea elements involved are going to be needed in the Americas "given the intransingence of the First Consul". He publically apologized to the Spanish, but explained this was not an abandonment of the campaign:

"Beautiful France need to strike down one serpent once and for all, so it will not raise its ugly head again, and then we can concentrate more fully on a successful war against the Caliphate without distraction. We effectively offered the Americas so-called Republic a truce leading to Peace, but since that have been roundly rejected we will give our answer by force of arms. It is a pity, but it is the cost of stubbornness on the part of the First Consul."



New York
French troops under the gaze of the Comte de Saxe has spent the month engaged in hard labour knocking down the citadel of New York. No reason was given officially for this act but rumours abound that the French military is preparing to abandon the place.

The fortifications around the city were also intended for destruction, but the arrival of Republican cavalry in force outside New York caused the plan to be abandoned. It appears the Americans have no less than 254 cavalry squadrons blockading the approaches of New York on the landward side.

October 1741

New York
A large number of granaries and their contents have been despoiled deliberately by French soldiers in the city of New York.

Persistant rumours have spread across the city that there is a strong possiblity that the French intend to destroy New York. This view have been fuelled by the distribution of broadsheets. This was done surreptitiously but nevertheless their wide distribution ensured the French authorities became aware of what the sheet stated. The content is as follows:

"The French are leaving our fair city and good riddance to them, will they burn and sack our city before they leave, that is the question. Good men an woman of New York, are you ready to enter the streets and defend your livelihood, home, familiy, city and nation from the French. Will it be dangerous? The French are known for murdering innocents and the defenceless but still we ask you to enter the streets and protect the Things thst are dear to you. It is important that no weapons are used and peace and calm must be kept, the French can easily crush any armed rebellion. Calm and peaceful must win this day, but protest anything any from the French army says anywhere."

The claims are being taken seriously, and have led to representations being made by leading Citizens to Marshal Maurice, Comte de Saxe who appear to be quite flustered by all this.


Boston
The following statement have been made by William Penn, First Consul of the Americas Republic

"I am sad to hear the news from Versailles that King Louis insist on continuing the war, even reinforcing the French Army in America. We will of course continue fighting if that is the wish of King Louis, all our forces are in American territory and we are unable to project any force beyond mainland North America. We have to react to French actions which we have done this entire war. We have an army outside New York, ready to take over the largest city and the Jewel off the Republic from the French as they leave. If the French forces inside the city would rather prefer to come out and face us in Battle we would be happy to accommodate them."

This conflict boils down to a few Essentials, we would be very happy to have peace, and we are prepared to give quite a bit to achieve this. We are not prepared to reward the enemy withone acre of our soil in Return for thius peace however as we have repeatedly informed our enemy during the Peace talks."

"The Freench are very eager for peace as well it seems, according to the propsed truces and treaties that pop out of France, but King Louis is not prepared to give up much of the territory his army has taken during this conflict. I am stubborn, King Louis is stubborn, neither is giving an inch and that is a sad thing. Neither army has suffered serious losses during the war, both feel confident that they can continue the war for a long time. We hate and despise our enemy and I am certain that the feeling is mutual. I hope we can keep this conflict relatively civilized even so, and keep civilians and their property from being subjects of deliberate attacks. The Americas Republic would certainly react strongly to any attacks on its citizens."

France`s Escadre dÀmerique has removed itself from off Boston and arrived at New York were it dropped anchor.


Eight American Merchants hips have been lost off the shore of the Americas Republic.

November 1741

Boston
William Penn, Fist Consul of the Americas Republic has made the following Speech at the National Assembly:

"Several American Republic traders have been lost along our coast, the French navy is a  suspect in this action as it would be a brave pirate indeed to operate With so many French warships nearby."

"The one and only concrete result from the ill-fated Peace talks that ended a year ago was an agreement to have peace at sea. It was proposed to us that there should be a general ceasefire agreement, here is Our reply from July 1740 and I quote "We fully support a ceasefire at sea, which has not seen much activity of late anyway. On land the situation is a bit different however, we will of course be happy to agree to a ceasefire for the explicit purpose of allowing the French forces on our soil to evacuate without incident, this is after all the sole purpose of our fight. A ceasefire because we are talking with no strings attached however will just give the French forces time to strengthen their position and make liberating American soil more difficult if the talks should stall or fail. Not in our interest I believe."

"It has always puzzled us that the French government claimed that we broke the ceasfire agreement when we liberated Philadelphia, no we did not. We specifically reserved the right to continue the fight the enemy unless the French wanted to evacuate their army, which they obviously did not intend to do. We have certainly kept our side of the agreement, our naval strength is to tiny to face the French Navy in any case. We have not suffered any losses to our merchant marine so far during the war so I assume the French have also been faithful to the agreement."

So the question is to the French government and it is simple enough, has France broken our ceasefire agreement and started attacking our merchant marine or is the French Navy innocent in this case. In which case I hope that the French Navy will do its outmost to catch the pirates involved."

"Loouis have been really imagniative in this case if the French Navy is indeed responsible for the disappearance of so many of our traders. First he accuses us of breaking a non-existent ceasefire agreement allowing France to leave the peace treaty talks, at least according to the French. Then he proceeds to break the ceasefire agreement we actually managed to agree on. Louis has not actuall cancelled the ceasefire agreement, just claimed we broke it, so as far as I am concerned it is still in force."


New York
To the East of the landward North side approach to New York, Sullivan`s Republican Army collected supplies With the intention of prosecuting a siege. On 5th of November as his field army was moving up to the North side to start the siege, the French garrison began to deploy outside the walls, clearly intending to offer battle! Lieutenant-General John Sullivan halted his own advance in order to properly deploy in readiness for the fight.

Marshal Maurice, Comte de Saxe, deployed his French With 16 infantry battalions in the first line, the maximum possible given the confines of the ground north of New York arrayed before which were 16 Field artillery batteries. Several lines of infantry formed behind in consecutive lines, while due to the confined space, the cavalry appears to have been held back in the city with much of the artillery and indeed infantry. Ten battalions of light infantry fanned out further to the front, intent on disrupting the American deployment.

Seeing that the French are not using their cavalry, and the skirmishers before their force, Sullivan felt confident to push forward light infantrymen of his own to counter them. He sent forward black african light foot in approximately equal numbers to the French, but held back a similar number as a second wave should the French recalcitrant and not withdraw.

The skirmising thus begn while the opposing artillery exchanged fire. The French and American artillery were deployed in similar numbers across a relatively narrow front.

After a prolonged firefight, the French light troops were inlined to fall back, and did so, meaning Sullivan`s second wave of his own African light infantry could move past the first and harass the French artillery and regular foot. The end reult of this was that the French cannon were silenced.

De Saxe gave orders for the first line to advance and engage the enemy. The drums began to roll, and under unfurled fleur-de-lils flecked white colours the French light grey line of foot trudged forward grimly.

The blue-coats prepared to meet them, presenting arms and then making ready to shoot. At 60 yards they did just that, shooting by platoon and with light cannon disgorging cones of cannister shot across the front. The French gallantly closed the range by another ten yards, then halted, levelled muskets, and returned fire, also shooting by platoon. However the Americans were getting the best of the exchange, causing the French to fall back.

Fearing bunching of ranks in the already limited area, Saxe recalled his army back behind the walls of New York rather than risk a rout.

The next day the Americans broke camp, abandoned any attempt at a siege and marche away into New England to the North-East! Not all the Americans left; the Maryland Cavalry under Lieutenant-General Erik van Darlan have continued their landward blockade.


East Texas
An American trader has had his goods ransacked by Caddo Indians, but managed to escape with his life after encoiuntering them in the area of East Texas.

And with that the history about war in America have caught up with current events. December 1741 will probably go out sometime next week.

Thanks Ardagor, a useful update

Just received an Message from Richard, game 3 is no more  

Reasons given are lack of players and one player being unhappy and threatening to drop out.

I have never been in such a frustrating and exciting game, being under French attacks, basically from day one. Fighting every month for almost six years and working on building up an army, more or less from scratch.

I started With this army

83 (8 elite) infantry Battalions and just 16 with any drill
4 light infantry
43 dragoon
58 Field artillery
8 Galloper guns
52 siege artillery
22 mortars


And ended with this force

156 elite infantry (all drilled to well at least)
113 elite light infantry (all drilled to well at least)
260 dragoons
100 horse
30 hussars
88 Field artillery
24 siege artillery
24 galloper artillery
22 mortars

All artillery batteries was based on the Belidor theory which we gained when defeating the French army at Philadelpia. All Field and siege had double the standard range and the galloper guns could use 12 pdrs as standard.

I did have a nice economy to pay for all this stuff, 13,8 million last income month, mostly from taxes.

Thats a shame I cut my teeth on game 3 first as Poland and then later as Russia.

A great shame as I said to Richard earlier, after 25 years!

I will join another game when a suitable position becomes available and play that to the end too!

Can't fault the way you ran the Americas Republic, well played and good luck if you carry on in another game.

Tudor

What a pity.

Cut my teeth on that game too as the pope.

A real shame, like others G3 was my first game (Denmark) and throughly enjoyed it.

So G6 is now the 'oldest' game still going.

Not sure if any knows but in game 1 Poland was 1 nation and pretty much conquered most of europe!

Hapsburg wrote:A great shame as I said to Richard earlier, after 25 years!

I will join another game when a suitable position becomes available and play that to the end too!

Can't fault the way you ran the Americas Republic, well played and good luck if you carry on in another game.

Tudor

Thank you

I do have a few regrets and things I should have done better/sooner such as

Building a strong force of horse sooner (drill/horse obedience) to take on the French curassiers at their own game.

Pushing the French harder in the Battle in the Wilderness, his force may have cracked there if I had gone all in but I was a bit timid, winter was fast approaching and my SL was high in several units.

I should have sent an army into the interior to flush out the French at Ft. Joseph/Ft. St. Louis. It was the plan for the coming spring but it should have been done years ago.

Other than that I was relatively satisfied with the the performance of my forces.

I think you can be more than satisfied   You seem to have done amazingly well!  I was always intrigued by the Americas Republic as it was one of the few 'fictional' nations to emerge in Glory.

I would say Game 6 would welcome a few new players

I too had enormous respect for the success of the American Republic.

Thank you all, in the beginning the French just rolled over me. His huge fleet allowed him to drop of and collect armies wherever and whenever he wanted so Quebec and New york fell quickly. Then the siege of Philadelphia started, blockaded from all sides I could not use my treasury outside Philadelphia. Very effective, he was slowly squeezing me and I was growing exceedingly desperat. And then he stopped his blockade, why did he do that as it was obviously effective. Perhaps King James warned him to not hurt his trade?

As the French had proved in the early years the tactic of dumping an army somewhere, attack and then move some where else was highly effective. What was the next French move, sit and wait for a long time, giving me time to build up the army, and then march a huge army into the New England forest where he was unable to use his advantage of naval strength and mobility, and fight excactly the kind of battle he could not control for no obvious reason. I assume he was planning on hitting Boston at the same time as the fireship attack, but he retreated as soon as he ran into our forces, his main army went back to New York and sat there for the rest of the war. I never really got the grasp on what he was thinking and planning. A bit more agression from the French after the initial rush of conquest would certainly have been difficult for me to resist.

Ardagor wrote:Just received an Message from Richard, game 3 is no more  

Reasons given are lack of players and one player being unhappy and threatening to drop out.

I have never been in such a frustrating and exciting game, being under French attacks, basically from day one. Fighting every month for almost six years and working on building up an army, more or less from scratch.

I started With this army

83 (8 elite) infantry Battalions and just 16 with any drill
4 light infantry
43 dragoon
58 Field artillery
8 Galloper guns
52 siege artillery
22 mortars


And ended with this force

156 elite infantry (all drilled to well at least)
113 elite light infantry (all drilled to well at least)
260 dragoons
100 horse
30 hussars
88 Field artillery
24 siege artillery
24 galloper artillery
22 mortars

All artillery batteries was based on the Belidor theory which we gained when defeating the French army at Philadelpia. All Field and siege had double the standard range and the galloper guns could use 12 pdrs as standard.

I did have a nice economy to pay for all this stuff, 13,8 million last income month, mostly from taxes.

Good grief.........were you the Russian Army in disguise? Only this force seems much larger than the total male population of the American Colonies.

I have noticed that if games of Glory go on for a long time Armies and Fleets grow vastly larger than their historic sizes and it looks a bit odd. A problem which is made worse if losses are reflected by SL rather than units being deleted.

I quite like the Scabble system in which a home country can provide so many units. Then if you take control of new territory you can raise new "colonial" units.

To get closer to the 1700's I think an idea might be to have a set up were:

a) A Home country can raise up to X number of units......without any effect.

b) For a war (or even in peace) the home country can raise up to double the number of units .......but this will hurt the Economic Health as Farm's are now being worked by fewer workers/horses and merchant ships are having crews pressed for the Navy.

Thus you can fight a limited war but if you go onto full war footing you will probably go bankrupt at some stage unless you have lots of a) Cash in reserve b) Credit (ie the Bank of England) or c) Subsidies from other players to fund the war. (ie Prussia in 7 years war, Sweden in 30 year war)

Note I would follow LAK and instead of 100 Fortress Cannon counting as one unit........have a static garrison unit which includes artillery, foot, the odd engineer etc. This represents people like the London Trained Bands, the Danzig Guild Army, The Goldsmith's Regiment in Mexico City.

c) If units above A & B are required..........use foreign recuiting, hire units from abroad. The Prussian Army was normally up to 1/3 non Prussians and English Armies abroad like John Churchill's "English" Army in Flanders at times included more non English troops than English Units.

What do people think?

It got a bit strange but the breakdown of the army was about as follows

Starting army: 80,000 which was the English army that followed King William to the colonies, but this was clearly not enough to take on the French so I had to get more recruits.

I received 40,000 from Russia, very helpful.

Most of the navy was made inactive and the crew`s used to boost the army, around 60,000 men.

Finally I started buying slaves, about 30,000 a year for a total of 120,000. They agreed to fight for the Republic on the promise that they would receive their freedom and the abolition of slavery when we achieved victory.

So a civilian population of ca 550,000 supporting an army of close to 300,000. But then again those same civilians had no trouble at all producing 20,000,000 tons of grain a year.

To be honest Stuart, from my perspective of games 2 and 3, not sure we need the changes you're suggesting.

As Ardagor has shown, the Republic's army had some things going in its favour that made it much larger than might otherwise have been possible-80K English troops is roughly 30 years worth of recruits from the colonies.

Not in nations in game 3 ended up with unhistorical sized forces. I played Denmark for 15-20 game years in Game 3 and I struggled to create a historically sized army and navy, never managed it.  I was briefly the Dutch towards the end of the game and even then when I looked at the historical size of its military, my army was only 75% of what it would have been-the fleet was larger but not by much and really down to a number of LSoL it had (captured in previous wars I think).  The same applied to me as Hanover in G3, despite wild claims about the size of my Janissary Peace Corps, the army was only just at its historical size and quite a way below the historical size of the combined armies of Brunswick and Hanover (the realm I ruled included both).

In the newer games I'm in I found it even harder to raise historically sized armies and navies, I wonder if that is because there are now so many other things to use recruits for-I might be wrong but I get the feeling that such things as doctors, lawyers, vets, priests, tax collectors are new additions to the games, not present when games 2 and 3 were in their early days.  The number of recruits a nation gets hasn't increased so I suspect as the remaining games go on we'll not see such oversized armies and navies that some nations had in earlier games.

Also, whilst I can see the reasoning in a 'garrison unit', not sure it would be practical now.  We have such a range of fortifications now-not just citadels and fortified towns but forts, stone forts, fortified towers-all with their own garrison sizes that there would need to be a whole range of different garrison units.

I think part of the problem with the system is simply that once you raise a unit it always retains its initial level of recruits. Active service was usually 25 years so in theroy over time, deaths, retirement etc would mean that people in units already raised would need replacing, that simply dosn't happen in the game, if you have a recruit pool of 40,000 then in five game years you can have an army of 200,000. which historically simply didn't happen. Maybe their should be a factor so that if the army reaches a certain % of the total population then recruits go down to reflect keeping the alraedy standing units upto strength

J Flower wrote:I think part of the problem with the system is simply that once you raise a unit it always retains its initial level of recruits. Active service was usually 25 years so in theroy over time, deaths, retirement etc would mean that people in units already raised would need replacing, that simply dosn't happen in the game, if you have a recruit pool of 40,000 then in five game years you can have an army of 200,000. which historically simply didn't happen. Maybe their should be a factor so that if the army reaches a certain % of the total population then recruits go down to reflect keeping the alraedy standing units upto strength

Can not recall the book I read it in but I think it said that Armies used to loss 5% to 10% of their men to sickness, desertion & retirement each year & in the Prussian Army in the 7 years war it was even higher.

So in theory even in peace time a 200,000 strong army would need 10,000-20,000 new recruits just to keep its strength up.

.

Nations like Rusdia and France could manage that as they had the largest populations of the age.

I think Richard addressed this at one point, and said that the constraints just frustrated players, so he permitted the inflation, since it effected everyone equally, the net result was the same without frustrating players.

So battles are larger than historical, but the net effect on game balance is the same.

If Stuarts figures of 10% needed to just keep the armies up to strength in peace time are correct( I think they are) then it would mean that recruits would become an evenmore vluable resource in the Game.

It could promote the hiring of mercinaries from the smaller states by the larger ones.

If it was the same for everyone then probably no one would notice. It would mean you have to think more carefully as to which type of unit you create & balance of your forces.

France could but huge armies into the field but still 400,000 was the maximum even for them historically. When the size of the army actually starts to approach the same size as the population then maybe we should start getting worried.

In the Dutch example add up the size of the Navy as well & the the Dutch in G3 suddenly become the modern Sparta. The British army at the height of Empire was never much larger than 100,000.

Maybe you should be forced to invest a part of your recruit pool into the military every year as part of the upkeep , or the army suffers SL. You could of course put units into the Ordinary or stand them down, which is historically more accurate.

maybe richard could just deduct the recruits at source depending on how big your forces are.  Remember the lower your EC the more recruits you get the higher the less showing a strong employment in your nation.

complicated.... 

Deducting at source sounds good, no one would notice , maybe a 5% "upkeep" in recruits of for the armed forces, would be an idea. If it applies for everyone then it would be a fair change.