"How do you replicate really big 19th Century battles?" Topic

In particular, how do you replicate the really big battles of the ACW and FPW on the game table? My figures for these periods are 20mm – 1/72. My friend has run BBB using 6mm figures, but, for me, that's just one step away from playing a board game with counters. I've tried Neil Thomas' Nineteenth Century rules which bathtub the battles down to a minimum of figures and, though the rules produce a fun, quick game, they fail to capture the tremendous scale of the historical battles. I wonder if the best way is to break the battle down into separate games, the way the original Fire and Fury did with Gettysburg.

You need a set of rules where the basic unit is at least a brigade. Volley and Bayonet or brigade Fire and Fury are a couple of options.

Or a big table

Volley and Bayonet should work – we have "bath-tubbed" Black Powder with cutting unit size in half and going to 6mm but it's not really designed for big, big battles

Depending on the battle--and your notion of satisfying representation--probably 79thPA, 14Bore and Frederick are all right. You certainly have to go to maneuvering brigades rather than battalions, and for the larger battles You'll probably need if not a single big table, multiple tables.

If you won't bathtub and you won't go to microscale, you're going to have a hard time getting much under V&B's 1"=100 yds, and if you look at, say, Leipzig, you wind up with a table you can't reach the middle of. (Actually, I keep looking at Leipzig in 2mm at 1mm=10 yds, and I still wind up at two tables.) You might to Sadowa with an "L" shaped table.

Depending on how your troops are based, I'd agree that V&B or the "Fire & Fury" family are your best options.

Bdes as the smallest manoeuvre unit, a big table and suitable rules,

Tally Ho!

I use brigades as base units and Fire and Fury for the ACW, and regiments as base units in the FPW using modified Fire and Fury. In 15mm scale. Brigades in the ACW were about the same size as Franco Prussian regiments. I also have a 15' x 6' table to game on though.

Why would you use 20mm figures for battles of that size ? You end up with each figure being a company or two, which looks ridiculous.
If you want to be able to see nice uniforms then play smaller battles.
6mm is pretty well the largest scale I'd consider using, at least the forces do look more like an army than a corporal's guard.

I agree with the consensus here: brigades as the atom of maneuver, and a big table.

I felt Bruce Weigle's 18xx system got closest to the way I'd like to handle brigades (each battalion is represented, but all the battalions move and fight as part of a regiment or brigade), but I also didn't like doing this with single stands of 3-4x 15mm figures. I think the almighty Mr. Weigle did it right the first time, with large blocks of 6mm figures maneuvering on a big table. I sincerely wish there were an ACW version of the 18xx system.

I tried Volley & Bayonet for ACW, and liked it fine, but I was already heavily invested in Fire & Fury (original brigade version), so I didn't switch. I should really try V&B for FPW (and APW, Risorgimento, Crimean War, etc.); I wouldn't get my individual battalions, but at least the 3" stands can hold a nice number of figures.

- Ix

The problem I have always had with brigades is the representation of specific regiments or battalions which have distinctive uniforms or weapons. I have seen brigades made up entirely of Zouaves or Berdan's Sharpshooters.

It's worse for Napoleonic British. How do you represent a brigade that could be made up of Highlanders, Lights, Rifles, and Line Battalions? I tried spreading them throughout the Brigade but that got to be ridiculous. Do you do them all as a generic brigade of line infantry figures? What's the fun in that?

As to doing large battles, in my younger days, we would play large ACW Regimental battles on huge tables. We did the 2nd Day of Gettysburg. We did all of Antietam save the Sunken Road which we did separately.

A few decades later, older players just do not want to play the 8+ hours it takes to finish these large battles. Nor do they want to command that many units. So, we do two things. One, we break up the larger battles into a series of scenarios of the major parts of the battles. Two, when the majority is tired or can't play that long we leave the game up until later in the week to finish.

I realize that everyone can do that. But with a dedicated game room, I can leave the game up for as long as we need to. The link below will take you to my Flickr page where I have posted some of our large ACW and FPW games.

link

link

OC, I'd like to hear more about that Napoleonic brigade made up of line, lights, rifles and Highlanders. Can you tell me what battle it was in? But it's sadly true contemporary British generals weren't so acute as miniature wargamers in appreciating subtleties.

More seriously, if you want to command big armies, you can't pay attention to the finer distinctions. That's why my 2mm Napoleonic armies have only formed and skirmisher infantry (with provisions for elites and green troops) my 6mm have line, light, Highland and rifle, and in 28mm I can get fussy about individual regiments. You either get to command multiple corps, or you get to decide when the 28th should form square and the KGL battery switch to canister.

But yeah, I might reconsider if I still had 20 players, two days and a barn.

I see nothing wrong with 20mm. I draw the line at 6mm. Anything smaller might as well be counters or painted blocks….imo.

I do like both V&B and Fire and Fury. I haven't tried Blucher, but it looks interesting as well.

Piepenbrink, the only one that springs to mind, is Kempt's in 1815, it had highlanders, rifles and two line. No lights, but the 28th were still wearing stovepipe so looked different to the 32nd.

1815
8th (British) Brigade: Major General Kempt
l/28th Regiment Line
l/32nd Regiment Line
l/79th Regiment Highlanders
l/95th Regiment Rifles

9th (British) Brigade: Major General Paet
3/lst Regiment Line
l/42nd Regiment Highlanders
l/44th Regiment Line
l/92nd Regiment Highlanders

4th (British) Brigade: Colonel Mitchell
3/14th Regiment Line
l/23rd Regiment Line
5lst Regiment Light

What facing colors would you use? It's not just the British some of the other allied armies had a variety of uniforms within one brigade.

Re the OP, it just depends what space and time constraints you have. I prefer to fight proper battles, not bits of them, so typically I use Regiment or Brigade sized bases grouped into Divisions or Corps as the elements of manouvre. For ACW I use a version of Neil Thomas's ACW rules and for APW/FPW my own rules, but they bear a strong resemblance to Bloody Big Battles.

Pitched at the right level, you can easily do Custoza, Solferino or Koeniggratz in a couple hours, and those battles are way bigger than anything seen in the ACW.

I don't particularly care if the figures are out of whack with the ground scale, they are just pretty 3D counters after all. My pal Tim games the ACW and FPW in 54mm, rather larger than 20mm figures…

I never understood the appeal of 2mm figures. I would rather play a good board game. Any Clash of Arms published game has more visual appeal. Maybe micro armor works. 15/`18 is as small as I can handle with my eyesight. In 2mm I wouldn't know if we were using Napoleonic or Ancient figures. Would it even matter?

I guess there are some advantages to 2mm. Storage, ease of painting, less expensive and you could use them for any period. Who's going to notice?

2mm works better than you think. I deliberately did all my WSS, TYW, ECW stuff in 2mm as I really couldn't be bothered with what passed for 'uniforms' in those days. And funnily enough can tell the difference between a Spanish Terco and one of Marlboroughs brigades drawn up in line.

Nick, you don't have to use 6mm figures to play BBB. Plenty of folks use 10mm or 15mm (some even use 28mm but increase all the measurements by 50%). Your 20mm could work too. Take a look at this:
link
It's Chancellorsville, the biggest battle of the ACW, played in 15mm on 8'x4'. Looks OK to me. What do you reckon?

We use the Age of Valour adaption of Age of Eagles for the FPW. My table can be set up as 5'x12' or 6'x10'. We have done Gravelotte St Privat and Sedan in 15mm. It was a bit of a squeeze, but it worked.

Although the precise definition of 'bath-tubbing' depends on who you ask, I think it's this:

Take your table and fit the terrain on it as best you can. That's your ground scale. Next work out 'division/brigade/battalion' frontages (shown on your battle map) to determine what is the best divisor to establish troop scale. Then set things up. I make no allowance for ground scale during the game – I just use standard rule mechanisms. This might sound odd and if the scaling was trying to get gettysburg onto a a 3'x2' using 28mm figures I'd agree. I'm fairly lucky – I have a 12x6 (15x6 with the dropleaf up) and a few tin soldiers – and make no apology for it.

That's pretty much how I did all of these in 28mm scale:

Vimiero 1808

Salamanca

Ravenna 1512

Zorndorf 1758

Cerignoal 1503

Chotusitz 1742

My map for Lobositz

Harran 1104

Trasimene 217BC

A rant on the theme of "might as well be cardboard counters" must inevitably follow. It will be posted elsewhere to avoid derailing the thread.

Bathtubbing. I've played a lot of bathtubbed games, and often enjoyed them. Done right, they capture the army commanders' options if not the tactical nuance. But they are not the historical battle, and the wargamer forgets this at his peril. One of my worst wargaming days came from an artillery bombardment which just barely reached me, but did massive damage. I had been thinking too much of the historical battle where I would have been a mile outside extreme range, and not of the bathtubbed battle I was actually fighting.

My fault, but it permanently affected how I view such battles.

OC, I see you couldn't match the four types in one brigade you claimed. Don't worry about it.

Possibly my problem is that I've never quite assimilated the notion of post-Colloden Highlanders as supersoldiers requiring different rules and tactics. But yes, at every stage up from 1 figure=1 man, compromises must be made and fine distinctions glossed over. It's not a problem which suddenly appears when your base is a brigade or a regiment instead of a battalion.

In my Napoleonic (Age of Eagles) brigades and FPW (Age of Valour) brigades, everyone has the same uniform, unless I don't have enough stands of one type for a unit. Either way, we are fine with that. If we did have three or four different uniforms within a brigade, we would end up with stands migrating between brigades.

Question primarily for Yellow Admiral:

Have you tried mashing up F&F with Weigle 18~~, manoeuvring Brigades/Regiments as in F&F, but calculating Fire and Melee according to the placing of discrete Battalions where this becomes appropriate? Since my head is fairly used to the F&F mechanics, I'm not sure how much of the Weigle system would be worth importing.

I have long wanted to try this. I realise it could significantly slow the computation of combat results, but it would still allow the representation of individual units. Note that I hesitate to recommend this for actions where each player is handling much more than a single Corps.

The main problem with bath-tubbing is that weapon ranges are far too long relative to the ground scale.

Many years ago we played Waterloo using WRG, bathtubbed down at 1:4 (so it was 1 figure = 200, not 50). It just became an artillery slugging match as everything was in range.

It can be a mechanism that works though.

Sounds like you are looking for "Grand Tactical" level of rules.
Where you can control a Corp or more on each side. There are many sets of rules at this level, especially for Napoleonics.

In a wargame, you always need to abstract things. The size of a figure really need not match anything. One could use a single 54mm figure for a brigade if they like. Ideally, the size of the base has some relationship to the size of the unit in the ground scale being use. The size of terrain need not match the figure size either. I have played often were the terrain was at ground scale so the figures were taller than houses.

It is more a matter of your preferences than anything else.

Using 20mm figures for a grand tactical game sounds like a throwback to games I played in the 1970s and 1980s. You may not have too many figures in any one maneuver unit, but it works just fine. Some care will be needed if the rules do accounting by number of figures. You can run into problems like Martin Rapier is talking about just above. If your rules use figure counts, you will need to do some accounting to keep the unit the same as intended in the original work up. Better rules will not be tied to figure count for this level of game. But that means you will most likely need a roster sheet for each unit to track things like casualties.

Question primarily for Yellow Admiral:

Have you tried mashing up F&F with Weigle 18~~, manoeuvring Brigades/Regiments as in F&F, but calculating Fire and Melee according to the placing of discrete Battalions where this becomes appropriate?

No, I've never tried that, but I have mused about it.

I know of two other rules sets that do something similar to Weigle's system:

• Rifle Wars, Part 1 by Jeff Knudsen
  
• Fields of Blue and Grey (sic) by Dan Abbott

As with Weigle's rules, I'd probably much prefer to do either of this in 6mm with big blocks of troops on moderately sized bases.

The problem I have always had with brigades is the representation of specific regiments or battalions which have distinctive uniforms or weapons. I have seen brigades made up entirely of Zouaves or Berdan's Sharpshooters.

This is one of my sticking points too, and a reason why I would prefer to see each individual battalion on the table. I started to get stuck on this when painting ACW Zouaves, and again when building FPW brigades with a single battalion of light troops in a different uniform. Uniformology is part of the fun of the black powder era.

I also just don't like leaving brigade formations entirely in the imagination, and I now actively dislike the F&F expedient of using standard tactical formations (e.g. thin line, thick line, march column, field column) but calling them the "operational area" of the brigade's individual elements. Large unit formations are a whole area of study and practice, and I prefer to see some representation of the period/national regimental and brigade postures on the table.

- Ix

Definitionally, if it works great for a division/side on a 6'x4' table it isn't going to work as well for anything else. There is no single compromise you have to make, but you have to make at least one, probably two.

It is basically a solved problem:

If you care about the individual battalion uniforms in an army-level game, that is functionally the same as caring about individual platoon's uniforms in a divisional-level game. If you are up to multiple armies (like in a big FPW battle) then it is the equivalent of worrying about an individual squad's uniform detail.

This also applies to worrying about minor tactical evolutions.

Mollwitz in Charles Grant's 'The Wargame' is bath-tubbed so it is functionally a bit smaller than Maida.

You don't have to play Bloody Big Battles, Horse Foot and Guns, Volley and Bayonet or whatever with small figures. Just learn to love having 4 figures represent a brigade rather than 40 6mm figures or 150 2mm figures or whatever.

Or get a really big table and concentrate on megagames and deal with the rules and co-ordination and admin difficulties that brings.

Or do as you suggested and break the battle down (I once knew a gamer who broke Waterloo in segments so he could play with 15mm figures on a 3'x2' table. it took him ages but he did it). I don't see how that preserves the spectacle of the big battle mind.

Or you could just play a boardgame with some counters. I have a good picture of such a game here:

lx: In deference to the OP, I'll be brief. I'm coming to 19c battles via F&F/AoE. My 6mm stands are worth 200-300 infantry, 100-150 cavalry. 6-8 guns. Broadly each a half-bn, sqn or bty. I figure I can arrange these loosely (sabot bases?) and still keep most F&F rules functional.

Ground scale 1:4000, 25m/1"=100m. My battlefields are European, and strangely inches and yards aren't helpful when working from local maps.

Ground scale to guns is a factor but, it's not big one. In my Peninsular battles I decided arbitrarily not to give every division a battery. For some this might be a big issue/problem. For me it's just another compromise to get a game to work.

This (scaling), I think is the player dividing line. There are players who think they are recreating history, and there are players who want to play a game.

For the former nothing, in general, satisfies and they always think adding more detail/history/figures/table space/ time will help. It's a 'history lesson' to be continued.

For the latter, the game plays out as a game, it has a narrative, and everyone gets some pleasure out of it thinking the have refought X or Y. The game ends and everyone move on.

I'm 60 years old, I like gaming and the social aspect of gaming. God preserve me from the bean counters – Amen.

"My battlefields are European, and strangely inches and yards aren't helpful when working from local maps."

No, and they're not alone in that unhelpfulness. My most detailed Auerstadt map is measured in toises, and my best Leipzig in versts.

On the other hand, my trusty Alison's Atlas is scaled in paces and miles.

True, but how do you scale your troops to the map. Do you put out your troops then build around it, or, do you build your map then scale troop frontages accordingly.

This, I think is the question. Given that most rules have silly ranges and movement distances, wouldn't the former be more silly than the latter – given that wargame musketry range and all movement is generally dislocated rubbish. Please, 12" musketry range and 18" cavalry move (pretty standard for 28mm) What has that to do with ground/time scale?

If you think you are doing more than having a good time playing games, you are deluding yourself. You are playing with toy soldiers, get over it already.

Actually, olicana, when I wish to "do" historical battles, I work out my ground scale on the basis of basing and representation, match it with my planned table, and then look through scaled maps to find battles which will fit. If my ranges are wrong, that should have come up much earlier--around the time I matched up rules and basing.

Of course, I resent deeply any suggestion that I am not fit to command troops in those periods I wargame. How could sitting in a climate-controlled house with no noise, bloodshed or personal peril, and with exact knowledge of movement rates and weapons effects in any way not resemble battlefield command in the 18th and 19th Centuries? The toy soldiers are the least part of the problem.

Self-delusion, however, is certainly a traditional and important part of real world generalship.

Hi Robert, that's pretty much how I do it (I think). here's a couple of blog post links to how I once did Lobositz 1756. The second is the how.

link

link

I pretty much only do historical battles. I often stretch or squeez the level of unit representation and ground scale to fit my available playing area. It just depends. I prefer to get the force/space ratios right, along with the key terrain. Ligny is an absolute pig in that regard, with all those villages.

Olicana. How can you argue, that players of grand tactical games with brigade as played units are bean counters, when Blücher is a much more simple game than most bataillon based games.

Whirlwind's post had an interesting point -

"You don't have to play Bloody Big Battles, Horse Foot and Guns, Volley and Bayonet or whatever with small figures. Just learn to love having 4 figures represent a brigade rather than 40 6mm figures or 150 2mm figures or whatever."

That sounds like the board game Battle Cry!

You know, after all the years and the money spent on this miniatures game hobby, I've had a load of fun playing little old Battle Cry (go figure – but I did eventually do it with 10mm units – heretic!). :)))

I'm thinking many of us compartmentalize our gaming projects – from full-on efforts, and lite-efforts.

The lite-efforts maybe for our fringe interests, or for what we can get onto the table between all the heavier figure and terrain crafting work.

Something like the Battle Cry approach – the new Scipio game from Warlord (included in the big Hannibal set) –

link

Here in the US, where lots of gaming goes on at the shops, we really don't see big battles with big figs being played on big tables much, as those big extravaganza games occur at someone's house, or at the cons.

Replicating really big battles for the 19th Century (or for any century) on a regular basis?

The proposition already has specific logistical constraints.

Simply put, the smaller the figures, the bigger the battle you can get on any particular table.

Another factor is how easy the rules are to play. We've been using Valour & Fortitude (V&F) rules from the Perry's (its free on their website) for Napoleonics for a few years, in scales ranging from 6mm to 25mm. They are very good rules for large battles.

IMO you don't get the "feel" of a big battle unless your basic playing units are at battalion size, and the units have lots of figures and look like proper battalions. I don't like abstracting up to brigade level, you need the feel of massed units IMO.

In 25mm we have broken down big battles into sectors and played them consecutively. We have had 300+ battalions in 6mm on an 18' table before (c 50 figs per battalion), that's a Bordino or Wagram sized game – link here link

10 – 15mm scales are "halfway houses", and (IMO) 2-3 mm is losing any definition of actual models, unit recognition etc.

Perry's/V&F have just brought out lists for the ACW and FPW, we are going to use the Warlord Epic (12.5mm) scale for ACW. Will see how that works out.

Simply put, the smaller the figures, the bigger the battle you can get on any particular table.

That is not correct. It totally depends on the scale of what each unit represents. If I did 6mm at 1:10 and 28mm at 1:120 then my 28mm scale could handle a bigger game. Generally one uses more smaller sized figures per unit than bigger sized figures. I could use 12 28mm figures for a battalion but I would probably want more 6mm figures to represent the same battalion.

The key word is 'can'. You 'can' get a bigger battle on a particular table using smaller figures: WRG 1685-1845 and Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun proposed bases for 6mm figures that were smaller than the footprint (not base size, actual physical footprint) of a 25mm figure.

In any case, 6mm games seem to generally split the difference, using some of the difference in size for 'smaller unit footprint' and some of the difference for 'more models per unit', but it does depend: DBx-type game usually just have 'more figures', Black Powder type games just have 'smaller unit footprint'.