"Attempting Battalion Carre" Topic

Hopefully none of my enemies in our upcoming campaign will read this.

Playing as the French against a grand coalition of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, we're going to be trying to use a battallion carre consisting of four wings and some 11+ corps.

We are still just getting the armies set up and haven't started yet but it is startlingly difficult to coodinate. It requires a great amount of communication and coordination between wing commanders who are used to operating fairly independantly. My wing commanders want to think in terms of objectives so when I determined that we were going to turn ourselves from facing east to facing north (125,000 Prussians mobilizing in Berg!), sudddenly our shape was entirely lost.

It may well be decisively powerful but at this early phase, it is becoming apparent that this sort of grand strategic manoeuvering is 'advanced' warfare.

It looks so easy in the diagrams.

11 corps? do you mean "divisions" perhaps. I would think that 3-4 corps would be the maximum army size.

Nope. 11 corps. In 1806, Napoleon did it with 9 Corps. We're in 1811 so it isn't odd that the army is larger.

The Reserve has the Guard and VII Corps.
Northern Army under Davout has I,IV, and VIII corps.
Central Army under Ney has II,V, and IX corps
Southern Army under Massena has III,VI, and X Corps and I Cavalry Corps

There are other detachmented armies in Tyrolia and Italy.

You need Berthier!

You know, that may be a good idea. We have two long distance players. Maybe we could give one the role of Berthier and the other the role of … Weyrother?

Having done this some years ago in an 1814 campaign (Austrians, Prussians-Swedes and Russians invading France, each player with four or five corps operating a bit distantly and in theory cooperating) it is stunningly difficult to coordinate activity with two other players, especially when i) the French don't cooperate by doing what you think they are going to and ii) neither do your Russian allies

Sounds to me like a real life situation!

Wow. Do you play on a map with road and towns marked? I'm reading Theodore Dodge's 5-volume work on Napoleon and the Art of War, and the author follows each day of his campaigns from '96 to 1815. I've read a LOT of march orders, but even these are usually page turners, as the author makes the strategy clear to the reader. Actually, he makes them sound as daunting as you've found them to be.

We use road network maps. For me, it was F Lorraine Petre's similar analysis of the campaigns that got me hooked on this aspect of the wars.

sample map:
picture

The other thing you need is people who are willing to play up the idea of friction. I'll give you an example for a game The Centurions played in the Twin Cities:

I'm commanding one corp of the Army of the Potomac under McClellan. The commander on my right is attacked by a force of Rebels that is larger than his and he askes me for reinforcements. He does not give me details of the enemy. I prepare a brigade to march to the sound of the guns, but send a messenger back asking for further details of the Reb force. I also wonder if I am about to be attacked too and order no movement of reenforcements until I've scouted the front of my position in case it's a faint. Meanwhile I'm getting increasing desperate pleas for help. These I naturally ignore because I don't want to weaken my position to fall prey to a cunning Rebel plot……

That is as nice looking a campaign map as I've seen in ages. Your own work?

I just found that map site last week, wonderful maps! I'm not sure if they're copyrighted, but I should think anyone could use them for private games.

I had considered two methods of moving on them. 1) Proscribing movement in inches (or cm) to formations, and allowing them to measure it out, or 2) assigning a number to each "link" of the road (line between two towns), with the number being the "distance" in leagues (i.e. hours needed to traverse). A small conversion would be necessary in the latter case, between infantry leagues and cavalry leagues, probably at a ration of 2:3.

Which do you use, malcolm? Or have you another method?

The maps are not copyrighted and are available for anyone to make use of. The only price is that you can't complain about mistakes!

We use node-to-node movement where one length of road represents one day's march for infantry. Fundamanetally, it is the system used in the 'Napoleon' board game.

As for friction, I find that if playing by fog of war, courier travel times, and limited awareness of even your own troops at times, the command friction builds itself and doesn't need to be added.

You need to set each player "wing Commander" objectives and dates to secure those objectives.

The coordination of this is not so much difficult form the wing commander's point of view, he merely follows orders. However, the C-in-C, which I presume is yourself needs to be of a singular focused mind to measure map movements (just like Napoleon did) for daily marches (weekly, hourly whatever) so that you have an educated guess at the expected arrival times of each wing at its designated location objective. This may mean the one wing will halt and mark time while others on the extreme other side of your formation are forced marching to arrive at theirs etc.

You also need to ensure that new orders are sent out so that they will arrive at the destination wing commander's headquarters on time so that their next march pushes off on time and does not fall behind schedule. This means you have to continually compare the actual game time with the expected current destinations of all corps to ensure you are up to date with their likely positions.

Also, if contact is made with an enemy on whichever wing or point of the formation, the local commander (wing commander) MUST send messages referring to the contact, its size, the best estimation of enemy numbers and direction of their advance or location. This becomes paramount when the message arrives at your HQ so that you can quickly and accurately respond to the changing situation. This will mean a furry of new orders dispatched to every corner of your strategic formation in a new effort to coordinate their movements to centre on the located enemy if the numbers warrant it.

Also, you MUST play each commander (player) as if they are role-playing their role. What I mean by this is that you should incorporate the dynamics of sound, eyesight and weather conditions on them.

Sound – Guns make noise, if the commander is in a proximity of the sound of gunfire he should be made aware of this. Including direction and volume (numbers).

Eyesight – Fires cause smoke, ensure that smoke caused by powder and burning villages is made known or visible to commanders and scouts etc. Direction and size of the cloud, colour etc.

Weather Conditions – Atmospheric and weather conditions will increase or decrease sound and visibility which can be obvious and at times not so obvious. If I remember correctly, sound travel is affected by atmospheric conditions such as cloud cover, in that it inhibits or amplifies sound (can't remember), been awhile. Rain will dampen the noise of gunfire and also decrease dramatically the visibility of powder and smoke etc.

Of course this all depends on how detailed you wish to go. I was an umpire in a huge 1814 campaign where all of these things were taken into account. This was back in the mid to late 90's but from what I remember the guys loved it because it was the little details that I threw in that added to their experience. I remember the French commander in a near panic because he had lost an entire cavalry division. The formation simply vanished off the radar so to speak, with only straggler reports of a catastrophe. He later sent forces down the road to investigate only to find the formation was ambushed and inihalated because the local divisional commander failed to send his own scouts on properly to protect against such an occurrence.

Another part of the campaign had two opposing formations sliding past each other within a mile of each other with neither side aware of the others presence. Scouts of the flanks failed to detect each other in the night. Two or three days later both commanders were at a loss as to explain why they were sent reports that they had enemy forces in their rear. It was not until after the campaign that I revealed what had happened.

Playing map based time and motion campaigns or what we called, Blind Campaigns" really open your eyes to a world of realism that until you are part of one does not allow you to understand the full effect of them. When you have one-off battles with a flank march or late reserve arrivals etc they do not really mean much. It is hard to put them in context to the greater picture. All the players understand is that for that battle they get to attack the enemy's flank etc. However, when you put this into the context of a larger (Blind campaign) campaign you really appreciate the difficulties of the commanders of the time and really begin to respect what they had to contend with.

This is a mistake many historians and authors make in that they harshly judge commanders for mistakes or missed opportunities and make sweeping judgements on how they would have acted in their place. Great with the advantage of hindsight but in reality, very difficult to get right. I remember witnessing players in a dilemma because they had information but not the whole story. They either delayed reacting losing time or reacting incorrectly because they did not wait to find out more clearly, what was actually going on.

you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't. That was what I came away with in playing and umpiring campaigns. I feel this is why Napoleon said, "yes, he might be a good commander but is he lucky?". Luck has a great deal to do with it in my opinion. The old saying, "the right place at the right time" comes into effect here.

That's one of the issues that I'm wrestling with: should wing commanders send all their reports only to the central command or should I expect my wing commanders to communicate with one another. If the Advance guard encounters the enemy, and dutifully sends off a courier to Imeprial HQs, by the time my orders reach the right and left flanks, a day could be lost. Shouldn't advance guard send information (not orders) to each of the wings so that the wing commanders can feel free to use their initiative?

I think it also important to keep the wing commanders talking because they can coordinate the size of gap that might appear between them. I don't want to tell my wing commanders where to move every corps every day. I tell them where I want their center and they can make their own decisions about where their various corps and divisions are. I should only have to worry about specific movement orders when the wings will be conflicting (going through the Thuringian Forest for example).

Malcolm,

Now you know why they call it "the Napoleonic era."

Too many individual points to address, but I agree totally – Napoleonic warfare is extremely difficult.

Manwhile, this all supports my long-held belief that no tabletop game really means a damn without a strategic context behind it.

Tabletop games which are integral with a campaign scenario are the most exciting – and real.

I will only further offer:

Yeah, even if you get it all correct, you could still lose by events outside your control. Napoleon spent every hour calculating the risks and making decisions, then adjusting for new info. His "art" was his ability to make plans with all the unknowns and unreliables calculated in. He was not always successful, but, again, we don't call it the Napoleonic era for nothing.

The Battalion Carre is a concept, not a dogma. The concept is that semi-independent, all-arms corps be capable of a holding action until the army could converge. It's actual appearance on a map might not look "square" at all.

Yes, it is only a strategic concept/framework, not dogma. That's why I am trusting to the initiative of the wing commanders.

I've been in the role of supreme commander on a tabletop multi-player game numerous times and watched how to gaps form between the forces of two players. The army commander has to sometimes do more than just write clear and angry messages telling the commanders to close ranks, very often you have to ride in and take personal command to stick units into the gaps. So, having seen it happen so often on the tabletop, when they can see perfectly well what is happening, I can only imagine the difficulty that I'm going to have executing this when they cannot see the gap, but can only imagine it based on messages and reports they receive that are maybe days old.

That is to say, for it to work as a concept, I may have to be overly dogmatic to achieve an approximation.

If you need any advice, I will explain a little what I did in a similar campaign that I umpired.

I had a large card chart (A3) drawn up. Along the top was time increments. Along the side was the formations. In the matrix of this chart I plotted the exact location of each formation as time progressed. Only I had the truth and access to this card while each player had to design his own individual method to deal with this. Some were good at it and plotted time and motion well while others seemed to keep it in their heads.

I then drew up another card chart (A3) in a similar format that had time increments running along the top and a blank column along the left for each and every message that was to be sent by both sides Messages from both sides we placed on this one single chart. The matrix area of the chart then plotted the time creation of the message when it was sent, and a calculated arrival time plotted in a future time increment. I then rolled on a table that gave a possibility of the message failing to arrive due to some issue or being captured or simply being delayed due to difficulties or the messenger getting lost.

Each message was number coded starting with a "F" and a number for the French and a "A" and a number for the allies. As the message was written by the player it had to be dated and the destination commander indicated on it also. These messages were handed over to me and I did the calculations. If the message arrived I simply handed it over once the correct time increment was reached. All the time the clock kept ticking over.

I really enjoyed this role because I knew EVERYTHING and was fascinated by the trepidation in the players who sweat-ed it out when things got hairy.

Shane

We already have our mechanics in place. This will be our 6th iteration of the Campaign system. In the last one, I tried an aggressive, relentless attack concept to try to see why we were always getting indecisive results. It was shown that lightning warfare does work.

This time I want to try 'advanced' techniques.

wish, I wish, I wish my weekly club of 6-9 members would do this. We sometimes play Empire V and have nearly 1,000 15mms, and a 8x24ft table where we can leave up games indefinitely.

Unfortunately, they have used other methods in the past and felt burned, and have no interest in playing campaigns now.

Again, not for anyone playing in the campaign. Spoiler alert.

Well, so far it is going abysmally.

picture

Our left wing got distracted by beseiging Dusseldorf and spent too long with two full corps to reduce the garrison, rather than simply masking it and moving on.

The Advance Guard got started late and now rain storms are making it hard to advance through Hesse-Cassel.

The Right Wing ran on ahead and farther to the south and east than he was supposed to be. There are massive gaps in the battalion carre and it is taking two days, sometimes more, to get couriers from my left and right wing. I only vaguely know where Davout and Massena actually are. The map includes information that I don't have. I only actually found out yesterday that my Right Wing was so far out of position.

We were supposed to be pounding the isolated Russians to our front but instead they might maul my isolated right wing.

Having worked in a BN ops center, it is hard enough to coordinate modern units with radios and good maps and all the other modern advantages. Tryibg with horse powered messages and poor maps seems almost impossible to do anything.

We managed to achieve some success, due perhaps more to enemy failures than our own brilliance. Two wings were able to mass against Barclay de Tolly and that army was destroyed (we let the player build a new army in Berlin as Prussian General Yorck)

We are now starting to get more spread out than I'd like, especially with Ney making a dash for Berlin while Davout deals with some 20 Prussian divisions under Blucher at Magdeburg and Massena and Bernadotte wrestle with Yorck near Dresden. We do not yet know about the Russian army of Bagration about to descend upon us from the east.

picture

I find it interesting (and a little tragic) that there is this massive gap between Blucher and Yorck, with each one assuming somehow that the other is defending Berlin. This kind of thing would never happen in a non-blind game and even with the gap there, Ney was unable to concieve of such an opportunity and spent a week assaulting the walls of Wittenberg with three Corps rather than probe toward Berlin.

We're on to June 26th now and we managed to get a perfect central position by using the Battalion Carre. Well, perfect in positioning but some of those numbers are looking scary, from the French perspective.

I Corps and the Imperial Guard have a tough choice ahead of them. Which battle should they reinforce?

The French had Berlin but left it open in a failed attempt to decisively destroy the Russians and Prussians at the battle of Rehfeld. There was a heck of a lot of Russians there that day.

picture

We took a month break for the holidays and to fight the battles of Dennewitz and Teupitz.

picture

Decisive victories were won by the French at both on June 27th and now, June 30th, The French have been able to push six Corps against Blucher's four at Berlin.

picture

After the Battle of Berlin (I assume it will be a French victory), we're going to have to abandon the battalion carre strategy. It is just too powerful against opponents that don't have a plan to fight it, and that makes it not fun for the coalition.