Here is my second FPW scenario posting.
Maybe it's just my sheltered upbringing, but I think that over the years I've heard the battle of Villersexel mentioned much more than the Battle on the Lisaine – even though the former is really just a preliminary skirmish to the latter. The Lisaine is the climax of the effort of the French Army of the East to relieve Belfort. Four days earlier, Chanzy's 2nd Army of the Loire had been definitively beaten at Le Mans. At the Lisaine, the Army of the East would in turn be defeated, after which it retreated to Switzerland. (Marshal Bourbaki apparently subsequently tried to commit suicide, but couldn't even get that right – the bullet glanced off his skull and he survived.)
I found the interesting challenge as a scenario designer was how to integrate the fortress of Belfort, and its garrison and the besiegers, into a game that focuses on the French attempt to breach the German defensive line on the Lisaine west of Belfort.
The approach I've taken for my BBB scenario for the Lisaine is to put the fortress on the eastern edge; to represent just the fraction of the garrison that might participate in a sortie; and to make the garrison's appearance on the table subject to trigger conditions that represent the prospect of relief appearing serious enough for the fortress commander to expend precious ammo and risk sallying forth.
The large ground scale – 4300m per 12" grid square on the table – means a lot of terrain features need to be represented. This game used up pretty much all my woods and hills … The scale also meant I had to include a 12" LOS limit, otherwise artillery starts to become too much like airpower.
Like the Villiers scenario, this pits French quantity versus German quality, an asymmetry which is always good in a wargame. Unlike Villiers, the terrain is really rugged – lots of forests and mountains – so the poor French really have a struggle to advance coherently. But if they can coordinate well enough to use their great numerical advantage, especially their artillery, they can blow holes in the thin German line. The Germans can't afford to just sit and wait to be smashed, they need to anticipate and move their scant forces around so that they can fill any gaps the French create.
Scenario map:
FPW The Lisaine map by
bbbchrisp, on Flickr
Quality vs quantity: masses of French, not many Germans. Photo actually from the Champigny/Villiers game, but it's a similar story on the Lisaine (and of course like Villiers it ought to be a white snow-covered battlefield, but never mind):
9 Wuerttembergers vacate Champigny! by
bbbchrisp, on Flickr
The full scenario is in the files section of the BBB Yahoo group:
link