The Combat System
Regarding combat, Western civilization has essentially prepared its armies to fight linear battles. I believe this is true throughout our history with the possible exception of the fluid front tactics developed on the eastern and desert fronts during tile Second World War, and how these influence current military doctrine, and, whenever western armies have adopted their tactics in order to cope with "eastern" armies: i.e. encounters between east and west exemplified by Alexander's conquest of Persia or Rome's first encounter with tile Parthian Empire, through the American involvement in Viet Nam. For the westerner, then. battles assume a kind of two dimensional form. Fronts are definable... tactics and strategy are fairly straightforward. Is it no surprise to us then that wargames conform to this pattern? The battle resolution systems in LAdN have generated no end of controversy. Let's examine the ideas behind them.
The Zone of Control (Z0C) and the operational Napoleonic game:
I postulate that the idea of the ZOC was originally intended as a kind of glue used to hold the pattern together. On a superficial level it certainly works. "Battle" games give the appearance of the two dimensional maps that were used in researching their subject. But this does not justify the design panacea which the ZOC has become, although I admit to their validity in some situations.
Originally, when I encountered ZOCs in a game on the Napoleonic era, I rationalized their use by the designer as representing several things, among which, the area effected by a unit's small arms fire, and its skirmishers. If an enemy unit came adjacent to one of my brigades it would have to stop and deal with these.
Of course this gave all units a compulsive imperative, that regardless of the degree of effrontery presented by an adjacent enemy unit. it would be dealt with immediately and unequivocally. I accepted this even though it lead to some rather strange circumstances. But the more I delved into the period the more I realized that it was the ZOC device that was dictating strategy, rather than the historicity of the game. I was only manipulating the designer's expedient in order to achieve his victory conditions.
The following are some examples of how ZOCs have warped the idea of Napoleonic warfare as exemplified by a game such as Napoleon at Leipzig:
- 1) A battalion rarely presented a front of more than one hundred meters. The average brigade consisted of between four and eight battalions. Assuming that each battalion deployed at intervals side by side (which they never did, they always deployed in at least two lines) this would yield a frontage of between four and eight hundred meters (in actuality between two and four hundred meters).
Now a corps of two or more divisions, consisting of at least four brigades, would have a frontage of between 1,600 and 3,200 meters in theory. But the theory is ridiculous when compared to how they really were deployed. Even the biggest French corps on the battlefield rarely occupied more than a kilometer of frontage. But with a ZOC driven design with every other-hex deployment, four brigade sized counters can easily present an impenetrable front of four kilometers (assuming five hundred meters per hex), and this is a small corps!
2) By increasing the frontage a corps is able to present, ZOCs have inadvertently created a surplus of troops. A corps of three infantry divisions is now able to cover the frontage it would historically cover with a single division. The other two divisions now either extend the front to Schliefflinesque proportions, or mass for huge odds on the enemy's line which has been just as equally extended.
3) The ability of a corps to expand its frontage to three and four times its historical capabilities has also stretched their linear front beyond the furthest extremities of their command structure. A corps was just not equipped with a large enough staff to deal with this kind of distance. Of course, this opens a whole new can of worms whereby, in order to deal with this obvious flaw, the designer is forced to contrive command rules, straight-jacketing everything back into a semblance of reality.
4) Lastly, by allowing infantry to project a rigid ZOC the role of light cavalry on the battlefield has been completely sublimated. It was the role of light cavalry on the battlefield to protect the flanks and intervals of the various divisions of infantry to which corps they were attached.
The rules presented in L'AdN where only cavalry projects a ZOC attempt to address all of the above objections. And that "ole three-to-one surrounded?" Sorry, trap-blocking belongs to American football, it doesn't belong in a historical simulation dealing with the era of Napoleon. "It is the simplest plan that meets with success. "
The Greater the Odds, the Greater the Chance of Killing a Defending Unit
This seems to be one the fundamentals of wargame design, appearing and apparently taken for granted for thirty years now. Well, let's think about it for a moment. Five-to-one odds is strong odds in anyone's game so it will be our example. Five thousand men attacking one thousand men. arms and armor equal: across clear and flat ground. We can find very few examples of these odds in history: Leonidas and Charles the XIIth of Sweden come to mind; the Alamo: Custer's Last Stand on the Little Bighorn River: the French Foreign Legion at Cambrone and many other famous deaths.
Although the odds were not five-to-one in many of the above instances the terrain tended to favor the defender, evening things up as things go... an inch is as good as a mile, etc. Yet these odds appear in every game, frequently, regardless of scale. One could argue that every battle is a series of little battles, coming out in the wash as it were when taken as a whole. OK ... I can accept that argument as reasonable ... I guess we all have since it keeps appearing in game after game.
The problem, however, is this... that is not how battles were fought. No one stood their ground in the face of five to one odds. And certainly, no one was eliminated from battle by odds of five-to-one. If odds as such were possible during a battle, without causing serious gaps in one's own line of battle (the concentration of sufficient force would necessitate reduction elsewhere) and your opponent obliged you by not exploiting this opportunity, who wouldn't yield their ground?
The defender would fall back as long as this was possible (even Custer did). Now I am as open minded as anyone, and I am open to the possibility that my common empirical, sense may be wrong in this matter, and I acknowledge the possibility of a five-to-one event taking place oil the battlefield as it was described several sentences ago. So I've maintained the tradition of five-to-one odds, even odds of six-to-one, on the Attack Results Table. But I'll be darned if anyone died frorn them: ergo, file prevalence of DR2 results on these columns. If you want to take ground, sure, mass these odds. If you want to cause casualties a la Clausewitz, you've got to be prepared to take casualties, a la Realite.
Thus, the various exchange results on the Optional Attack Results Table (this will replace the original table in the 2nd edition, whenever that may be). As an aside, I'm sure that there were artillery barrages in the First and Second World Wars that would warrant the utility of odds greater than five-to-one, or the use of nuclear weapons, or strategic bombing, but L'AdN deals with the Napoleonic era as does this article.
Incorporating Troop Quality into Unit Sizes:
How do you explain 3,000 French guardsmen attacking 7,000 Prussian infantrymen and winning? Some games level this stuff out (Napoleon at Leipzig, again... we published this one). Because these guardsmen fought with the same skill and fury as three times their number, their strength factor is trebled. Conversely, because the Prussian infantry wasn't up to snuff "we round 'em down" to slightly half their actual strength. The problem with this philosophy is: What exactly is "up to snuff?" Where do we find a common denominator for all these various nationalities? Who is Joe Average?
In the "La Bataille" games each battalion is given its own morale rating. Good troops tend to rally quicker than bad troops: will more than likely "go in" when all assault is ordered and stand their ground in the face of an infantry assault or cavalry charge. They also have their own melee value which is both a function of their size and quality (as evidenced by their morale but factored in during the design). A synthesis of these two ideas, melee value/morale rating, found in the these games provided a means of having my cake and eating it too with the unit Morale Values for LAdN. 3,000 guardsmen call remain 3,000 guardsmen (otherwise they'd have also been an artificially large target for artillery).
And their morale gives them a better than even chance of giving as well as getting when attacking an enemy force three tirnes their size composed of troops of lesser quality. This goes for cavalry charges also: on June 15th, near Gilly, Napoleon's escort of less than a thousand cavalrymen trashed five battalions from Pirch's brigade: odds of one-to-four at best! Pajol, on two separate occasions, at Charleroi and then again on the 18th at Limalette: seized well-defended bridges over major water obstacles with just the esprit and panache of his troopers. Of course the reverse of this is true also as evidenced by the 4th Foot Grenadiers shattering the charge of Lutzow's black uhlans late in the day at Ligny.
Regarding troop size and artillery fire, most gamers are familiar with either Napoleon's Last Battles or Napoleon at Leipzig, by Kevin Zucker. In these games artillery have a strength factor identical to that of infantry (representing one battery per SP) and when they attack they use the same CRT. Artillery attacks are resolved by establishing odds, strength factor vs. strength factor, as they are in most games. In this way a four-point artillery unit attacking a four point infantry unit makes a one-to-one attack. This is fine, but the strangeness occurs when you realize that a four point artillery unit attacking a seven point infantry unit makes the same attack at one-to-two odds; the chances of causing casualties being less likely.
Think about this. Isn't it just the opposite of the way it should be? Because the area represented by a hex is finite the more men you put into the hex increases the density of the target, in all likelihood increasing the chances of a hit, but not in these games. Napoleon at Leipzig has an advanced rule for hex density (hexes occupied by more than 10 or more SPs) but this only subtracts one from the attack roll. At least this game addresses the problem but it still fails radically short of redressing the historical irregularity. LAdN artillery rules attempt to address this aspect of Napoleonic warfare.
The French cavalry is too strong
When designing the system around which LAdN was built it was my intention to apply it to other battles of the era as well. It was not just designed for the Belgian Campaign of 1815. Therefore, the capabilities of cavalry from 1790 through 1815 had to be taken into account. I had to come up with something that made them more than just fast infantry; they had to be as different from the other arms as infantry differed from artillery, and hopefully the game would, in the end, demonstrate their interplay; what we call combined arms tactics.
The game had to demonstrate more than what we find when good cavalry opposes good infantry. The usual certainty, or predictability, of even this type of encounter was never actually certain or predictable as evidenced at the battle of Albuera where good cavalry (the Lancers of the Vistula) broke three-quarters of a good brigade of British infantry, or at Waterloo where the British Union and Household Brigades put the kibosh on half of d'Erlon's Ist Corps.
Rather than the stalemate army leaders and game players have come to expect from such encounters there had to be room for the unexpected. There also had to be room for the encounter of good cavalry vs. poor infantry, and the possibility, since the turn represented up to two hours of real time, that it could go on and on with its charge as a brigade of good French cavalry did at Medellin when upwards of 26,000 Spanish infantry were put to rout. One also had to experience the fruitlessness of commanding poor cavalry in the face of good infantry (I refer the reader to Marhot's description of the huge number of Kalmucks released on the French army as it withdrew from Russia into Poland at the close of campaign of 1812, and that even in the deplorable condition we find most of the infantry at that time, these eastern horsemen had very little if any impact on formed infantry).
Cavalry also had to be able to have the chance of performing the impossible, such as when Pajol's horsemen formed into a column of only four abreast and charged across the bridge at Limale in the face of three battered but tenacious Prussian infantry battalions. Normally this kind of thing, charging across a defended river crossing, unsupported to boot, would have been factored out of a game because of its rarity, but it did happen and it can happen in LAdN. Now, what about the question of whether or not the French cavalry is too strong in this game? I must admit that I agree with this charge, but let's take a look at my reasons.
The French cavalry is certainly of better quality than the Prussian cavalry, and more numerous. It is also better than the Dutch-Belgian, unit for unit. But it is not better, unit for unit, than the British cavalry.
- The French cavalry consists of fifteen units of 47 increments with an average morale of 3.67.
The Prussian cavalry consists of ten units of 32 increments with an average morale of 2.1.
The Dutch-Belgian cavalry consists of three units of 7 increments with an average morale of 2.0.
The British (including KGL and Brunswicker units) consists of seven units of 22 increments with an average morale of 3.1 (3.67 if we exclude the Brunswickers; exactly the same as the French).
Taken together the allies outnumber the French four-to-three in cavalry units; 61 to 47 in increments (the same ratio of four to three); but have a vastly wider spectrum of morale values.
On the whole, then, the Allied cavalry is superior to the French cavalry (in fact, at least eight Allied cavalry units are as good if not better than the average French cavalry unit if morale is our measure). So this apparent superiority of the French cavalry must come from something other than an actual comparison of units. It must come from the fact that the French have the elements of surprise and concentration in their favor, for though all French cavalry units start on the map, it takes fully two days for the bulk of the Allied cavalry to come into play.
I think, however, there is something else going on here. It is not so much the superiority of the French cavalry over the Allied cavalry, but the uniform quality of the French infantry when compared to the Allied infantry when faced by enemy cavalry. The morale differential here shows the true advantage enjoyed by the French. Excellent Allied cavalry attacking the average French infantry unit will at best be on the "one" column on the Cavalry Charge Table, while the variety of Allied infantry morale values will find, more often than not, French cavalry enjoying the benefits of at least one column better.
And to belabor this point is to again say that the French cavalry is too strong, which brings us back to the historicity of the game in the first place. The Army of the North was a damn fine fighting machine; possibly the most kick-ass, foul-tempered body of soldiers Napoleon had ever commanded. Every one of them was a veteran, and every one of them had a grudge.
The shortages in the cavalry experienced in the 1813 and '14 campaigns had been sorely felt by Napoleon, and he made sure that he brought an adequate amount of horse flesh with him into Belgium. It was good stuff on its own and great stuff when supported. The critics merely state what was going on in the minds of all that Prussian infantry as they watched the French deploy for battle, "the French cavalry is too damned strong!" (Grouchy held Thieleman's entire corps at bay throughout the battle of Ligny with only three cavalry divisions and a single brigade of infantry, one-third as many men. Could Thieleman's relative inactivity be attributed to the reputation enjoyed by the French cavalry that faced him on this front?)
Of course, it is the job of the Allied players to win the game as their historical counterparts did. To do this they must learn at least how to cope with the French cavalry, if not how to defeat it. The Optional Prussian Infantry Deployment (Rule 21.0) should be a first step in the right direction (its the closest thing to a "magic wand rule" that I'll ever provide in a game). For its historicity I refer the reader to Scotty Bowden's Armies at Waterloo, and the chapter introducing Prussian tactics and organization... there was a reason for those big brigades.
I'll also take this opportunity to point out that there is no place in the game where it say's that Optional Rules may be employed at the consensus of all players. If the Prussian player wishes to use Rule 21.0 (Special Prussian Infantry Deployment, or Rule 23.0 Obscured Units), then he may do so, regardless of the wishes of his ally or enemy. The most important "tip" that I can give to the Allied players is this... Don't lose your nerve. Blucher got really thumped at Ligny and Wellington escaped disaster on the 17th by the smallest margin. If either of them had lost their nerve history may have been quite different. I have played this game at least a dozen times and know that what looks insurmountable on the 16th may look quite different on the 18th.
More L'Armee du Nord Designer's Notes Part One
L'Armee du Nord Designer's Notes: Part Two
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