"Napoleonic battle density, do we overpack the table?" Topic

Well said McLaddie. A little elbow room is a good thing.

The part of the battle represented on the table is usually Crunch Time – often with lots of Crunch!

Of course YMMV.

It may, indeed.

For those with more interest in grand tactics than in unit tactics, all the really fun decisions have already been made by the time we reach Crunch Time.

Without some room to maneuver, a Napoleonic game is about as interesting as lining up two opposing battalions on a table just one battalion-width square, and having at from there.

Yawn.

Without some room to maneuver, a Napoleonic game is about as interesting as lining up two opposing battalions on a table just one battalion-width square, and having at from there.

News Flash! – That applies to pretty much any period! :o)

I think 6mm is the way to go if you want a big Napoleonic battle. I've used HFG for a couple of games, and they do allow large scale maneouvering. Usually in Tokyo we play Black Powder 28mm; fun, but you don't get the space to be Napoleon.

I suppose the other alternative is to do some of the peripheral wars, like in South America, rather than the European battles. Most of the battles in the Wars of Liberation were fairly small. It depends what you want to do.

Without some room to maneuver, a Napoleonic game is about as interesting as lining up two opposing battalions on a table just one battalion-width square, and having at from there.

News Flash! – That applies to pretty much any period! :o)

Yes, it's called "Head-to-head-lead" and as Jeff said "Yawn"

Personally I find the pre-battle maneuvering much more interesting.

Art Bonne Annee.

In response to your question about Ney personally leading his avant-garde I use a mechanism where each corps has a number of senior staff officers who can be detached to lead a "battlegroup" in modern parlance.

The normal level of manouvre is the division but the battlegroup may take one infantry element (so a quarter of a division) and a couple of cavalry squadrons.

Detaching the SSO does not reduce the effectiveness of the corps but the detachment only returns to the corps if the corps performs a rally and reorganisation.

The corps commander detaching himself is one I had not considered but I would add more friction to the remainder of the corps in this case and allow the corps commander (Ney) to return to assume command of the remainder of the Corps with no delay but keeping the friction effect for a turn or two.

If you paint them, they will be there.

I agree with Mike the Mug – battle groups were constantly used – usually lead by senior ADCs or adjutants generaux or other trusted members of the staff.

it shouldn`t look like this…

but should be more like this…

or perhaps like this…

In all three instances it would depend on the ground scale for my "acceptance".

In the first photo the figure bases might be deemed to represent not just the physical location of the men but the entirety of the unit's battle space, giving enough elbow room to form line or column as required.

Very nice photos btw!

Cheers Bob,
Over on another Nap board Trajanus commented upon the "Common wargame practice of not leaving space between columns…" – I guess we often return to the same essential points in the representation of grand manoeuvre – and the need to be able to deploy from columns in order to engage our miniature forces.

And as if by magic, the demon appears! 😄

No prizes for guessing which photos I prefer!

I'm afraid that rules featuring one base per brigade and the ever present trend to make change of formations for battalions instantaneous within a game turn lead players away from the practicalities familer to period commanders.

Statement of the obvious I guess.

If you paint them, they will be there

Love it!

I can't be the only one who has had rows with players wanting to cram nice looking figures on the table because of the effort they have put in!

MC! Indeed you are correct and I retract my comment.

Mind you I prefer worrying about traffic control on the battlefield.

Others ideas of fun differ wildly!

"Mo' toys mo' better" and while I don't agree I won't say they are doing it wrong either :)

That's why I prefer smaller engagements, with one brigade per side and some supports. Maybe 10 to 15 units for each 'army'. It gives me the chance to play in my limited available space and at the same time to have the 'feeling' of maneuvering with my soldiers.

I think game design has pushed players into massive concentrations of troops. Often, it's the lesser of two evils.

1. "Command Control Radius" limits maneuver flexibility and concentrates troops, but it's a quick and easy way to limit the 300 foot player/commander even if it's nonsense. The fear is that if you increase the command radius giving opportunity to maneuver, players will micro manage the maneuver of individual battalions, which some feel is too tactical (or cheesy). Of course, command control doesn't make sense because it precludes the possibility of standing, durable orders. If you're on a landing craft headed for a beach, you don't turn around or stop because you lost sight of the commanding officer on his flagship.

2. There's a push to create games that can be played on a small surface. This makes a lot of sense for players that live in areas without basements, garages, or where housing and storage is expensive. Unless you're playing 6mm or Empire with small footprints for units, you're playing a division or two on a 6x4' table for battalions. More figures and larger unit footprints means less battalions which may not be pleasing to players that want to play big battles. One option is the Games Workshop answer where you cut down ranges, command, and movement to ridiculous levels to pack in as many figures as possible. The other option is to play brigades instead of battalions.

3. Speed of the game. You want to finish the game in four hours, but now you want to add in lots of time for maneuver. To save time for maneuver, you have two choices, speed up combat resolution by further simplifying it or reduce the amount of units. The practical answer is to reduce the amount of units which isn't satisfying to players that want to play big battles.

4. Pips. Reducing the ability to maneuver by introducing command points naturally leads to larger, more tightly packed units.

+1 for KR cases

At the League of Augsburg weekenders this is typical of the deployment we use

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Re. League of Augsberg game photo:
There were a few cases of revolutionary-Napoleonic columns advancing like this (or something akin to this) to engage their opponents, but they were exceptional.
And it would work out just fine if all they came up against was a line of skirmishers, but artillery would not fail to miss such a target!

Glad you told me they were columns Mike, I was about to be rude and ask what formation they were supposed to be in!

Obviously you have given the benefit of the doubt.

Tricky things 28mm!

I assume no changes into line were required? 😊

1 of the problems is that guys use 2-deep blocks for basing. It looks great, but it horribly distorts the ground scale. "Columns" were actually a lot wider than they were deep – more like long, slightly thicker versions of lines.

I bit the bullet and went to 1-deep basing and companies in my own house rules. It looks not that great, but it is a lot more accurate and workable in terms of having a consistent ground scale.

Then you can work out movement and firepower ranges on a consistent basis and you end up having a game which looks and feels like a Napoleonic battle, rather than mashing two vast blocks of painted soldiers against each other in a big scrum.

Two deep basing can be a problem. It certainly gives a false impression of the footprint for colonne serrée. It may make big columns, such as d'Erlon's at Waterloo very difficult to do justice too. Also the footprint of squares is way too big.

But it was customary to leave quite deep gaps between lines of battalions and (I think) to stagger them chequerboard style – so it shouldn't be that big a problem on the tabletop. Also columns often moved at half or full interval, where the tabletop foot print will be much closer to the real one.

But looking at those photos you can see what the main problem is. There are too many units and there's nowhere else to put them. Now it isn't necessarily unrealistic to have that sort of unit density for frontage. But commanders that did have that many units would deploy them much more deeply. When the first line got into trouble you bring up the next, and so on. But there just isn't enough table space for a third or fourth line. Rules need to discourage that density of deployment. Vulnerability to artillery is one thing. Also control: if one unit gets into trouble it is likely that a near neighbour will too. Or you find that you run out of reserves too quickly if you put too many units in each line.

But you also need the table depth.

But you also need the table depth.

Or (perish the thought) leave units off the table!

Plan out the table edge to stop units turning up by magic and then bring them on as others advance or are broken.

Its hard to get people past the old 'I've painted 56 battalions I want them all on. Now!' tirade but threaten them with the naughty step and no story at bedtime, then see how you get on!

I think game design has pushed players into massive concentrations of troops. Often, it's the lesser of two evils.

1. "Command Control Radius" limits maneuver flexibility and concentrates troops, but it's a quick and easy way to limit the 300 foot player/commander even if it's nonsense.

2. There's a push to create games that can be played on a small surface. One option is the Games Workshop answer where you cut down ranges, command, and movement to ridiculous levels to pack in as many figures as possible. The other option is to play brigades instead of battalions.

3. Speed of the game.

4. Pips. Reducing the ability to maneuver by introducing command points naturally leads to larger, more tightly packed units.

Joe R:

Yeah, I agree. A number of game rules attempting to simplify or conform to smaller areas create ahistorical dynamics and produce all sorts of problems that could be avoided if not for the desire to have as many troops on the table as possible. You have to admit, Mike C. first picture of massed figures above is far more dramatic than the next two, though they make much more sense.

What also happens is that gamers then think that kind of mass is the way it was done. A recent TMP thread question of 'accurate' unit footprints saw one game designer assume that when the Hougomount was attacked by six+ thousand French troops against no more than 2,000 Allied at Waterloo. Actually the French couldn't bring that many against the area of the chateau. It was actually several attacks of @2,000 French troops each time…

In some cases it can simply be those 'playing with toy soliders', the more the merrier and those who play wargames with toy soldiers. Different mindset.

I'm not sure I should say anything here since I have a 14 x 6 foot board that can go up to 21 foot if necessary. I usually do 25mm refights of Peninsula battles at 1:25 with a conventional ground scale (mainly Spanish-French, which were small by central European standards). Indeed most earlier Peninsula battles had less than 20,000 a side (800) aside, Talavera and Tudela are the only ones for which I needed all 21 foot (and for Tudela there needs to be l o t s of space in the middle of the Spanish "line".

On the other hand, however, I play with my toy soldiers. Every now and then I have an "Out of the cupboard" game: everyone who hasn't been used recently, or more than x times in total. Now that can get packed.

What struck me reading the thread up till now is two things.

Firstly, one i s sometimes just playing with toy soldiers and sometimes (some people anyway) d o do historical refights. I don't see why one can't enjoy both. And of course we have full dress uniforms, with flags – even my Spanish.

The second point is that surely these issues should be regulated by the rules. Rules should reward historical behaviour. In my (home grown from In the Grand Manner) rules, brigades/divisions that keep formation get to move one hell of a lot more than those that don't. There is no command radius; a formation knows who its general is. If succeeding lines are too close, the second line will be swept away when the first breaks. If the columns are too close together, they will count as a "big thick target" for artillery and quickly lose over a third, which stops them advancing, which breaks the brigade's formation, which causes movement penalties and loss of the initiative. Why don't published rules penalise overcrowding? Or do they?

One point I haven't seen raised is that you really can't have more than a 6' (~180cm for those that game in metric units) wide table. You just flat can't reach the center of the table of anything wider.

This is ignoring the distortions between unit width and depth common to almost every basing scheme.

That (usually extreme) distortion is why I'm plotting out 3mm minis and 1:600 ground scale. Gotta use about 3 minis for every 4 men because the spacing between minis is wider than the spacing between men, but otherwise, it allows for actually having a Thin Red Line on the table at a close approximation of the proper deployment and space needed for a unit.

This is ignoring the distortions between unit width and depth common to almost every basing scheme.

Well, that distortion is ignored by designers because of the game scale and/or figure size is paramount, particularly if gamers want to cram on the minis.

With the right sized figures and game scale, there is very little distortion.

You can correct the distortion to some extend – just by taking away some bases of the unit when in column and give it a column symbol.

The Lion is obviously right that to get a game that looks remotely like that picture of Austerlitz you need 6mm or 3mm.

With larger figure scales, however, the distortion of unit width actually allows one to fit units in onto the battlefield. They are then more like Kriegsspiel blocks than a thin red line, so in the end the unsolvable problem is the 6 foot depth, unless you temporarily add moveable 2ft wide sections to the table edge to hold those reserves.

With a larger battle it's all a particular problem with artillery. If you use artillery teams behind the guns, which looks nice, they are always in the way.

"Rules should reward historical behaviour."

I agree – but why do all fail in this?

I agree – but why do all fail in this?

Probably because no two historians -bar two wargamers!- can agree about what means "historical behaviour".

Ok, I am exaggerating a bit. There are consensus on what "historical behaviour" means, but the problem is that it is difficult to agree on what kind of historical behaviour you want to represent on your tabletop. Is it that of a Brigade commander? Or is it an Army commander? What scale of representation are you comfortable with? And how your collection/tastes fit on the above? While I realize that 28mm figures are not the best choice for representing big battles, it happens that size is what I enjoy painting. Smaller figures are just not my cup of tea.

Therefore I am somewhat limited on the kind of "historical reality" that I can represent on my gaming table. There is also a logistical constrain: money and time. Money for buying figures and time for painting them. I need to take both in account when planning my "armies". Finally, I must conform to what my usual fellow opponents want to play -and their own financial and time constraints-. Thus I have gone to 4-6 bases per battalion/battery/squadron, with 4 models per base if infantry, or 2 if cavalry. That solution strikes the balance -for me- between visual pleasure and time and money available in my budget.

Of course, it means that I won't be able to represent Waterloo with any degree of accuracy. I need smaller affairs.

I could have chosen other path. For a while I toyed with the idea of using 6mm figures, on 40x20mm bases, with 3-4 bases per unit, in 3 or 2 ranks as appropriate. That would have mean a scale ratio of 1cm=10 meters aprox. Although still the battalions would have been too deep (20 meters)relative to their frontage, the distortion would have been smaller. Even then the maximum that I could have cramped in the table, to stick to historical accuracy, would have been an Army Corps for a standard 180x120cms gaming table. Problem is that I do not enjoy painting 6mm figures.

To me is about balance. That is: that what I can afford is relatively "historical", without the savage distortions that would make pointless to claim I am gaming something remotely related to Napoleonics.

Ultimately though "we" only over pack the table when the "we" actually playing the game think so, despite my preferences or those of anyone else not playing that game.