Sengoku Jidai - The question of control

Pike & Shot and the recently released Sengoku Jidai have a quite unique system: players have, under certain conditions, limited control of their units. Entire regiments can be locked in close combat and the player won’t be able to order to disengage. This becomes even more evident when an enemy unit routs as the consequence of a charge and the player’s unit continues its charge independently from the player’s wishes.

The author of Sengoku Jidai

Shadow of the Shogun and Pike & Shot Campaigns, Richard Bodley Scott, explains the reasons behind his decisions. In the days when battles were decided by hand-to-hand combat it was largely impossible for a commander to successfully order a unit to disengage and go and do something else. In fact, in the rare cases where this was attempted, it often led to a mass panic as neighbouring units thought that the retreating unit was broken and themselves broke as a result. Even the Romans, who reportedly had a system of line replacements (although nobody has yet figured out satisfactorily how this worked) only replaced one unit with the one immediately behind it (if indeed they did so). The replaced unit did not then go off and do something else. Likewise it was normal for troops who routed their opponents in close combat to pursue the enemy at least for some distance before being brought back under control. What led you to implement such a feature? Would you say you were inspired by any particular game or system? I have been playing Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance tabletop minatures games since 1971. Loss of control of units in close combat is normal in such games, as is units pursuing routed enemy (except in some rather abstracted systems such as DBx). This is because those games are based as closely as possible on the history and this was normal behaviour for troops in the era before battles were decided almost entirely by shooting. Pike and Shot and Sengoku Jidai follow the tradition of tabletop miniatures games, without all the hassle of collecting and painting figurines. Would you say that it adds to the realism of the game? Certainly it does. What notable examples from history are there of this occurring? There are countless historical examples of pursuits getting out of hand and troops either not returning to the fray soon enough to influence the result of the battle, or themselves being routed in their turn by enemy reserves.

To name a few

At the Battle of Magnesia in 190 BC, the victorious Seleucid right wing, under the command of King Antiochos in person, pursued the routed Roman left wing as far as the Roman camp, and failed to come back in time to save the rest of the Seleucid army, resulting in a decisive Seleucid defeat. During the Imjin War the Japanese used the Korean and Ming cavalry’s tendency to pursue in a disorganized fashion to lure them into a trap and destroy them at the Battles of the Imjin River and Byeokjegwan. In the English Civil War the Royalists lost several battles because their victorious cavalry pursued for several miles right off the battlefield and failed to return in time to influence the infantry fight. At the battle of Waterloo the Scots Greys completed their objective of routing the French 1st Corps, but then carried on without orders to Napoleon’s Grand battery, only to be counter charged by French cavalry and routed. How does this feature affect the tactical depth