Cortés/Alvarado/Pizarro

[Deuce]

Why is there no Spanish list to fight the Central and South Americans?

[Rod]

I would suggest that David K should comment, but my take is that the Spanish were never present in significant enough numbers to represent what we would consider to be a Triumph army battle with a Spanish force.

So for example in Mexico there were battles between the Aztec and "Spanish" were actually battles between large numbers of Central American tribes with a relatively small contingent of Spanish troops on one side. The other incidents were more like 30-40 soldiers taking over entire empires by taking out the leader in what might be more suitable to a skirmish game (Inca encounters come to mind).

So if you wanted to represent that force in the scale of a triumph battle, you might have a single stand representing all the Spanish as an elite foot General (maybe even Pavise or knights to show off the impact of there fire power or horses?) heading an army of Tlaxcalans.

[Deuce]

Thanks for the quick answer.

I was actually thinking it would mostly consist of Indian Allies too.

Another option might be Allied contingents of Spanish for Mayans, Tlaxcallans, and Aztecs.

[Rod]

We are currently working on the Fantasy Triumph! draft which is in beta testing now. In Fantasy Triumph! we have "heroes", which could be for example Gandalf or Conan, an individual so powerful that it has a significant impact on the battlefield.

These are actually individuals that add characteristics to or enhance a standard unit. They are typically placed on a 1MU round base and then when attached to a normal stand they add their ability to that stand. Alone they cannot interact with enemy stands and in fact can be overrun if caught out in the open by an enemy stand if moving for example on their own to another part of the battle.

Why do I mention it here? Well for example in Fantasy Triumph! we have a battle card called "Deadly" it adds +1/+1 to your combat factors, which can be purchased for 2 points and added to a stand or to a hero (think Conan for example). This is effectively what the normal General's unit gets in regular historical Triumph! So when Conan (or Corte's band) is attached to a unit they fight at a +1.

To me the Conquistador effect is almost more like that in that this small band of steel clad / harquebus armed guys might be the equivalent of a "hero" moving about the battlefield adding deadly to any stand of Tlaxcallans they were attached too, but if caught alone and in the open by a stand representing say 10,000 aztecs, well then maybe they just go poof.

The other thing that comes to mind is "Terror" which causes enemies to panic if they lose instead of just falling back. Think about the Spanish horse impact because initially it freaked the locals out who had never seen one.

Just me musing about another possible way to sneak in some Conquistadores on an appropriate scale.

DK, once used something similar to represent Thorin's party for example charging out of the mountain to help in The Battle of Five Armies. It was before the hero concept was flushed out, but the concept is these individuals for whatever reason have an oversized impact on the battlefield relative to their numbers.

[Rod]

And yes a very small allied contingent is certainly possible too.

[David Kuijt]

Why is there no Spanish list to fight the Central and South Americans?

Sorry about the delayed response -- I'm on vacation in beautiful British Columbia, where the haze from the forest fires barely obscures the moon.

As Rod says. The total number of Conquistadors was microscopic -- in the one battle I remember, maybe 100 total out of an army numbering many 10s of thousands. That's nothing.

Rod's suggestion of using Fantasy Triumph "Hero" stands to represent the conquistador group (or making them a Leader if they never changed from one unit to another -- a leader is a hero that don't move, basically) is probably the best way to represent them. The triple alliance did not fall to the military might of the conquistadors, and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. (Which is exactly why the Conquistadors told everyone different -- they were trying to sell something).

[Deuce]

For what’s it’s worth, they had 1000 Spaniards at the Siege of Tenochtitlan (plus many thousand Tlaxcala’s allies.

I disagree that it wasn’t a military conquest. Granted there were other factors (Divine intervention?), but battles, sieges, and alliances were critical.

Alvarado went to Guatemala with 400 Spanish and 10,000 Mexicans.

This brings up an interesting question. What does a stand represent? Is the Thebes Sacred Band (300 guys) represented by the elite unit in the Theban list?

[David Kuijt]

For what’s it’s worth, they had 1000 Spaniards at the Siege of Tenochtitlan (plus many thousand Tlaxcala’s allies.

I disagree that it wasn’t a military conquest. Granted there were other factors (Divine intervention?), but battles, sieges, and alliances were critical.

Be careful with your cite -- I didn't say it wasn't a military conquest. I said:

The triple alliance did not fall to the military might of the conquistadors

One of the battles involved 40,000 or so enemies of the triple alliance -- and a microscopic admixture of conquistadors. That's a military battle, and that's (as you say) critical, but it isn't the military might of the conquistadors that makes the difference. You cannot argue that the fear of the horse (for example) or of gunpowder (for another example) had any significant impact on a battle where only one enemy in 100 or 1000 would have any chance of SEEING a horse or a musket in the whole battle.

I agree, battles, sieges, and alliances were critical. At the Siege of Tenochtitlan you mention -- Tenochtitlan was at the time a city of more than 200,000 people (maybe as many as 350,000 people). 1000 Spaniards (many of whom are probably not front-line soldiers, at a guess) couldn't have held a siege on a city that size with assault rifles, much less single-shot unrifled matchlocks. They didn't have enough GUNPOWDER to do any significant damage to a town of 350,000 people, not if the population lined up and closed their eyes.

This brings up an interesting question. What does a stand represent?

It's an interesting question we decline to precisely answer. Because it is different from one army to the next. We want to have a battle game where you can play with your army, and I can play with my army, across the span of military action before the period of Pike and Shot. But the battle of Aylesford in England might have had at most 1000 combatants, maybe 1200. And no King of Mercia ever could field 1000 fighting men in a single place at a single time. Some of the battles of Alexander the Great and his successors, on the other hand, are arguably the largest battles before Leipzig (1813 AD in the Napoleonic Period) -- they might have had hundreds of thousands of combatants. 100 times as many as Aylesford.

So yes, stand scale is not exact. That is deliberate. If you go with rigid stand scale, most battles between unmatched combatants cannot work because of issues of figure scale. Because if the stand scale is, for example, 500 men, and I field an army of 100,000 Persians (a big army, but not unusual, for the Persians) and you field an army of 500 Raiding Vikings (one of the largest ever fielded by them), I have 200 stands and cannot even deploy them all, you have 1 stand, the game isn't much fun for either of us.

There are other issues with stand scale. The Polybian Roman army fought in Spain, against Carthage, in Gaul, in Italy, in Macedon, and expanded into most of the Mediterranean. Its armies were not all the same size -- they changed through time (increasing) and with different theaters. If you have a standard stand scale, then battles fought during the conquest of Iberia require a different Roman list than battles fought against Carthage. And so on. Because they never used their full strength against Spanish tribes -- not the number of men they committed against Carthage. There are already several Polybian Roman lists -- that would require up to dozens more. Where we really don't have the information we need to make a good army list because we don't have good estimates of numbers.

Numbers estimates are the most BS data that the ancients pass down to us -- Rome was always outnumbered by the Gauls? Total BS. Good PR for Julius C, though. Numbers estimates for the enemy are always modified to make a better story, or to get paid more.

Hope this helps answer your question.

[Rod]

I specifically did a video on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w1mbxWLvKw

As DK says, it is all relative.

So if you battle was between armies of 3,000 troops with a 300 or so being Conquistadores, that is a lot different from 300 in an army of 40,000 plus.

[Bill Hupp]

I prefer to do historically based battles. I like to see if I can get the scenario to ‘work’ historically with 48 point armies. That means there is an implied scale. I start with that, but it may mean, as Rod explains in his video that there may be too few elements to get down to some of the more interesting groupings and tactics from the historical narratives. As DK notes, these can be highly untrustworthy, but I think they are a good place to start.

I am starting to think 96 points with the standard sized battlefield might be good for some historical battles.

It is fun experimenting and you get some good games in too.

I’m currently working on The Battle of Lewes, the Battle of Leuctra, and the Battle of Bosworth.