Well - it all started off while painting a couple of French Napoleonic colonels and the thought occurred to give one of them a back story, so the task was to find a colonel of note. This would turn out to be Jean-Pierre-Antoine-Rey, Colonel of ‘Les Terribles’ 57th Infantry Line regiment.
With that done, next was to find an action from 1809 that involved him and the 57th.
Then the cock-up happened! It must have been very late at night together with a total absence of coffee, because my search instead picked up the Austrian IR57 - the 57th Line Infantry, I didn’t notice and as the search went deeper, the Battle of Mariazell popped up - an action unknown to me I must say.
There is quite scant information on the battle, even in our internet world, which drew me in all the more and sight was lost of the fact that I was now researching the wrong formation and the wrong battle. By the time I noticed, Mariazell had become so interesting and illusive that my determination to create a scenario based upon it, banished all thoughts of Colonel Rey and he went onto the back burner.
Trying to piece the battle together was absolutely fabulous and deliciously frustrating.It reminded me of the pleasures of research that was very much part of my younger years in gaming, which was pre-internet and you had to hang on to every word of every paragraph that you found in whatever text books you could get hold of, just trying to draw a new bit of information.
Anyway, I have put enough together to get a draft scenario for my next Soldiers of Napoleon game. SoN works to included some effects of what is happening off-board around you in the bigger battle, but this was an isolated battle, without interference from off-board flanks etc, everything happened in one small space, as an Austrian division under the command of Merveldt became separated from the general retreat following the Coalition disaster at Ulm 1809 and instead started marching towards the pursuing French!
Before Merveldt could correct the error, the French were upon him and he chose to make a stand at Mariazell.
The dynamics of the scenario are that the French advanced elements under Heudelet de Bierré were outnumbered 2:1 by the Austrians, but the Austrians had been on continuous retreat for days and were tired and of low morale. Would they crack or stand firm? That is the basis of the scenario build.
I am not fully familiar with Soldiers of Napoleon yet and it does have a process for scenario building, which I have tried to follow, so getting things like unit strengths right becomes important when working out points and the number of stands that units will comprise of. Break Points need to be worked out and then there is the question of building up the battlefield and whether to allow random placing of some terrain pieces. Orders for each side and what type of cards (a card driven game) that each side can, can’t or must use need consideration.
For Points the French ended up with 204 and the Austrians have 431, so we get the 2:1 ratio naturally without tweaking too much. The Break Point value for the French is 8 and 13 for the Austrians, but under the Special Rules, the French will get D3 extra Break Points as required by the 1809 army lists and before play, to recognise the low morale and losses of the retreating Austrians, every Austrian unit will roll D3 and suffer that many disruptions (bad!).
Will the fitter, smaller, French force defeat the bigger but more fragile Austrian force? I am hoping that the scenario is not as unbalanced as 2:1 suggests. The French in fact won the real battle and took a lot of prisoners, so we must hope that the game delivers something that gives the French the prospect of victory.
Anyway, I think I have come to something that should look and play right, that accords with everything that I have been reading. Pretty much most things had been worked out when I discovered that the Austrians had 12th Cuirassiers with them …… but what did they do? How fit were they after Ulm and the retreat? I just love this kind of stuff.
To deal with uncertainty surrounding the Cuirassiers, they will be classed as an off-board Austrian Reserve, slightly to the rear, to enter at some point over the first three turns. It is treating each new piece of evidence in ways that have character rather than being generic, that gives a scenario personality …... whether it is the right personality is best decided after a couple of play tests.
Building up six or so of these type of scenarios, that reflect the current strength of my armies seems a worthwhile thing to do. It will give a bank of familiar subjects for future games that can be played over and over if successful - they will in effect become as quick to get to the table as throw down games!.
It was really nice to return to doing a bit of deeper research. The process does give something that stands apart from either a point based ‘throw down’ representative game or relying on published scenarios that have been worked out by someone else. There is a real, dare I say Old School pleasure in pursuing all of this yourself, especially on the more obscure battles and really trying to get the detail right like it matters.
If the first playing shows the situation to be interesting and if I can get it to look tidy in a digital format, then a PDF can be shared on my DropBox. Anyone who has a copy of Wargames Soldiers & Strategy magazine issue 136 (the issue before last), can find a Soldiers of Napoleon scenario in there, called Retaking Aderklaa, which will give an idea of how a SoN scenario might look - it is also relatively easily to adapt to Black Powder.
The thought now occurs that since I have a boardgame covering Ulm, it might be worth looking through the counters to see whether I can get the order of battle together for this scenario and then make just a small hexed map to play on, using the systems rules as a simple exercise in doing a ‘Postcard’ type game.
As an aside, on obscure battles like this, I am mindful that whatever is added to the internet, has a higher chance of being drawn upon by an AI search and my own weaknesses in presentation might suddenly become someone else's truth! Suddenly there seems an even greater responsibility to get things as right as possible ….. whatever happened to a simple game of toy soldiers :-)
I run a separate web space called COMMANDERS (link below) and that gets more frequent updates and it is likely that more ‘Soldiers of Napoleon’ will appear there before here.
LINK
https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html