"Fighting in built up area" Topic

I thought that we had covered this type of combat quite well in our house rules, but a recent battle caused us some soul searching.

Getting the balance right between allowing the defender to hold for a long time (such as Hougoumont at Waterloo or The Granary at Essling) and still making it possible for the attacker to take the town or village is quite difficult.

Our house rules all combat depends on luck, and we wanted this to be the same. But not to the extent that one good, or bad, dice will cause a result which will decide the whole wargame.

After a lot of consideration, and quite a bit of game testing, we finally decided on a series of combats. We use the brigade as the basic fighting unit. Only one brigade allowed to garrison each town section. As many brigades allowed to attack as can reach the outside area.

Each attacking brigade fights a combat with the defending brigade. So if eight brigades attacking, there are eight individual combats.

The whole calculation is quite long winded, but if you would like to read a summary you will find it on my weekly Napoleonic Wargaming blog

link

Built-up areas could be a mixed blessing in the horse-and-musket period. Places like Hougoumont or La Haye Saint which were surrounded by walls (essentially fortresses) or large buildings with few entrances like the granary could be extremely strong defensive positions. But an ordinary town or village which had not been fortified (streets barricaded, walls loopholed) were actually not terribly good defensive positions. The buildings forced the defenders to be broken up into lots of small groups that due to the short ranges and slow firing rates of their weapons could not support each other very well. Coordination of the defense was very difficult and a determined attacker could penetrate the village down the streets and often the defenders would retreat rather than risk being cut off and surrounded. In addition, any sally from the town would be difficult so that the defenders could not really control the space around the town, either.

ScottWashburn has it right in my opinion. In rules you should distinguish between strongpoints (like Essling Granary, the Waterloo farmhouses, etc) and ordinary built up areas without a clearly defined, defensible perimeter (Plancenoit, the rest of Essling, etc). Non-strongpoints often feature seesaw battles with the attacker being favoured until the counterattack comes in. And heavy casualties to both sides.

A further complication (for brigade based rules) is that strongpoints can rarely be occupied by more than a battalion, and often less. And also a strongpoint can be contained in the wider BUA (that granary at Essling).

In my rules, which use brigade bases, I distinguish between large BUA sections, which can be occupied by a whole brigade, and smaller ones, which can't, where you have to place your brigade base adjacent to the BUA. Strongpoints are always this smaller type. But you then have to create a rule about garrisoning these strongpoints, so that it can fight on even when its brigade support has been driven back. I haven't got to that bit yet!

For a brigade level play such as you describe- wouldn't it be more realistic that for the defending brigade ( not fully fortified do to being a BUA or fortified foot print size of only a large building for a battalion or less to occupy) they ( the brigade) would be just considered "anchored" and thus have only the appropriate modifier to make them a bit more difficult to push away from a granary/building or BUA? After all it wasn't unusual for a brigade to push through and the an opposing battalion or just a few companies would have to remain in the fortified element(whether church – granary) until the parent brigade countered and retook the surrounding area back to relieve them.
The bottom line is that the main force was ousted since it wasn't in full protection of the fortification as explained in the other replies and thus lose the benefit under a reasonable effort( good die roll and plan).
The remaining troops of the parent brigade finally ousted are no longer a factor except motivation for the counter attack.
Agree the casualties would be much greater than a typical combat in the open and thus should represent a "meat grinder" combat with a result to "wrecking either or all the brigades involved" and thus have much higher casualty/loss in the results.
With a Houghoumont-it changes more since the foot print becomes much larger ( IE. most of the brigade is fortified). The losses become more to the attack and thus more inline to a normal combat but easier for the attacker to have the "I just been crushed" result in the results table thus taking a significant more loss as the possible result/out-come thanks to the higher negative modifier to their effort.
MG