"Using Revolution & Empire for Play by Email" Topic

For the last few years, I've been doing some play by email games. Most recently I'm using Revolution & Empire for a refight of Eggmuhl. I had some familiarity with Empire V but it's my first go at R&E. There have been some struggles with the organization of the rules but I've worked my way through most of them. It seems to me to be very suitable my purpose. There's lots of time, real time not simulated time, between turns, so the complexity of the rules isn't an issue. The templated approach to ME and the how the rules represent orders also seems to be suitable for players who aren't hovering over the tabletop measuring precise distances and angles. So the players provide their orders to the corps and ME while I work out the implementation by the ME commanders.

Here's an example of the French player view at about 1330-ish. Only Austrian troops visible to the French are shown.

(The image hosted on Flickr. The map is adapted from a General de Brigade scenario booklet – i.e., troop dispositions shown on the original were removed).

That all looks excellent!

@Major Mike, thanks.

Very nice. I like how you do the map. How long does it take you to fight out a battle using this method?

@Lascaris,

The length of a battle mostly depends upon how quickly players provide their input for the next turn; and that's up to individuals. With "engaged" players a battle would take about 2-4 weeks, but I've had battles drag on for months with players who had to be poke frequently to get their turns in.

I first started this during the pandemic lock-down and there were enthusiastic players starved for games, so it was quicker. At that time I set up miniatures on a table and used annotated photos for feedback. More recently, playing with old friends, I switched to using PowerPoint since the games took months – due to one tardy player. This game doesn't involve that individual and we've managed deployment and three turns in a month.

My time for each turn is probably about 2-4 hours which involves game resolution, searching the rules for clarifications, updating the current status of the battle and preparing player feedback.

The game is over…one brigade of Austrian infantry could not extricate itself, so it was forced to surrender. The game pretty much followed the historical battle. The exception was that the Austrian cavalry holding the Bettelberg didn't do as well as their historical counterparts. They did rout a brigade of Bavarian cavalry but were driven back by the Wurttemberg cavalry. It was a close fight. The Austrian 10th Hussars losing the close combat to the Wurttemberg 'Konig' Jager zu Pferde by one point! Final positions shown – from the French perspective.

As for the R&E rules….well, I might go back to Empire V. Half the time I felt like I didn't know if I was doing things correctly or not. Eventually I could find answers but it just took too long, so I sometimes just went with what I thought would be reasonable.

Going with what is logical and reasonable Bearing in mind the mindset of the Austrians and Frenc is always the best way. If you only lost one Brigade thats a win for the Austrians. Austrians should have been destroyed if the two best French Marshal's on the field Davout and Lannes.

@Richard 1956, I wasn't clear. The one brigade that surrender is on top of the four brigades eliminated – essentially all of Dedovich's and Vukassovich's divisions. All that's left of Rosenburg's corps is one brigade of infantry in the north infantry and a brigade of cavalry in the middle. The reinforcing grenadiers and cuirassiers were sent too late and were not engaged. So, one could say that the Austrians were destroyed.

Very interesting. I have a hybrid set of house rules comprising mostly Empire V but using the cavalry rules of Empire III and the fire tables in RxE and have some enjoyable battles on my 6x4 table. As I've raise in the forum before I can't see cover modifiers for artilley,save during bombardment
, in the text or charts.Is this a oversight by the rule writers. At the moment I'm just using the Infantry cover modifiers but halving the values!