College of Kings

This post is to give my final thoughts about the Battle of Pavia, before I move on to my next projects. At some point the game may be put on the table again, but that will not be for at least a few years.

Terrain

Throughout the project I have blogged on my progress. Many of these have covered the design and building of the terrain. Due partly to the size, and partly because I wanted the big reveal at Historicon, I did not post pictures of the entire table laid out. Here are some photos of the terrain. The large table was 12 feet by 12 feet with a central access area replacing the lower portions of the Vernavolo stream. The back table with the city of Pavia, the Five Chapels and the pontoon bridge was 12 feet by 4 feet. With the intermediate walkway the total footprint was 20 feet by 12 feet.

As it was not possible to layout everything in advance of the convention, I was not totally sure how it would all look and fit. Overall I was very happy with how it came together at the show. Surrounding the table were seven images of the Pavia tapestries which can be seen in the photo above. These images were to show people some of the inspiration for the project.

The one thing that I really thought captured the battle of Pavia was having the walls surrounding the entire park. These walls really set the scene. I was really pleased with the appearance that they gave. However, it will be a long time before I am able to forget the hours spent cutting these walls from foam.

While the city of Pavia was the backdrop to the game, the Castello Mirabello was the center piece. The building was scratch built from foam.

The city of Pavia provided the backdrop to the game. At home the city looked massive. On the final table it did not look quite as big but was still impressive.

The above two images are the area that represents the Five Chapels. Again these buildings looked massive at home, but they did not overwhelm the table.

What follows are some other photos of some of the terrain details.

Convention game versus club game

A number of sacrifices were made to allow the game to be played as a convention game rather than a club game. These were made to allow 20 people unfamiliar with the rules to complete a game in four hours. If I were doing the game as a weekend club game I would make a number of changes.

The main compromise was that all of the imperial forces were in the park at the start of Turn 1. This was to allow each player to get into the fight quickly. For the same reason I also deployed the troops of the Duke D’Alencon a lot closer to Mirabello than I would have liked. Ideally they would have been closer to Pavia. The French Gendarmes were also able to move on Turn 1. In the actual battle they took time to get their armor on and mount up.

The upside was that everyone was fighting quickly. The downside was that unlike the actual battle troops were not slowly fed into the fight. I would have preferred that the arquebusiers under the Marquis del Vasto had more time to reach Mirabello before they had to deal with the French Gendarmes.

Slowing everything down would have given more time for the light cavalry battle to take place before the larger Spanish and French units arrived.

Also slowing the game down by limiting the speed that the Imperial forces could file through the wall would have given more time for the French Gendarme battle against the Spanish knights to play out before the landsknechts came into play. There were a lot of heavy cavalry and we really needed more time for this battle to play out.

However, given the limitations I would say that the vast majority of the players had a good time.

Things that went right.

I have seen many after action reports of other people playing the battle of Pavia. The project has been an obsession of mine so I have followed almost anything to do with gaming Pavia. The vast majority of the these have had French victories and declare that it is almost impossible for the Spanish to win on the table top.

After running the game five times at Historicon, I have to respectfully disagree. The Imperial forces won four of the battles and the other one was a draw.

If both forces were facing off in an open field with good ground, the superior numbers and superior quality of the French Gendarmes would make it almost impossible for the Spanish to win. However, that was not the case at Pavia. The terrain confined the movement of the Gendarmes and the February weather made the ground muddy. As the battle went on this mud became worse. Putting rules in that reflected the mud, giving reduced movement and reduced ability for the Gendarmes to defend themselves as they fought on the same ground, really influenced the result. Gendarmes slowly diminished from elite troops to very average troops and the Imperial arquebusiers were easily able to finish them off.

By accounting for both the terrain constraints and the mud, we were able to replicate the actual battle very well.

Also remembering that the Swiss at Pavia, were not the same quality of Swiss at Marignano and Bicocca was important. Giving them realistic stats certainly helped the game be successful.

Photos.

I have done a video after action report that can be viewed here.

This video gives an overview of the history and how the battle developed on the table. For this reason I will not give an after action report here. Instead I will post a number of photos for your viewing pleasure. The images are in no particular order as they come from across the five games that we played.

Conclusions

This project has been my main project for the last two years. Running the game five times at Historicon was great fun but completely exhausting. I was honored to be awarded Best of Show at the convention.
It is time to pack up the Italian Wars and move on to other projects. Although the Italian Wars will come back out in a few years time – possibly the Battle of Marignano. For now though, these are my final thoughts about the Battle of Pavia.

For now I am moving onto the 1813 Battles of Grossbeeren and Dennewitz. I will also be looking at modern drone and electronic warfare in the Ukraine.

Here is a quick video after action report of the Pavia games at Historicon. The video covers the historical background to the battle, the layout of the battlefield and the inspiration behind the project (the Pavia tapestries). It then gets into the table top battle which is an amalgamation of the five games that we ran.

Here is also a quick overview photo of the game. This weekend I will do a wrap up of the Pavia project with lots of photos and a discussion of the results and recommendations for running the battle.

I am now coming down to the final admin tasks for the project. One of the most important is to prepare the Pavia unit data sheets.

I have a number of requirements for the data sheets:

• Ideally each player should be able to accomplish most of the tasks with one double sided, laminated data sheet.
• The data sheets should be easy to read and clear.
• The data sheets should include all units under that player’s command. I don’t want players having multiple data sheets for different units.
• The data sheets should be in the theme of the game, be colorful and good looking.

I also wanted to have the name of their commander and a photo of the commander model on the top of the data sheet for easy recognition.

The front of the data sheet has stats for each of the units under the player’s command. The reverse side has the key rules with modifiers – essentially a Quick Reference Sheet with most the stuff the player needs to run the game.

There will also be some secondary sheets with some of the other key rules and the break test on the back. There will be about eight of these secondary sheets around the table for when players need them. However, for probably 90% of the game, the single sheet will be enough.

Example of unit data sheets.

Below is an example of the front of the data sheet. You can see the commanders name, command rating, image and the value he adds when he joins a unit.

Underneath are the two types of unit he commands with their stats.

At the bottom are details of the special rules pertaining to the units under his command.

On the reverse will be the key rules for the game.

The two pages are then laminated back to back.

Data sheet file

Here is a file with all of the data sheets for each of the commanders.

I am now ready to go with the completion of my Pavia unit data sheets. You will note that there are a few custom rules in some of the data sheets. The main ones are for large pike blocks and the effect of mud at Pavia. In my after action reports I will discuss how these rules influenced the game.

My next post will come after Historicon with an after action report. The convention starts in nine days time and as soon as the table is set up I will post photos in various hobby FaceBook groups.

At the time of writing this post, Historicon is less than two weeks away. The only major task left to do is print out and laminate the unit stat sheets, although I may make another fifty trees if time permits. I am now in the stage of Final preparations for Pavia.

With the weather being good this weekend I wanted to layout all of the terrain mats to check that everything fits together and to lay the park walls out on them to ensure that they are all the correct length. This post will show the images of this test layout. I know that the subject matter is not overly exciting, but it was a job that needed doing. It also gives an overall impression of the size of this project. In two weeks time I will be posting a lot of images of the final set up at Historicon. That should provide a lot more eye candy for regular readers.

The layout.

A number of post back I presented a drawing of my table design for the terrain mats. To save scrolling back, here is that drawing again:

This drawing shows the terrain mats that I will use for the park. There are another two terrain mats that I will use for the city of Pavia and the Five Chapels area. Each of the terrain mats are 4′ x 6′ giving a total playing area of 168 sqft.

In the drawing the brown areas are muddy areas that will be used for the woods. The green areas are the more open areas. The blue area at the top center is the Vernavolo stream.

The park mats.

The following images show the terrain mats for the park. I laid out the park walls and the Castello Mirabello to check how things fitted. There is a lot more terrain to go on the table, but it wasn’t necessary to lay it all out for a test fitting. I really liked the look of the brown areas of the woods verses the more open green areas. This difference should really pop once the trees are laid out.

This first image shows the overall layout with the walls and the Castello Mirabello. It was lucky that I did the layout as one or two of the wall sections needed a little trimming to fit correctly. After the photos I made the required adjustments to the walls. To show the shear size of the table the next image shows the walls with a 28mm figure. The above photos don’t really capture the size of the walls.

On the subject of scale, the Castello Mirabello is a huge terrain item, occupying an area of 26″ x 26″. In the first photo it looks like a small item, but the next image shows a close up.

The final image shows the walls where the Vernavolo leaves the park.

For this section I modeled the wall on the image of the same area in the Pavia tapestries.

Mats for the city of Pavia and the Five Chapels

The final two mats are for the city of Pavia and the Five Chapels. You will notice that in the top right corner there is the edge of a river. This is the Ticono and I will place the famous pontoon bridge from the Pavia tapestries across this river.

Summary of Final preparations for Pavia

The Final preparations for Pavia are now in the how stretch. It will be great to see how everything comes together on the table at Historicon. This test fit of the mats has given me a lot of confidence that everything will fit and that there will be space for movement and a good game. If you have signed up to play at Historicon, I look forward to seeing you there.

I will be posting a load of photos in a couple of weeks time.

Although there are still a few things to complete on the 28mm Castello Mirabello model for my Pavia game, I wanted to check that everything was fitting together. I took the opportunity to take a few photos of the current state of the building.

The inspiration for the model was from current photos of the building, older sketches of the building and the battle of Pavia tapestries. Although it is not a perfect representation it is a stylized version that fits on a 28″ x 28″ area. If I had tried to do a larger footprint, it would have taken up too much of the tabletop.

The inspiration

The following images show some of the inspiration for the project.

The model

The model includes the main building, two outbuildings, the entrance, a tower, a drawbridge and a moat. Previous posts have discussed making the buildings. The drawbridge was a modified Sarissa product.

Work to do on the 28mm Castello Mirabello

I still have some work to do on the main gate of the 28mm Castello Mirabello. You will notice that the turret tops are still not complete or painted. I also need to put some water lilies in the moat.

The last of the Pavia commanders arrived this week. They were commission painted for me by Sijie Hao. I think that you will agree, he has done an excellent job. This post is going to be short on words as I just want to show photos of each of the 22 command bases. Here they are in no particular order:

With time winding down on the Pavia project, there are still about 100 figures to paint and a lot of terrain to build before the game goes on the table at Historicon in July. This post shows some of the recent project developments.

Antonio de Leyva

Antonio de Leyva commanded the garrison of the city of Pavia. I really wanted to have him represented for my Battle of Pavia game. One interesting thing about him was that he had severe gout. He therefore needed his aides to take a chair for him to sit on wherever he went.

I spoke to Sijie Hao about whether he would be interested in creating a vignette for me depicting Leyva, his aides and a chair. This post is very short but shows an image that he used for inspiration and the final command base.

There are some more command bases coming and I will post images of these once they arrive.

Heavy cavalry

I also made a lot of progress on both the Imperial and French heavy cavalry during the last month. I still have about 14 heavy cavalry figures left to complete, but the following images show the bulk of the units. It should be remembered that I also have a huge amount of light cavalry in addition to these figures.

All of the cavalry in the images below are from SteelFist Miniatures. I shudder to think how much time I have spent painting these figures.

I have kept the Gendarmes and Archers on separate bases. The Gendarmes are on one base in the front rank. There are then two bases of Archers behind each Gendarme base. This reflects that the Gendarmes usually wanted to lead the charge.

Items in progress for the Pavia project

This weekend I will be finishing the basing of the Pavia park walls and making progress on the trees for the game. I should have a further updates on the Pavia project soon.

I have been asked recently for a copy of my final order of battle for Pavia. Here is the latest version.

At the moment the Pavia tapestries are on a tour of the United States while their permanent home at the Museo di Capodimonte in Napoli is being refurbished. This last weekend I took a trip down to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to visit the tapestries. Seeing the tapestries in person was more impressive than I could have ever imagined. I spent four hours in total just admiring them. Every few minutes I found something new in them, despite having studied them in books for the best part of a year.

In this post I will first post picture of the complete tapestries and then I will point out five things that I observed in the tapestries that you may not see from a quick viewing.

The tapestries.

As the tapestries are huge, I used panoramic mode on my phone and walked along the length of the tapestries to get the images. This meant that the image is flat like the tapestries themselves. One downside is that some of the border needs to be cropped.

Five interesting items in the Pavia tapestries

In this section I will highlight five things that I found interesting on the tapestries. Some are useful from a gaming perspective. Others are just things that appealed to me. I will probably follow this post up with another five later in the month.

1. The Imperial Light Cavalry

I have chose to model the Imperial Light Cavalry as Spanish Jinetes. However, in the tapestries I also saw what appeared to be some eastern stradiot type cavalry on the Imperial side. The first picture shows the typical Stradiot type hat. The second two picturse show a turban type headwear, which I have not seen in the Italian wars before.

2) Cavalry identification slashes

I was aware that the Imperial infantry had white and red identification slashes as shown in the first picture. I was not aware that the cavalry also had them, as evidenced by the second picture.

3) Sconces

The sconces on the imperial side were shown as different to those on the French side. The imperial sconces defending Pavia had slits in the sides and looked like a more permanent structure. Those on the French side, surrounding the city, did not.

4) Pikes versus cavalry

The general consensus seems to be that unless pikes are in a block, they are of little use in a more skirmish type roll. This picture shows individual pikes in combat.

5) Always a good time for a barbecue

While the fighting was going on at Mirabello, the hog was still roasting.

Summary

Visiting the Pavia tapestries was a highlight of the year. I would certainly recommend that anyone in the United States takes advantage of the situation and visits them while they are still in Houston.