"An observation on command in 1809" Topic

Corps commanders often took more time to figure out where they should march to then they did actually marching there. Especially the Austrians.

I'm working on my operational level rules, and it's been quite an interesting process. I'm learning a lot about game design and why board-and-chit war games are designed and marketed the way they are. Essentially, once you zoom out past the immediate environs of a battlefield you can't do any kind of random terrain set-up or other one-off type game. You have to have a very detailed scenario with very strict rules, outcomes and subtleties built in with fluff. The "happening" of an army level campaign on the scale of the opening of 1809 (Regensberg and environs for example) is so specific to itself that you really have to create rules just for it, or at most a robust framework and mechanism on which you hang the specific, localized stuff.

The amount of information you need to realistically play/simulate a campaign grows exponentially when you go from showing a few hours to showing several days. And so do the rules required!

That complexity + fog of war is why I started doing computer games in the first place.

once you zoom out past the immediate environs of a battlefield you can't do any kind of random terrain set-up or other one-off type game. You have to have a very detailed scenario with very strict rules, outcomes and subtleties built in with fluff.

Well, you don't have to, obviously. You could add all that detail if you wanted to, just as you could add it to a small-scale game. But there's no necessary correlation between game scale and level of detail. Nor is there any obligation to have a detailed scenario, just because the game's scale is different.

The amount of information you need to realistically play/simulate a campaign grows exponentially when you go from showing a few hours to showing several days. And so do the rules required!

That hasn't been my experience. The most detailed games I've seen recently are very small tactical games in which there's a ton of detail about weapon types, visibility, equipment, and so on. By contrast, most of the higher-scale games I've played recently are quite streamlined.

As Garth said, you don't have to. Realism isn't based on the quantity of detail you stick in, but on the quality of the mechanisms that are there. You can't replicate reality unless you simply have another war. So what aspects of the campaign do you want to replicate for players, what decisions?

If I remember right, the hexes are two miles across. For a wargame table at 60 yards to the inch, that would be about 1 1/2 hexes by 1 for a 5 X 8 table. At 100 yards per inch, that is 2.5 by 1.5 hexes. Doable for transferring the map area to a table to some extent.

Corps commanders often took more time to figure out where they should march to then they did actually marching there.

Yes. Gamers focus on shooting; officers focus on maneuvering.

Especially the Austrians.

LOL!

The amount of information you need to realistically play/simulate a campaign grows exponentially when you go from showing a few hours to showing several days. And so do the rules required!

No. The game designer needs a lot of info; the player doesn't.

Admittedly, one of the things that made one Napoleonic commander better than another was better command of the details of a battle, operation, or campaign. Napoleon was a(n in)famous micro-manager, and some of his most competent opponents were, too. However, there are other ways to simulate this aspect of period warfare than to just put all the details within a player's influence so he can (and must) manipulate them. Abstraction is a part of every wargame; logistics and C3 are usually its earliest victims.

The "happening" of an army level campaign on the scale of the opening of 1809 (Regensberg and environs for example) is so specific to itself that you really have to create rules just for it, or at most a robust framework and mechanism on which you hang the specific, localized stuff.

I agree that the specific details of a campaign are what make the campaign interesting, but I think a generic campaign rules framework can work quite successfully. The GCACW and GBACW frameworks are excellent examples of generic core rules frameworks into which unique campaign maps and force pools are plugged in a sort of modular fashion. I've seen much less of this with Napoleonic boardgames, but I'm pretty sure it's been tried with campaign frameworks for miniatures gaming. (I kinda wish the GCACW framework had been adapted to Napoleonics… alas, no joy.)

- Ix

Corps commanders often took more time to figure out where they should march to then they did actually marching there. Especially the Austrians.

1.Because of indecisive commanders [i.e. the players]?

2. Because of poor mapping/knowledge of the road net?

3. Because of poor staff work coordinating movement?

4. Because of poor scouting/knowledge of the enemy positions?

5. Or a combination of all four?

I would think that 2 through 4 should be fairly easy to represent with simple game mechanics… at least to some extent.

Two years ago we played the Marengo campaign based on the OSG boardgame (the original version) I started with something very close to the original boardgame rules and slowly moulded them into somthing more usefull for campaign. We had 11 players, me as an umpire and it took a year, with about one days turn each week. We played out 7 tabletop engagement during that time.

The major factor to me is is getting the following interactions in place:

Suuply or forage – forage disperses and takes time
March speed, the faster the more attrition
Attrition – bad conditions, supply, march
Delay in implementing orders (staff systems)

We are starting the 1799 campaign soon. I have midified the supply system to be less abstract – it was simply lines and points – to a system of depots and moving rations about. The importnat thing to my mind is making players take decisions based on their logistic possibilities.

I have sinced modified the rules

once you zoom out past the immediate environs of a battlefield you can't do any kind of random terrain set-up or other one-off type game.

Do you mean that it is difficult/impossible to create a 'campaign generator' which will produce both the realistic and interesting terrain, and suitably distributed forces in their various starting positions, and to come up with plausible and balanced victory conditions/objectives?

If that's what you mean, I agree and sympathise.

Chris

Bloody Big BATTLES!
link
bloodybigbattles.blogspot.co.uk

One thing we have used here is something we created: Campaign lite. It takes historical terrain and force sizes within about a three day march to create interesting battles. 2nd Manassas and the Jena Campaign have been our favorites. In about 30 minutes to an hour, with hidden movement and screening, one or two days scale time, we generate interesting battle situations.

Probably not what you want to do, but at that scale, supply and attrition other than force marches don't really apply. We have tried delays in implementing orders, but found that only complicated what was really a battle generator, albeit one with lots of strategic issues.

The amount of information you need to realistically play/simulate a campaign grows exponentially when you go from showing a few hours to showing several days. And so do the rules required!

It is funny that you should say that because I have read designers and gamers say exactly the opposite. That once you zoom out in scale, it is easier or rather necessary to abstract all the little details and showing a few hours has the detail go all granular, where little things matter.

I'm probably going to put my foot in it here, but I'd have to say that what details are important change with your level of command (or timescale).

Which troops are armed with rifles versus muskets doesn't seem to matter anywhere near as much as where the enemy is, what your lines of advance there look like, and where your rations are, for example.

LITS- I would certainly agree with that! The details you need to deal with change a lot when you "zoom out."

ChrisBBB2- that's exactly what I mean. Look at Davout's situation during the opening of 1809, or the Austrians squeaking across the Isar at Landshut. Modeling the mixture of C3, strategic, tactical and personal-psychological factors that led to these decisions are difficult to model. The thing is, in my current project I don't want to abstract anymore than I have to. I think that there's abstraction and then there is careless abstraction.

Actually, I had an idea for a fun game that'll really enrage the traditional war gamers out there, but that I bet people will get a kick out of if they approach it with an open mind. Personally I think it's really fun.
These are not the "big rules" I've been working on, just a set the idea of which I was kicking around at Historicon. There are only 12 steps and anyone can play them. You will need about $4 USD in pennies however…

1: First, set up your table so that it looks really good.
2: Put down the two armies in some mutually agreed manner.
3: Get two opaque bags and a few hundred pennies.
4: One of the players reads off a scenario description that explains the goal of the two opposing forces
5: One of the players- flip a coin- selects a unit- any unit, any size, and explains what that unit is going to do. Then he moves the unit or attacks with it, fords a river, etc, as he just explained.
6: He puts one penny in his bag.
7: The opposing player now does the same thing, picks a unit, moves it, places a penny in the bag. OR he can pass and the first player goes again.
8: If one player doesn't like what the other player does, he can veto it, explaining why, but then he has to place another penny in his bag.
9: Combat is resolved like this, at any level and in any level of detail: Player A declares that Division 1 attacks Division 2 and destroys it to the man. Player A puts a penny in his bag. Player B vetoes this by putting a penny into his bag and offering an alternative outcome. Player B's alternative outcome is that Division 1 is decimated by artillery fire before it ever gets to Division 2 and is hurled back to its starting positions. Player A vetoes this with a penny, and offers an outcome that both divisions are locked in bitter close quarters fighting until the following turn. Player 2 agrees. They move to the next unit.
10: Play continues in this manner until a logical seeming outcome is reached.
11: The two players now roll a number of dice based on the year, their generals, and their armies historical performances. The better the army did historically, the higher this number will be. This is the Historic Handicap.
12: The player who scores furtherest BELOW the Historic Handicap for his army wins. If he was under the handicap and the other player was over then it's a major victory. If both are over the handicap then the lower number was a minor victory… etc, etc.

Now, you may laugh, but try the rules out as written and see what happens, and compare it to the outcomes of the rules you normally use. I bet that the difference will be illuminating. At least, it's good intellectual exercise!

forwardmarchstudios:

It isn't clear, are you providing a method for resolving campaign battles? It is very much a dialogue/decision-matrix approach.

I like to think of it as a discoursive war game. Instead of rolling dice the players tell a mutual story.

Discoursive/dialogue, potatoee/potato. Same process of talking through the events.

True enough. I was inspired to come up with this by the latter forms of Prussian kriegspiel as descibed in the book American Kriegspiel. Apparently to speed things up the referees- older officers- would often adjudicate outcomes between the red and blue team by experience. And thats basically it- but- I'm going to do a post on the blog soon where I link it up with my new time keeping system, and I think those two things together will really wow people. I was trying to come up with a more traditional combat system but I ran out of time as I'm starting back into school anew and won't have much time for anyghing for the next few months.

I think the adjudicating outcomes by dialogue between teams wouldn't necessarily speed things up compared to a referee adjudication…. And did you know how the 'red vs blue' convention started? Blue for Prussia, red for France in the 1824 game of Kriegspiel.

I'd really be interested in the time-keeping system. [for the campaign or a table-top battle?

If you are interested, there are any number of examples of discoursive/dialogue games and systems on the web.

The point of my rules above (which are toss-offs) is to engage the imagination and foster learning. They're not competitive rules in the traditional sense but that's not their point. Combined with true groundscale and some realistic terrain however they could sct as aids in exploring historical outcomes.

I didn't know about red/blue. That's interesting!