L'Armee du Nord has been available for over two years now and in this time I've been queried through the mail and on GEnie enough that a few designer's notes may be warranted, these questions are good: they show the game is being played...
Essentially, L'AdN, or the idea for the game, sprung from a discovery I made while working on the historical commentary for La Bataille de Mont St. Jean (discovery may be the wrong word since the historical moment I'm about to describe is well documented; just over-shadowed by other events). As you know, the battle of Wavre actually occurred on June 18th and 19th. The fighting on the 18th saw Grouchy crossing the Dyle at Limal and turning the flank of Thieleman's IIIrd Prussian Korps. The fighting in the very early hours of the 19th (it was over by 10.00 a.m.) saw the French put this same corps to flight in what various historians have described as "utter ruin."
What captured my imagination was this: At roughly 10:30 a.m. Grouchy and Vandamme (Gerard had been seriously wounded assaulting the Moulin Bierges on the 18th) were conferring in the vicinity of La Bawette on what to do next. They could see the bridge over the Lasne from where they stood; the last real barrier separating them from a clean shot to Brussels. The few Prussians blocking them could be brushed aside and they could reach the capital with their cavalry in under 5 hours (at that moment there was but a single formed British battalion in the city; of course, this was unknown to Grouchy and Vandamme).
Before deciding what to do however, a courier rode up bearing the news of the disaster at Waterloo. Deciding Grouchy's mind on the spot, Vandamme proposed they move on Brussels anyway (one can be sure Grouchy, at least, thought of the last time Vandamme had attempted to cut across the enemy's line of communication... KULM!). I asked myself, "what if? what if?"
What if Napoleon had not committed the Guard and had accepted a draw at Waterloo, leaving the army bloodied but intact? What if Grouchy had been swayed by Vandamme (think of Stuart's raid prior to Gettysburg).
As soon as I had finished Mont St. Jean a blank hex sheet appeared on my dining room table and I began to work it out. As my what ifs" were sorting themselves the whys" that I had not been able to answer when working on Ligny, Quatre Bras, and Mont St. Jean (because of the tactical scale of those games) re-emerged. The game map grew till it reached France. Eventually the .. whys" overshadowed the "what ifs" and becarne the game.
Operational
Because LAdN was to answer questions of an operational nature I chose a commensurate scale: division and brigade level units; roughly 3 flexes per mile (600 meters/hex, a cornfortable brigade frontage). Some of the questions that have popped up from players have reflected a degree of confusion regarding the difference between questions of a tactical nature, and those of the operational.
The following question may help elucidate the difference: Call Bylandt's brigade hold Gernioncourt (a Grand Farm flex) against a determined assault by the Guard Light Cavalry Division?
At first this sounds a little ridiculous. One is tempted to immediately say, "but of course, how do you expect cavalry to breach solidly built walls of brick?" Having been to this farm on two different occasions I am immediately inclined to agree. However. let's explore the obvious a little further. As already mentioned a hex represents 600 meters worth of terrain. Gernioncourt farm is roughly 100 meters on a side, or one-sixth the area represented by the hex. Bylandt's brigade consisted of the following battalions: the 27th Dutch Jagers, the 7th Belgian Line, and the 5th, 7th and 8th Dutch Militia. If it were physically possible, I'm sure every man of Bylandt's unit would have liked to have taken shelter within those brick walls, but it wasn't (and still isn't).
A building of this size could possibly hold a thousand men but fully half of them would have had to have been standing on ladders, while the rest stood beneath. Historically Bylandt placed a single battalion in the building for a very good reason; that's all that could fit in the place. Thus, with one-fifth of his command behind the solidly built brick walls, where do we find the rest of the brigade? Deployed in the environs of the farm (see Fig. 1), that is, in the other fivesixths of the remaining terrain represented by the hex, exposed to the finest cavalry in the world with only their morale value of "1" to protect them. When these men break (even this is not assured. the chances being a dead even 50%) some of the men in the farm will join them, sheltered though they are.
In any case, one-fifth of a brigade holding a hex does not a unit make, nor does the farm itself represent the sole feature of the hex (as I said, one-sixth). To solve this question "tactically" take out your Quatre Bras map and set it up, placing Bylandt's battalions within five hexes of Gemioncourt. Now place the Guard Light Cavalry Division to the south a further six flexes. At the "operational" level the question answers itself, in that it is not an operational question, but a tactical one in the first place.
Paul Dangel, who had been fielding these questions for me on GEnie, made what I thought to be a rather astute observation which I believe a player should bear in mind prior to ascribing an oversight in the design of this game. It ran something like this:
- "You must keep in mind the average age of the people playing these games today, which means they have probably been playing games for well over a decade; or half their adult life.
This means that a lot of their knowledge of history comes from the games they have played. It's game history, and doesn't reflect, necessarily, any true historical endeavor on their part."
If I had thought less about the subject I'm sure this game would have conformed to the expectations of most of the people who already own another operational "study" of the Waterloo campaign, but as Cyrano said. "A man doesn't fight to win." [He fights for the sake of honor.]
We call take this discussion of command level and garne scale one step further if we consider the game The Emperor Returns. TER can be defined as either quasi-operational or strategic. We can say that it is "operational" because it deals with only a single theater or operation of a war that was fought on several fronts. We can also say that it is "strategic" because the main maneuver element is the corps. As our perspective of the theater draws back to this scale of two miles per hex, terrain features that occupy a prominent place in the tactical narrative of the campaign, La Haye Saint, Gemioncourt, and Hougoumont to name a few, recede from view. At this level of scale they become insignificant.
Though they may be labeled on the map they have no effect on the game. Players who own TER, LAdN and either La Bataille de Mont St. Jean, Ligny or Quatre Bras can compare these games with the following formula: one hex in The Emperor Returns is equal to six hexes in LArmee du Nord, while one hex in L'Armee du Nord is equal to six hexes in one of the aforementioned La Bataille games.
Thus, at a scale of roughly one hundred meters per hex the corresponding level of command is that of the battalion or regiment; at a scale of roughly six-hundred meters per hex the corresponding level of command is that of the brigade or division; and at a scale two miles per hex you have roughly twice the frontage of a corps from this era. Distance is not, of course, the only measure of scale.
Time
We also have that of "time." Six turns (each being twenty minutes) at the La Bataille level is equal to a single turn in L'Armee du Nord (one turn equalling two hours of simulation). Six turns in LAdN equal a single turn in TER (strictly speaking this represents only twelve to fourteen hours: but that is about the maximum amount of time any unit actually marched in a given day, with a few notable exceptions). As shown by the previous example (Gemioncourt) a brigade can accomplish quite a bit in two hours. Napoleon in his memoirs states that the average battle only lasted six hours (and he personally fought/participated in over fifty of them), while we know that an empire can be lost in less than a day (TER). When we use time as our unit of scale we can see the tactical significance of a terrain feature shrink in proportion to the increase of the length of time a turn represents.
MAP
More L'Armee du Nord Designer's Notes Part One
L'Armee du Nord Designer's Notes: Part Two
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© Copyright 1995 by Clash of Arms Games.
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