Art De La Guerre

[ethan]

The Mongols at Mohi were quite successful in using stone throwers to clear away Hungarian crossbowmen - so that is at least one example of actually useful heavy artillery.

I believe Alexander also found stone throwers to be occasionally useful in battle.

[Amra]

Well yes , but also no

Mohi is a great example . The Mongols used artillery to clear a bridge defense and to attack the wagon laager camp .
They did not use it with their mounted bow attacks on the enemy army

OK so to sum up

There is no historical justification for the rules allowing shooting with lights , particularly longer ranged artillery working with mounted

This is not a concern because the lists (mostly) limit the availability of massed heavy arty stopping the massed gun tactic .

Its also not a concern because to date no one has found it that useful on the table .

I can always play a house rule to resolve this , I just wanted to see if Id missed something by thinking it allows an impossibility. Clearly, I haven't .

Thanks everyone for your help and thoughts

[eudes]

As a player from the first set rule, i will try to explain the author choice for artillery.

At the beginning artillery can only shoot on a target in line of see, so the useful tactic against artillery was to put a LI or LH in front to receive fire with one of protection and after pass through with heavy troops to kill artillery.

So no one played artillery in second set rules.

For the third set rules ( we actually playing) Hervé decided to support artillery come back by wreaking the usual tactic against artillery. The mind was if you want killing artillery you have to support its firing turns.

It is certainly not a perfect historical way but accept the firing up every troops with a random way of landing missiles will upgrade hardness of the game without upgrade the fun of play.

So it is the way of the game to bring fun and tactics for the players and not to be strictly historical way. In fact, all wargames are not strictly historical.

Enjoy playing, that the way.
_________________
Ce n'est pas parce que l'on a été que l'on ne sera plus.

[Amra]

Thank you eudes ,
So Hazelbark was right ( grr ), it comes from an evolvement of the rules not from history

[Hazelbark]

[AvogadroTheMole]

I always interpreted this rule mechanism (and similar ones in other ancients/medieval rulesets) as representing the diffuse nature of light troops. I take the use of the word "over" to mean the concept of a base on a table top rather than being literal about most or all of the fire on the "real" battlefield. I.e. the arty is shooting through gaps in a loose and weakly cohesive group (or groups) of troops and any occasional "accidents" do not kill/maim enough skirmishers to be of consequence at the level of an ADG game.

I think overall this is something where how you approach the question makes all the difference in your conclusion. If you are skeptical of historical recreations' ability to represent arty accuracy and/or have certain opinions on how skirmishers operated then it will be very hard to rationalise arty shooting over/through them. If you buy those recreations' results and/or take a different view of skirmishers' operation, the rules seem perfectly reasonable, if perhaps a little smoothed for easier gameplay/balance.

My two cents.

[Amra]

Thank you for all your thoughts , Avo , but as we say in Australia "yeah,nah"

I accept its just a game mechanic and nothing more but I cant go with your argument .

Your rationalization falls over because it never happened . We can imagine what we might have drilled our troops to do but its just pretend .Its partly what makes Ïmaginations"so fun

I am not "skeptical", it didn't happen . It especially didn't happen that mounted were shot thru/over by gunpowder artillery .

However ,I'm not staying awake worrying about it Thank you for your method but rather than try to justify the rule I'll just accept that its a game .
While I think you can kill a historical rule set this way , the rules work great and I can live with the anomaly.

[Ramses II]

FWIW I suggest that the problem lies in the universal base size and the inability to intermingle stuff as would have happened in real life.
That said, AdlG is first and foremost a game rather than a simulation. We know that certain things occurred or were present from writings or artifacts and this is just a game mechanic that permits us to include artillery models within the context of these rules, as others have already said.

[Amra]

So true , after all our primary sources go quiet when actual hand to hand takes place . So even something as basic as duration of combat we have to guess and infer how battles lasted so long ( try fighting a 3 minute round ! )

I always hope for more Chinese translations to shed some light because they were such a literate culture...

Let me say again though how much we like the rules , my club will be hosting a tournament in Nov using ADLG for the first time