Banish All Their Fears: Bayonet & Musket Battles, Volume 1

TheBayonet & Musketseries will cover the period of the War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697, and the War of the Spanish Succession, 1702-1714. In western Europe, the figure of the great King of France, Louis XIV, dominated the scene, leading a newly united and energetic France to expand and secure its frontiers into Germany, Spain, northern Italy, and the Spanish Netherlands, a course which ran into the natural opposition of Great Britain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch United Provinces.

Larger national armies, reinforced by a multitude of German allies and hired troops, far exceeded anything seen before in Europe; the battles of Steenkirk (1692) and Malplaquet (1709) were the largest fought on the continent before the coming of Napoleon. Great generals emerged on both sides—for the French, the Duke of Luxembourg and the Duke of Berwick and the Marquis du Vauban, one of the greatest of all military engineers. Against them came the Imperial Prince Eugene of Savoy, and the finest commander of the age, the Duke of Marlborough.

Larger armies and the primacy of firepower mean significant changes for the familiarMusket & Pikegame system: