Above: Battle of Crécy 1346, the second French charge. Illustration by Graham Turner. © Osprey Publishing Ltd. Taken from Crecy 1346 by David Nicolle, CAM 71.
Hindsight is usually a wonderful thing. In historical wargames, however, it can be a positive nuisance! If players know the outcome of an historical battle and know the mistakes the generals made, they can avoid them in a way that the original combatants could not.
Take the Battle of Crécy (1346). Never having experienced the power of massed longbowmen, the mounted French knights, who vastly outnumbered the English knights facing them, charged frontally. They were mown down by archery so that by the time any of them reached the dismounted English knights, they had no chance of success. Adding in the consideration that the English archers had dug pits in front of their positions, and that the French attacks were piecemeal, uncoordinated and uphill, an English victory seems inevitable with 21st century hindsight. On the other hand a French victory would have seemed inevitable to all of the Frenchmen and probably many of the Englishmen when battle commenced on 26 August 1346.