Constructively I still use these rules, or I would if I had the time and space to actively play Napoleonics (like a number of folk here I just paint them, mainly, and with WW2 you get to a game much quicker). I too played with these at a school club and never found anything much wrong with them to the point that I wanted to change.
You are right that a number of things are not well explained and / or clunky, and that there are blind spots where certain aspects of the era are not well represented. Writing orders is a good example. You don't need to write reams; "take this end of the bridge" is fine (I don't remember actually writing even that). We altered the command ratings so that to depart from the general objective, you rolled a D6 and highly-rated commanders required a lower score to depart from the plan.
The miscalibration you point to is a fair comment. Most of Quarrie's "morale" bonuses for generals are in fact an assessment not of their ability to inspire, but of their tactical skill, which need not be the same at all. As for how to use them, well, the general attached himself to one unit and that unit assumed those bonuses. He also risked becoming a casualty in the same proportions. So if Wellington attached himself to a 30-figure Foot Guards unit which took 3 figures in casualties he rolled a percentage dice and below 10% meant he was one of them. 0 to 4 meant he was the casualty, and 5 to 10 meant his horse was. Oddly, this info is buried in the section about casualties generally.
Your point about bathtubbing is correct. I think what Quarrie assumed was that clubs would play these rules with several players contributing a contingent. In this way an "army" the size of his own – 400-odd Westphalians – becomes one of three or four corps. It is then slightly less bathtubby, although even 1,200 figures are only 40,000 men. Of course Napoleonics are always bathtubby; if you can get 1,200 figures on your table then you can get 1,200 figures on your table. If you want to deem that to be 40,000 men or 240,000, you're bathtubbing.
We dealt with the confusion about the sequence in which to resolve all the simultaneous combat by resolving it from the French left to the French right.
Much of the apparent complexity of the morale rules vanishes in play. A routed unit stays routed, basically. We amended this so that a routed units auto-rallies, i.e. once it is 250 yards from the enemy it goes from Rout to Retreat to Retire to Halt without further morale tests. It is also usually obvious from the context what the result of a morale test will be so these can be skipped.
Artillery is indeed devastating. An eight-piece battery of 12-pounders firing ball at a 3-deep line to its front could be expected to get 24 rounds off in a 2.5-minute move. Assuming every round hits, it's hard to see how each round can take out more than a file, so 72 should be the maximum possible. Being generous let's say half those hits take out two files – so 108 men. In Quarrie, the maximum possible effect of such fire is in fact 187 men. If you halve Quarrie's figures, and apply the fatigue and smoke rules, you get a bit closer to common sense.
Multi-unit attacks: he covers these only in passing – essentially one unit can charge and the others can join in the melee at a walk, adding their headcount and counting as one unit for 'win' purposes. So if two Austrian battalions melee one French (or if they shoot each other up), and inflict 50 casualties each while the French inflict 75, the Austrians have won that round because 100 > 75.
I share your scepticism of rules which state that squares couldn't move and that line infantrymen couldn't skirmish, for the same reasons. I suspect these are just gameplay-driven because Quarrie recommends Chandler and comments on Davout's victory at Auerstadt, which Chandler's account explains began with an advance in square. So he was aware it was possible, but ruled it out anyway; odd.
For me what these rules most needed was to be clear that single battalions were not tactical units and had to be integrated into a larger formation and to follow its movements. Once you do this and once you are adept at anticipating the result of the more laborious mechanisms then large battles become very possible.
The thing that has stayed with me is the internal subdivision point – so many figures per company. The key thing about Napoleonic warfare for me is lines, squares, skirmish lines etc and I don't want these abstracted away. These are battalion level formations and thus you need battalions represented. I am afraid I lose interest in any rule set that starts talking about "stands" (or "zones of control"), because commanders of the day didn't use such terms and because we're apparently moved away from depicting the internal structure of the battalion accurately.
Probably old fashioned thinking on my part, but a few years ago I asked on the Ancients boards here how many figures made up an imperial era Roman legion in common rulesets. The gist of the answers was that many / most / the trendiest ancients rules make no attempt to model legions at all and it's all about stands. I have to wonder, if your ancient rules don't model legions, what they are, and I tend to think the same about Napoleonics.
