"Still new to Naps, need help with OOBs for Russian campaign" Topic

I have one, maybe two buddies in my boardgaming group who are willing to stretch into wargaming this fall with some Napoleonics, in time for the 200th anniversary of the Russian campaign. I plan on using Lasalle for the ruleset, and 6mm figs for the sake of my wallet and my underdeveloped painting skills. But I'm still enough of a neophyte that I'm having trouble figuring out OOBs for the battles we want to run. So I'm hoping you folks can either help me figure them out here, or at least point me in a good direction for doing so.

Here's our tentative schedule:

[12 August: Battle of Gorodetschna]
17-19 August: Battle of Smolensk.
7 September: Battle of Borodino.
24-25 October: Battle of Maloyaroslavets.
26-28 November: Battle of the Beresina.

Gorodetschna is in brackets because it may get a pass since it will require another army (Austrians/Saxons). So can anyone offer some assistance?

(Then of course I'll have the related problem of selecting minis, but let's cross that bridge when we get to it…)

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

What rules are you using? Many of those are published sceanrios.

link

Saber6, I'm planning on using Lasalle. My only other Napoleonics experience is with Napoleon's Battle's, but for this project I'm thinking of Lasalle as it's less complex and plays at a smaller scale, so should let us finish a battle (or I guess technically some small sub-portion of a battle) in our typical 'Tuesday game night' timeframe.

Thanks for that link – I may try to go through there this weekend with my copy of Lasalle and try to come up with some likely-looking matches for further critique/assistance here.

Check with Sam. He probably has what you need.

The most detailed and authentic ORBATS are those George Nafziger donated to the US Army Combined Arms School, Fort Leavenworth:

link

and just type 'NAFZIGER' in the search function…

Once you have them, simply divide by 20 or whatever troop scale Lasalle uses.

If you are doing Borodino and other epic engagements where both Russian Western armies were involved, you may also want to consider conflating the Bde and Division to make a further scale reduction, still keeping a tactical flavour whilst retaining historical formations.

My blog has a load of waffle about our thinking behind Borodino, but we are using Black Powder rules which makes something on that scale much more manageable than most rules…

link

As Sparker and Saber6 say, the Nafziger collection has some useful orbats for 1812 campaign.

A more detailed one for the Russians at Borodino by Alexander Mikaberidze is here link

These may help:
link
link
link

napoleon-series.org
And' use the "Discussion Forum" and you will get the Answer's to your Question's

If I may be so bold,… ;-)

If they are boardgamers and you want to convert them, why not play Command & Colors: Napoleonic on the tabletop. All you need is a hex mat from Hotz Mats (5" hexes), and you are good to go!

Your boardgame friends will appreciate the light but interesting game mechanics, and you'll have them hooked!

For many many years I was a miniatures enthusiast and a boardgamer, but even as a Napoleonic history buff, I couldn't tolerate the slowness and rules-heavy nature of tabletop wargames rules. I didn't want to measure out the moves with a ruler, and try to remember all the modifiers and complex rules, and the sloooooow nature of the rules meant that the scenarios took all day to play, and even small engagements sometimes couldn't be finished, and forget about re-fighting an entire famous battle. ugh!

(I realize that all this may get me lynched on this site…)

Then along came C&C: Ancients, and it just clicked for me. I saw a system that was fun, fast, but yet had the feel for the period, and really required the player to make good decisions…interesting decisions with lots of angst (do I respond to what the other guy just did, or launch that attack I've been preparing and take the initiative, or do I…)

Now I get to play with my toy soldiers AND have all the other good things I like in games.

Thanks everyone, I'll definitely be spending some time with the Nafziger stuff this weekend, as well as the other links like the 'Napoleonistkya' and the napoleon-series links. Much appreciated!

And GDrover, while I appreciate the advice, I've actually got several of them to play the C&C boardgames – apparently before I joined the group, the 'BattleLore' version of the Borg system was a big hit there so it was an easy sell. But I specifically have some people interested in minis, and doing this stuff for the 200th is something I wanted to do myself. Still, I agree, you can't go far wrong with C&C.