To design anything you must first have focus. The focus of LAdN should be obvious to anyone viewing the three maps together... the highway running from Beaumont in the south to Brussels at the very top of the map. Just tracing the line of this highway should reveal a few things, and answer a few questions put by persons of greater renown than ourselves.
First of all, Napoleon had to go quite out of his way to fight the battle of Ligny. Secondly; if we envision the battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras around 2.00 p.m., or just when they were getting well under way, was Napoleon guilty of forgetting about the VIth Corps [Lobau] as Chandler asserts, and was this a symptom of his waning acumen for the art of war? Place the VIth Corps in its historical deployment within a hex or two of Charleroi. At once it is apparent that this part of the Reserve is ideally situated to march either on Ligny or Quatre Bras. Did Napoleon forget about it? Or was this corps filling the role of the masse de manoeuvre (reserve), waiting until one or the other battles then raging developed to the point where it would be needed to either finish a victory or stem the tide of defeat.
I believe the lie is immediately put to Chandler's square-peg, round-hole academics. Napoleon's "powers" may have been on the wane. but this is not an example thereof. In fact the "V" created by the road running from Quatre Bras to Charleroi, and then to Ligny, is the perfect actualization of the idea of the central position... VIth Corps occupying the fulcrum. (As an aside the reader may find it interesting to know that Napoleon found out about Ney's involvement with a large English force at Quatre Bras, and not the mere rearguard he had predicted, from Lobau and not from Ney).
Another function of "focus" is to limit the scope of the design. Since the game was also to be eminently playable chrome that otherwise would have found its way into it was subject to the following "rigor," will it slow down play? And if so, is it essential? If it slowed down play and was not essential to what the focus of the game was, it was cut.
One example of this "economizing" was the effect Rain Turns have on play. I could have halved movement: I could have halved combat (each at the expense of an added paragraph in the rules). I chose instead to double the length of the turns in question to four hours instead of the usual two. A simple solution that required but one sentence on the Movement Track.
A consequence of this focus, or subject of the game, is that an army of the 19th century could travel much greater distances than we give them credit for, under the right circumstances. I remember reading somewhere in an old S&T that Napoleon made better time invading Russia than the Germans did in World War II.
Although the number of variables involved in this comparison must be staggering, when all is said and done I'm sure a grain of verisimilitude remains. There are only a finite number of things/events that can slow an army down and these things haven't changed over the years. Only the manner in which they are dealt with.
Some of them are as follows:
- 1) The type of moving body: mounted, wheeled or on foot: slower moving troops in front.
2) The physical condition of the moving body: fresh, exhausted, worn out or new (as in transport); frequent breakdowns, straggling, frequent rest periods, insubordination.
3) Terrain: type of road, overland, mountainous, urban, etc. Leading to...
4) Bottlenecks: river crossings, intersections, stalled or broken down transport, mountain passes: anything that creates congestion in the desired path of movement
5) Confusion: miscommunication, sabotage, poor staff work, bad maps, drunkenness, accidents.
6) Weather: ice, snow, rain, mud, flooding and their effects on the terrain, type and condition of the moving body.
7) The presence of the enemy: interdiction, raiding, skirmishing, creating physical obstructions, (felled trees, etc.) ambushing, threatening, feinting, deployed for battle.
8) Leadership: rashness, accident prone (unlucky), and for our purposes, bad play, bad dice.
The Army of the North encountered every type of obstruction catalogued above. To cite an example of each is beyond the scope of this article or the Historical Commentary that was included with the game, however. a discussion of a few may help clear up some of the gray areas for a few players:
Leadership
One person wrote to me and pointed out that it was impossible to get the entire Imperial Guard Corps on a road and in command at the same time, greatly inhibiting the sustained speed at which this rather large maneuver element could travel. He is absolutely right. What is termed the "Imperial Guard Corps" in the game was historically two corps plus assets at the army level.
As mentioned on the Cavalry Charge Table, Mortier, commander of the Guard Cavalry Corps (Cavalry of the Guard Imperial) "missed the campaign" because of a severe case of the gout. (In fact, one of the reasons Ney shows up on Turn 5, and not Turn 15 is because he had spent the early morning hours buying two horses from the stricken Marshal... neither of which survived beyond Turn 19). So rather than having two commanders for the Guard, poor Druout has to command the entire formation by himself. Here we have an example of Leadership slowing down an army (illness). Enterprising gamers may wish to create a Mortier counter and use it to test the effect of his absence (of course for play balance, Ney should show up later as well).
Terrain and Bottle Necks
As stated in the rules stacking restrictions during movement only apply to units in road column, as they move, and as they end their move (they may not end the movement phase stacked with another unit or move through another unit). Historically, the utility of a road served two purposes, least of which was the reliable surface it provided to travel upon.
More importantly a road defined the shortest or least encumbered path between two points (encumbered in the sense that it takes less time to go around a hill than over one; crossing rivers at shallow places rather than deep ones: or connecting a series of clearings through a forest). As the size of armies grew over the ages the actual metalled surface of a road accounted for an ever decreasing percentage of the troops who could use it, being explicitly reserved for wheeled transports, artillery, and message bearers. If a gap appeared in this morass of vehicles the cavalry had priority over the infantry as to who could use it next.
Of course, this is not to say that the infantry was the last to "move out" while on campaign. It marched beside the road, across fields plowed and fallow, through light woods and orchards, through hedges, across streams and small rivers; trampling crops and knocking down fences and garden walls. Depending on the proximity of the enemy they marched in open or closed order.
Occasionally, however, everyone needed to use the road at the same geographic point. Rain turned plowed fields into brown glue. Fog caused the battalions to tighten up nearer to the road. Defiles in the countryside funneled the men closer and closer to each other and deep rivers had to be crossed at bridges. The rain on June 17th did not save the Anglo-Dutch Army by making the French gunpowder wet. (The condition of the ground caused the French Ist and VIth Corps to become road-bound, intermixing the various formations as they entered the crossroads of Quatre Bras from the east and south).
If, as the French player, you plan your move poorly (staff-work) and end the movement of an infantry division on the Charleroi bridge, you have just choked this bottleneck (confusion) and no other unit may pass at this point for the remainder of the phase. If, as the Prussian IVth Korps discovered, the troops to your front were allocated an extra measure of rest, and their bivouacs lie across the road you must travel, you are going to go nowhere. I cannot stress enough the importance of Rule 6.3. As the artwork on the game illustrates, the subject of L'AdN is an army on the march and how this is done.
More L'Armee du Nord Designer's Notes Part One
L'Armee du Nord Designer's Notes: Part Two
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