Campaign design 1815

I have been somewhat inspired to step into the world of napoleonic campaigning following a two part article in the wargames Illustrated magazine, issues March (423) and April (424).

Jervis Johnson, who put together the Valour & Fortitude rules (free on the Perry site) for napoleonic battles, has developed a campaign system that he has called Strategy & Guile.

The March issue of the magazine introduces us to Strategy & Guile, with the system and background notes and the April issue gives us a sample scenario for ‘The War of Liberation, 1813’.

Suitably taken by the whole thing, I set about writing up a battle game for the battle of Wavre 1815, intending to fight a one day battle, but using a campaign style game engine for the divisions / brigades to manoeuvre and fight over in the Wavre setting.

At the back of my mind is to run this as a 10 player, play by e-mail game for readers of this blog who may wish to get involved.

Anyway, I have burned the midnight oil over the past week, getting the form of this together and it looks like I have a workable game. 

To date I have created the map, got good orders-of-battle, created player briefing packages and have a system to underpin the management of orders, moving and fighting etc. The victory points have been worked out and I am into the fine tuning part now.

I will be using my (mostly unpainted) Warlord Games Epic French / Prussian forces, simply because there are enough in the starter boxes to cover the various unit types and numbers that I might need for the bigger battles.

I still haven’t decided which set of rules to go with. Front runners are Valour & Fortitude, Shadow of the Eagles, Black Powder and my own home brew rules.

As I think about this, there are three areas that I know the rules will need to deal with adequately; 

The various contacts that will be created in the game will run from patrol activity to divisional (or bigger) actions. 

Then as contacts happen, I am looking at how casualties and degrading of formation capability arising from the tabletop game can be carried over into permanent loss in the game, with unit capability reduced in an acceptable and sustainable way.

There will be quite a lot of contact made in areas that have hamlets, small villages and Wavre itself, so the handling of built up areas will be important.

So for example, Black Powder on the face of it, makes buildings quite tough, but the ‘ratings’ of buildings can be changed, which would be good when trying to highlight the difference between a small settlement and a big chunk of Wavre - though, as it takes a good while to eject units from buildings, you don’t so easily get that too and fro of villages being taken, lost, taken again and then lost again within the timeframe of a single action, though tweaking of any of the rules gets you closer to that sort of thing.

Anyway, as a ‘thing’ it is at a fairly advanced stage and perhaps making it ‘live’ is more dependent upon my mood of wanting to set aside the actual time needed to run an e-mail campaign, than anything else. My Germantown campaign game, to me at least, seemed very successful, the Midway proposition did not even get off the ground, so I will see what my fine tuning brings and hope that the enthusiasm remains high.

In the meantime, today, I did an exercise with Shadow of the Eagles rules (by Kieth Flint). The idea was to test a brigade (French) Vs Regiment (Prussian) level of engagement, with the capture of a small hamlet as the objective. What I wanted to see is how the attack on a BUA felt and at the end of play, what did the number of hits per unit look like and how that could or should translate into permanent damage for later in the campaign.

I selected two sample units from the campaign list. For the French, they had 1st Brigade (commanded by Dufour) from 11th Infantry Division, giving them 12th Line (2 battalions) and 56th Line (2 battalions). They also had the divisional artillery with them (17th Foot Artillery).

For the Prussians, they had 5th Kurmark Landwehr (commanded by Major von Welling) from 12th Infantry Brigade, giving them three battalions of landwehr, plus 35th Foot Artillery. 

The rules suggest that for 1815, the Prussian Landwehr will be 50% regular and 50% inferior. With three infantry units on the table, I chose to just make one of them inferior.

Anyway, this is the opening situation. I have chosen to represent battalions with 3 bases.

Click to enlarge

The French artillery didn’t do as much harm to the BUA as I thought it would. There was a -1 for range and another -1 for cover, so they needed to roll a 6 on 2 dice for hits, but a couple of hits did eventually get through (the pre-game bombardment didn’t give the attackers anything!).

Set on a 4’ x 3½’ table 

The two French line regiments advanced. On the left, the first battalion got roughly handled and had to fall back and the wing became something of a stalemate for a while

On the right, the 1st battalion of the French regiment, faced poor shooting by the defenders at the BUA and so were able to storm the BUA with relative ease. The defender result was to pull back 4” and suffer an additional hit.

This freed up the second French battalion on the right to go into column and attempt to cover the ground to attack the Prussian regiment that was sitting on the Prussian left, which was the ‘inferior’ unit and had already taken a hit from the artillery ….. but the French column was now operating beyond command range and had to test for each attempt to move towards the Prussians. 

A determined Prussian volley threw the French column back and this gave the Prussian unit enough space to disengage safely. With the BUA lost, the Prussians accepted that the time was right for a general retreat, leaving the French to hold the field and preserving as much of their own force as they could.

That all seemed to go quite well, it gave an enjoyable exercise and felt right.

In the game, units accrue hits and depending upon unit quality, at some point will receive enough hits to be declared weakened and then a few more hits will push them into rout. Units do get a chance to rally some of their hits off.

At the end of play, two Prussian battalions were weakened as was one French battalion. One other weakened French battalion had rallied back to good order and none of the units had taken enough hits to rout … though one from each side came close, before they broke contact and rallied a couple of hits off.

At the moment, I am thinking that a weakened unit in a battle should be given a permanent hit for the rest of the campaign, a unit at one hit below the rout level should be given 2 permanent hits and that a routed unit should be given a 50 / 50 chance of being either totally lost, or being given 2 permanent hits.

Anyway, on with the fine tuning. If I do put this up as a game and invite participants, I will of course give those who signed up to the Midway game (which didn’t get enough numbers to go ahead) an automatic opportunity to have a place in the game and as before, it will be names in the hat if there is an excess of interested gamers …. but it will be for a future post to call up for recruits! the above is just a design ramble :-)

Resource Section.

My sister webspace ‘COMMANDERS’ is being re-configured to showcase various figure and boardgame systems that I am enjoying and gives a flavour of where current projects are up to. Link.

https://commanders.simdif.com