"New Rules: Napoleon At War" Topic

I just pointed up a French division and it came out to 1900 points….2000 if you upgrade the generals.

I also like the special rules for the various nations….

The more I read, the more I like this…The combat unit is the infantry battalion, cavalry regiment and artillery battery at one model = two guns.

I just wish the basing wasn't so odd. I need to rebase my British anyway….

Yeah, we were a little put off by the basing initially. But we liked the rules so much that vast numbers of troops have already been rebased. Armies that had set literally for decades unused are seeing the light of day! Even those that had been recently rebased for Lasalle got redone for NaW.

We've played more Napoleonics in the last few months than we had for the last 10 years. So it's all good here in Austin!

Is rebasing really necessary to play with these rules?

….the $64,000 USD question….

Well.. if you are just going to use the rules with your own armies then most likely it is not "necessary"..

I've use them with 28s not based for NaW, as long as the units have a similar foot print you can just mark the "base loss" with disruption markers and simply remember to discount those in combat and fire…

If you like the rules and you are looking for pick up games then it is convenient to re-base of course… but other than that there is no particular geometry issue with basing like for example in FOG-A where basing is indeed critical to understand how many dice you get to throw in combat.. here like in most nap games you just need to represent the footprint in different formations and when units are in contact the whole unit fights.

In 15s the footprint is pretty standard, an infantry unit in attack column is 75mm x 60mm… pretty close to the standard 80x60.. cav is 90x60 in column… line as you can imagine is x2 for width x1/2 for depth..

We used the now typical 40x30 basing at first until we were convinced that we liked the rules enough to merit re-basing… only when we saw critical mass in our group did we start re-basing, mostly from empire, lasalle and napoleon's battles

cheers
Francisco

I play these rules weekly and have not yet rebased as I provide both sides and so the basing is consistent. I use 2cm(front)x2.5cm bases for infantry and 4cm(front)x3cm for cavalry. It works absolutely fine and haven't come across any real issues as yet.
In theory my basing leaves my armies compatable for other rule sets e.g Lasalle, but the truth is I find this rule set superior to all others and so I don't expect to take up the other rules, yet deep down I'm always worried some one new will walk into the club with a more common basing system. So until I come across someone else with armies based for N@W I'm not going to rebase.

Yeah, our problem was we already had about four basing systems going in our group. We found that playing with mixed basing sytems did not work too well. So that really prompted the movement in our group.

Also, we now have a lot of new players joining, and they are using the NaW figures and bases, so it worked out for the best. As Tzen67 notes, no reason to rebase until you meet other armies.

I've had three games using these rules so far. The more I play it the more I like it. I'm actually thinking about rebasing my Napoleon's Battles armies to play this. Nobody in my area is playing NB anymore.

I have these rules on order but now I already have buyers remorse. I just don't like point systems. I guess it depends what you want out of the hobby. I prefer historical scenarios instead of quick throw down games. Defiantly not interested in tournament play.

I am thinking I may end up going with "March Attack" which doesn't use points. The author states "The rules are not a points balanced, buckets of dice, pick up, competition style game and are best played with historical orders of battle or as part of a campaign system."

Battles are not balanced, sometimes you are outnumbered in a bad situation and you have to figure your way out of it. Using a points based system is unrealistic and quite frankly I find them boring, gimmicky and non-historical.

Well… :) you can always ignore the point system… :) (they are just there for people that have no time to plan scenarios )

We just did d'Erlon's initial assault during Waterloo a couple of weeks ago with of course histrocial OOB… no points needed :)

It was a lot of fun.. the game went very much like the historical event.. we want to try it a couple more times to see if we can find a way for the Frenchies to win..

We tried March Attack as well before the arrival of NaW… both MA and NaW provide rules fast enough to play even up to a corps per side and have the game last only one gaming session…

Francisco

How difficult would it be to use a smaller scale, such as 10mm, with this rule set?

Hussar76,

Not really difficult at all; either put more figures on the same sized bases or reduce the base sizes and relevant distances.

I have just purchased these rules and awaiting their arrival. I have been going over some old threads on the web looking for info on them. I have a problem with Naps in particlular why is canon when firing roundshot over powered and under ranged and why is cavalry so slow? Not aimed at any rule set specifically, this occurs in all rules I have seen and read so far.

Is it something that was started in the early days of gaming and has continued or do the authors of the rules have a reason to do this.

Muskets could manage about 200m but were only accurate at less than half that and artillery could fire over a mile (1600m) but were only accurate at about half. So artillery crews could fire successfully at up to 800m, 8 x times the muskets distance but no one shows this in their rules.

A horse can travel 4 times the distance at a walk than a man can but would usually trot or canter, which is even faster, on a battle field. Yet most rules allow cavalry to only travel twice the distance of the infantry.

Well you won't find cavalry slow in these rules, they can sometimes charge to contact in their first bound.

The relative speed of troops (and by extension interaction with weapon range) is mitigated by command inertia – in your example above cavalry might indeed be able to move 2, 3, 4, 5 times faster than infantry. But only if somebody tells them to move.

regards

David F Brown