"Napoleons Battles 4th Edition" Topic
12 Posts
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KimRYoung | 21 Jun 2020 5:51 p.m. PST |
Does anyone in the USA sell the 4th edition rules? So far I have only found them available in the UK. Any help is appreciated, thanks, Kim |
Sigwald | 22 Jun 2020 7:14 a.m. PST |
On military matters has them listed: link |
KimRYoung | 22 Jun 2020 8:37 a.m. PST |
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Alcibiades | 22 Jun 2020 12:25 p.m. PST |
Unsurprisingly, On Military Matters has them. |
dantheman | 22 Jun 2020 3:39 p.m. PST |
Wow, decent set of rules, but I don't know of anyone who plays them anymore…. Is it still a thing? Have the 1st Edition and all its scenario books, which I never had major issues with. Haven't played in a looooong time, but can't get myself to part with the set. |
KimRYoung | 23 Jun 2020 5:50 a.m. PST |
I have never played them, but seen games at HMGS cons in years past and they are visually appealing. A friend is interested in getting into Naps and picked up 1st edition off Ebay, so I thought I'd take a look at the latest edition. I was gifted a very large collection of painted 15mm Napoleonic armies, enough to do both Waterloo and Borodino in their entirety! So I have been looking at possible rules that might work as is, before I just do my own. I found these for free on the internet: link These are pretty close to what I think will work for me and it has ties to Napoleons Battles and original Fire & Fury. I found several other free rules that are also of interest to play large scale battles. If anyone has played Napoleons Battles recently and has an opinion, let me know. Thanks Kim |
Garth in the Park | 23 Jun 2020 5:59 a.m. PST |
If anyone has played Napoleons Battles recently and has an opinion, let me know. I played them for years back in the stone ages of my youth. I remember that they took a lot of heat for being "too simple" back then, because the normal Napoleonics game had 200+ tables and charts, so a sequence of play with a mere 15 steps was a radical simplification. Nowadays, they're at the high-end of complexity and detail. Not because they've changed, just because the hobby has changed. It had some radical ideas for its day (1990), like allowing interpenetration without penalty and very long movement allowances to get into combat quickly, and no "flanks" in combat, and so on. It also had some problems that never got resolved, like the ease with which you could destroy an enemy infantry brigade by simultaneous attack of infantry and cavalry, or just the way you can change a brigade's footprint by 300 yards by making it form squares, thus opening up huge gaps between brigades, through which you can push your own brigades. (Rather than forming squares where they stood, the battalions all walked a few hundred yards first and formed a big brigade square). By today's standards, NB requires a lot of labels and fine detail. And the depiction of generals requires a fair amount of effort for something that in the end amounts to just a die roll to determine whether somebody can move full, half, or not at all. (It can get weird to have a Divisional commander who has only one brigade in his division but still has to tag along with his one unit, so it's in his "radius." Like… what else was he planning on doing today? Getting a haircut?) I haven't played it in years and probably never will, but my respect for it is still high enough that NB usually survives my biannual purges of the closet that spell death for other games. |
dantheman | 23 Jun 2020 7:38 p.m. PST |
Garth in the Park: Forgot about all those labels, Age of Eagles, its closest competitor also has a lot of labels. As a rule set it definitely shows its board game roots. Also feel it moves slow compared to other games. Like you however, I cannot get rid of it. |
coopman | 17 Apr 2021 5:13 p.m. PST |
The problem with NB was that it tried to include formations (column, line, square) and still be grand tactical. It takes a rules set like Volley & Bayonet that mainly deals with the deployment and location of brigades and reserve forces to approach the grand tactical nature as experienced by a Corps or Army commander. These high level commanders would not normally be concerned with the formations of individual brigades – this is the job of the division commanders. |
Garth in the Park | 18 Apr 2021 11:15 a.m. PST |
Labels can be useful if they cut down on detail elsewhere, or if they eliminate the need to consult charts and tables. The issue with the labels in NB, though, was that in addition to that data on every unit and officer, you still needed to consult spreadsheets of finely-printed details in order to remember that a French Ligne unit in 1809 had values of: +1 +2 +7 -4 2/4 6/C 4"/0 10" 3" 18" 2/1 2/1 2" Whereas Austrian line infantry had values of: -1 +2 +6 -4 2/4 5/C 4"/0 8" 3" 16" 2/1 2/1 2" It's crazy to think that in 1990 this seemed like something way too radically simple and thus NB caught hell from a great many grognards. But those were the days of hardcore historical simulations and people who got really passionate about how their particular set of charts, tables, and dice rolls were the only "historically accurate" way of doing things. I don't miss those days. |
Murvihill | 19 Apr 2021 10:39 a.m. PST |
I thought it had battalions pretending to be brigades. |
Musketballs | 19 Apr 2021 3:40 p.m. PST |
They were such a big thing back in the day…the first rules I owned that weren't just a paper pamphlet. To this day, I've never quite understood why Bob Coggins didn't run with the success and produce an 18th Century or a 19th Century/ACW version…I'm pretty sure they would have been just as successful as Napsbats. |
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