"First impressions: Sharp Practice2 (French vs Russians)" Topic

We played our first game of Sharp Practice 2 at the club. Full disclosure: we're big fans of Chain of Command. But we're completely new to the Napoleonics era. Will we like SP2? What's good, what's bad? Well, this first battle was at least great fun, and overall we enjoyed the game's foundation, even though we found a few kinks where we might add house rules.

link

Link to your AAR?

Sorry, it's edited into the post now.

Great little report – so many options for smaller scale action in Napoleonics.

Great AAR Setsuko.
A note on the Attack Columns. . . The advantage comes from having the ability to soak up far more shock in fisticuffs than other formations, even if a group is not in "support" contact range in the formation, it still can share the shock allocation. This means that in an equal fight the AC outlasts the groups of an enemy formation in Line as they don't have this ability. I had this happen in my own play test and ended up with the left flank group of my British in line formation being pulverised by an attack column. The attack column ended up splitting the formation in two, the left most British group was broken and retreating up the table while the centre and right groups cut off from any support. Without the ability to share the shock throughout the whole formation the French would have broken first. Likewise if the Brits had been able to share the shock they would have held on. Important to remember that when in formation in fisticuffs it is not a given that all the groups can fight or share shock (as is the case in shooting).
Don't know if that helps any, would love to see more of your AAR's!!
Cheers
NB

NB is absolutely right about Shock being spread across a whole formation. Also, if the column had hit the end two groups, the third group in line would only support, so the column would get more dice and spread the shock around more effectively. However, a column of 32 men against a line of 24 men is probably never going to fare that well without some preparatory fire against the line.

Well, that's kind of the problem, I guess. In a few cases, if you're placed just exactly right, the attack column is better in melee than a smaller number of men in line formation. In most cases, the attack column is as good as a smaller number of men in line formation. And it's almost always worse than a similar number of men in line formation.

And that's before factoring in the 50% reduction in firepower. Oh well. I love the activation system, so I'm not worrying about experimenting a bit with house rules.