To Defy a King

 Well It's been a while but I am finally back with my ECW head on. I found a fantastic drama series on You tube called 'By the sword divided'. Made back in 1983 I thought it was going to be really dated and bad, It was fantastic and very well researched. It certainly stands up to the test of time as far as the uniforms and customs go. I found the siege on the stately home/castle very inspiring and dug out my old 1664 ECW rules to look at the campaign section. It was while I was trawling the Internet that I caught wind of another new ECW release, To defy a king.

Here it is, after reading a few glowing reviews (many from Sealed Knott members) I decided to take the plunge.

So far It looks good  with lovely easy to learn pages that are very simply laid out. From what I can tell so far It doesn't place to much emphasis on fire power, but leans more toward melee to settle things on the field.

The thing that really stands out and the thing I think the makers are most proud of, is their army generator. A pack of cards is supplied with the rules and these allow you to randomly generator a force of different strength units with varying classes of experience. This I think is great and It leads Itself very well to solo gaming. Something I would love to try out once I have enough troops.

On a slightly different note here is a sketch I did to work out how I'm going to base my standards. I like the idea of having lots of standards per regiment and most 'flag' manufactures produce at least four for ECW regiments. Well, I have been playing around for a while trying to work out a good look. I have finally come up with a nice alternative that combines a few ideas. I will have a 40mm round base with the commander and two ensigns on it and the other two standards will be placed one each in a Pike stand.The round commander base will play no part in the battle or be counted as a 'base', but will simply look nice either at the back or front of the regiment. I think the massed standards will look stronger than just having two.

I did plan on having a wide 80mm x 40mm base at the back of the regiment with all four standards on it, but this looks too confusing and gives the impression of another rank of pikes. I think the floating commander idea is better and will allow the whole regiment to cross bridges in column etc without the 80mm base getting stuck half way across.