The Viereckstal Campaign. Chapter 5

In which the battle moves on and I push my camera settings.

I have this week off work, bringing the opportunity to push along the campaign before an enforced pause later in the month. Today I played through a further three turns of the assault on Flaschendorf. As these three turns all began with the first card in the deck being an ace, I took the hint and decided the last of this turns would be a special event and it seemed appropriate for the weather to intervene. This allowed each army to reposition under cover of a heavy snowstorm (it is January in Tattemberg) without being troubled by significant shooting by the other side.

The result was the Gallian forces of General Croquaumerde falling back from the town to reform in a defensive line on the ridge to the north. This afforded their artillery a clear line of fire if the Tattembergers advances beyond the town and would also bring the hussars into play. Of course the "by the book" Kurzenpilz had no intention of imprudent offensive action and elected to consolidate control of the town first. Falkensteyn's leichte brigade concentrated among the buildings wit the musketeer battalion and less-battered half of the light battalion facing north while the remaining light infantry and the Lieb grenadiers were held in reserve to recover from the action of the last few hours. To the right of town the fusilier brigade of Kodenchypz formed on the north bank of the river after crossing the bridge. Their far right was protected by a company of jager who had bravely waded across the icy water to occupy an area of rough ground that would give protection from the enemy hussars if they got a little frisky. From the left came the cavalry of Bittert's brigade, forming column to cross the bridge, while the dismounted Weisspferd dragoons held station with their accompanying jager company to pepper the Gallian left wing with harassing fire.

The aggressive personalities of the Gallian commanders means they are willing to fight hard for every metre of ground, but they do now have a chance to pull back to find better defensive terrain that would help to even the odds and give time for reinforcements to arrive from Vierecksbrucke.

While I had some time, I experimented with the camera settings on my phone. I deployed by tripod and using a slow shutter speed (2 seconds) and a 30 second timer to reduce shake I was quite pleased with some of the pictures I managed to get. One thing I did discover was that quite sharp pictures immediately lost detail if edited within the Camera+ app I had used to take them, so it was better to export them directly into my photos on the cloud and crop them in the standard iPhone photos app. Seems weird, bit there you go. I didn't twig this at first, so the photos here are mix of ones edited in different ways.

First we have the situation at the start of this batch of game turns, as we left things at the end of chapter 4 part 2.