Nov 26, 2012

Virtual tercios

I know, two posts a day, but I was just thinking about how to represent a tercio as a whole in Cossacks for some of my solo games. After some google'ing I found how it was built up. Now the problem is I would need two different type of shooters, musketeers and arquebisiers. Only Swiss have arquebisiers in the game, so that is a no go. I've put another nation's musketeers into the formation, namely Portuguese (who can be mistaken for Spaniards from a distance, so their presence is more plausible). As the 'musketeers' make up the front of the formation, my impression was they needed to be heavier, so the Spanish musketeers with their extra armor took that role.

As bulky as it looks (cannot fit into a whole screen), it maneuvers quite well.

The Cossacks: Back to War tercio is made up of:
  • 2x 196 men bodies of pike
  • 1x72 and 6x36 bodies of 'arquebisiers'
  • 1x72 musketeers,
a total of 752 men, a good half of the original. If you can't 'upgrade' to the 18th century, you usually get stuck at about 3 thousand population limit, which, in a good case, means you can field 3 such tercios, or 2 tercios plus artillery and cavalry, and you still have enough workforce to stop them from starving and let them have enough gold, iron and coal to do their job.

This is a smaller version, counting to

  • 2x72 men bodies of pike,
  • 6x15 and 1x36 men bodies of 'arquebus'
  • 1x36 musketeers,
totaling to 306 men, less than a half of the 'big tercio', but I think the aim is to make them big and ugly as they were. I can see no trouble in fielding 5-6 of these with sufficient cavalry and artillery support (at least logistics-wise. I think moving them around would be a major pain in the bum).

In American Conquest, the next generation of RTSes made by this team, there is a distinction between arquebisiers and musketeers, but the Spanish don't have pikemen, they have halberdiers instead - well, the role is quite the same. This is a 'big' tercio again, and it moves like a snail on marijuana. Looks nice on the field tho.

American Conquest also has a bird's eye view. 

If there is enough interest, I'll try these in battle later on, seeing how they manage mobility-wise and how they stand against smaller formations.


  1. Now that would convert to an awful lot of lead!

    1. 750+ figs, let's see, even in plastic... I think it would be just cheaper to hire mercenaries and build up a real one.

    2. Hi Andrew,

      that looks really good. In a real battle I am wondering how it would have changed with the pressure from several sides.


    3. Thanks for the comment. We'll arrange a battle soon and test it.