After playing two highly defensive battles with minimal manoeuvring I acted upon the advice of a more experienced player given via Discord and picked Poitiers as my next battle. I’m glad I took that person’s advice, at Poitiers the French let me try my hand at some dynamic movements and a dramatic flanking attack – even if the English still ended up being reactionary and defensive for the most part.
Poitiers has long fascinated me. A triumphant victory for the Black Prince (I’ll just note here that he was not known by that name during his lifetime) and the capture of King Jean II of France. Jean II joined his Scottish ally King David II, who had been captured at Neville’s Cross in 1346, at the English court. The ransom for Jean II significantly enriched the English crown’s coffers and allowed them to negotiate the very favourable Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 – a treaty in which Edward III exchanged his claim to the French throne for more French territory than its own king had. If the Hundred Years War had ended there it would be remembered as an English triumph – but of course it didn’t, and all those gains would be gone within a century.
Peace negotiations have failed, the armies have lined up for battle.
My recreation of the Battle of Poitiers didn’t exactly match the historic outcome – the French initiated a flanking attack that slowly eroded the English position, eventually forcing them to flee the field while Jean II watched the whole thing from a safe distance. My experience left me with a few thoughts about the battle specifically and Men of Iron as a game. Please bear with me, this one gets a little long.
Audrehem and Clermont’s units lead a surprisingly effective reckless charge into the English lines while the rest of their Battle moves towards a flanking attack on the English right.
Jean II’s lack of involvement in the battle reflects one of my issues with some of the scenarios in Men of Iron. In Poitiers and Agincourt, the back ranks of the French armies really didn’t get involved at all – the entire conflict was fought and decided by the first two Battles. At Agincourt there was at least an opportunity for the third Battle to get involved but I chose another strategy, while at Poitiers I ignored the third Battle, commanded by Orleans, because of the special rule that they would break and flee the battle once the casualties started mounting. That rule is interesting in principle and reflects the fact that the commander was a novice, but in practice it means that I activated the Battle only to get them out of the way in case Jean II needed to advance. I know it would have deviated from history, but had they been the front Battle and thus already engaged then the decision about whether to activate them or not would have been a tense game decision, but in practice I activated them once and then pretended they weren’t there.
Audrehem and Clermont’s initial success is fleeting - one is killed the other retires to the standard and the English close their lines again. Meanwhile the French vanguard continues to move to the English right flank. Unlike their historical counterparts, they did not dismount making the movement much faster.
This issue with the rear Battles also reflects a slight issue with the history of Poitiers. Poitiers was a long battle, so long that by some accounts they took breaks, and the English archers actually went out and retrieved arrows they had already shot because ammunition was running so low. In my game, Poitiers was relatively quick and since the rear Battles never got involved it felt like it was probably a conflict decided in the opening couple of hours. It was an interesting way in which the timescale the game attempts to portray doesn’t always line up with the feel of the game as it is played.
The French flanking attack begins with remarkable success thanks to some effective crossbow fire and lucky charge attack rolls. Several French Men-At-Arms are disorganised as a result of the attack, but they have crossed the hedges and ditch in several places.
There’s a tension of sorts in wargame design around how desirable it is that they reliably produce the historical outcome, and it’s something I have thought about a lot in my time with Men of Iron. In two-thirds of my games so far history has changed. The French have triumphed in two battles they famously lost, while being completely crushed in another. What I’ve been thinking about specifically is not whether or not my game results reflect Men of Iron as a simulation of history, but rather how our perception of these battles is formed. Poitiers and Agincourt are famous English victories, triumphs against larger armies by scrappy English commanders on foreign soil. The legend around them, along with similar battles like Crécy or Bannockburn, have become so large that it can be easy to assume their result was inevitable and overlook how close some of these battles were.
The Black Prince leads a successful counter charge, pushing the French back and forcing several men-at-arms to retire to their standard.
Part of this is down to an aspect of medieval warfare that not everyone is aware of. Casualties in battle were actually fairly uncommon – relatively few soldiers and very few nobles were actually killed during the main fighting. In Men of Iron, the frequency with which you get Retired results, where units retreat to their standard and count as eliminated for victory purposes until a player spends an entire activation rallying them, kind of reflects how soldiers were difficult to actually kill, but I’m not convinced it’s a great model for history either. Most casualties in a medieval battle happened in the pursuit, the bit that followed the total breakdown in morale on one side of the conflict. The victorious army would ride out hacking down their enemies as they fled. This is the reason why reported casualties for medieval battles are often very one sided – with the winner suffering few losses. I think this can mislead people into believing that there was no other option than that the winner would emerge triumphant. Your instinct is to expect that in a close battle casualties would be comparably even, not completely one sided.
France’s second Battle, lead by the Dauphin, engages with the English line with some effect. Meanwhile the crossbowmen on the right flank pepper the English with shots and force several of them back. At the very back, some lucky Continuation rolls let Orleans’ Battle move forward and out of the way in case Jean II needs to get involved.
I think some parts of Men of Iron do a decent job of capturing this aspect of warfare or attempting to. The fact that victory is determined by flight points, and that Retired units count towards flight points, does reflect that you generally won by your enemy fleeing the field. The special rules for Courtrai that mean that Mounted Men-At-Arms run the risk of dying outright if they retreat from the ditches and across the river was inspired by the fact that at the real battle many of the French knights drowned in their armour while attempting to retreat. Overall, I think a full discussion of the accuracy of a game like Men of Iron in replicating the historic results of these battles must also involve a more in-depth discussion in how likely the historical outcome was in the first place – after all if the English victory at a certain battle was a fluke or lucky result, then shouldn’t a truly accurate historical game deliver a French victory more often than not? I don’t have the answers to these questions now, but they’ve been bouncing around in my head all week, so I thought I’d try inflicting them on you too!
The Dauphin’s attack falters in the center but he consolidates his position along what was the right end of the English lines. English longbowmen begin to encircle the French position on the left while dismounted Hobilars bring their crossbows to bear on the French right flank. The number of Retired French units around the standards grows.
All that having been said, I do want to do a little nit-picking if you’ll forgive me. I think missile troops in Men of Iron are too powerful. At Both Agincourt and Poitiers, they were one of the key factors in the French victory, and they were still pretty consequential in Courtrai despite their small number. As a historian of medieval archery, I obviously have a lot of thoughts about how the game models it.
I want to start with what I really like. The initial table for archery attacks is great – on a 0-4 you do nothing and on a 5-9 you flip the unit over to their Disordered side, making them more vulnerable to future attacks. I think this is a great model for how medieval archery, especially the longbow, was used. It was a weapon of disruption first and killing second. Pre-gunpowder missile weapons were not great at penetrating medieval armour. This was especially true after the widespread adoption of plate armour over the fourteenth century but even before then there are numerous accounts of soldiers surviving multiple arrow shots thanks to their armour. That’s not to say that bows and crossbows were never fatal, they absolutely delivered lethal results, but it is also worth remembering that many famous warriors were wounded by a bow or crossbow but survived. Henry V took an arrow to the face at Shrewsbury in 1403 and Joan of Arc was wounded twice in her short career - once besieging Orleans and more severely at the Siege of Paris. Richard I was famously killed by a crossbow, but he had actually been wounded by one during the Third Crusade and recovered, and even for his death it was the infection rather the bolt itself that killed him. This is not to say that bows and crossbows were ineffective, but they also had their limitations. Also relevant to this discussion is the scale of Men of Iron - each chit is meant to represent a large number of soldiers, so even if occasional individuals were killed by archery it would be very rare for an entire unit to be wiped out.
The French redouble their attack in the centre, eliminating several English archers in the process and making significant gains.
With that in mind, I have issues with what happens when missile troops shoot at already disordered units. They are lethally effective, meaning that barrages of missiles are a super effective way to pick off heavily armoured and otherwise tough to kill soldiers. Exactly the kind of troops that you would historically have needed to smash repeatedly in melee are most vulnerable to arrows and bolts in Men of Iron. Given my own tendencies, I would probably have preferred it if archers in Men of Iron were incapable of delivering lethal results to heavily armoured soldiers but that may be taking things too far the other way.
I also think it misses the other key role of medieval missile fire – forcing your enemy to attack you. Barrages of missiles may not have been consistently lethal, but they could maim and at minimum they were extremely unpleasant and irritating. Even when they didn’t penetrate armour, the impact of a longbow or crossbow on plate could easily leave bruises. There was only so long that a medieval soldier would stand and take that before trying to do something about it – either moving out of range or moving forward to deal with the problem. Obviously, their commander usually preferred the latter. This was a key element that allowed the English to force the French to attack them so often, letting the English make the most of their defensive positions.
The French begin pushing through the centre and manage to turn the right flank. The English archers continue to envelope the French left flank. The hedges are now thoroughly trampled along the centre of the battle. The English are forced to Rally their few Retired units.
Men of Iron puts a clock on the French to try and force them to attack the English defensive position even though tactically it obviously is not a good decision. Imagine if instead the English longbows were able to force the French player to act. I would be very interested in seeing a game where instead of forcing units to retreat you could use longbows to force them to advance. If you could make them Disordered and then advance, isolating them from their companions and leaving them open to attack, I think that would both be very interesting and better capture how these medieval battles worked.
The English archers have now fully encircled the Dauphin’s left flank but the French attack in the centre continues unabated. The attack on the right has stalled somewhat but the French have numerical superiority.
Men of Iron already has something like this – it is generally not optional to advance into the space left by a retreating enemy unit, and the highest results on the combat table can force you to keep attacking as you follow. This can result in units advance out of their command range and almost always in my games resulted in the loss of a much more advantageous position due to the recklessness of my successful melee troops. I think this system is brilliant and I wish the archery was similarly good at capturing the chaos and uncontrollable nature of medieval troops. To be fair, there is a system for mounted units to counter charge when under attack by missile fire, but with very few mounted troops available in the battles I played – and in the one that did there were few archers and terrain that stopped charges – this hasn’t really come up. A cursory glance suggests that it is a rule that plays an important factor in the battles of Infidel, which will be interesting to explore in the future.
A final French push in the centre and on the right flank causes several more English units to Retire, resulting in the English breaking and fleeing the field. Victory of France, victory for Jean le Bon and the Dauphin!
This post went a little longer than expected and didn’t really say very much about Poitiers specifically, sorry about that! Despite my comments, Poitiers was probably the most fun I’ve had with Men of Iron yet. Being able to attempt a completely different method of attack for the French army was great and the game felt a lot more dynamic with interesting manoeuvring options. That said, I think after three games in pretty rapid sequence I need a bit of a break from Men of Iron, so I’m going to shelve it for the next little while and try something new! I’ve always wanted to play a block wargame…
Future Update: You can see my live play the Battle of Poitiers scenario, and get some of the rules wrong in the process, on the Homo Ludens YouTube channel!
Further Reading:
The Great Warbow by Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy
The Hundred Years War: A People’s History by David Green
The Battle of Poitiers 1356 by David Green (read my review here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/the-battle-of-poitiers-1356-by-david-green)
The Knight and the Blast Furnace by Alan Williams
Kelly Devries, “Catapults Are Not Atomic Bombs: Towards a Redefinition of 'Effectiveness' in Premodern Military Technology”, War in History vol. 4 (1997). 454-470