Later, I’d learn from books and old timers that it was the first worthwhile tactical Napoleonics game to take into account differing national organization and practices, and indeed was the result of original research on those lines. Even as a high school student, though, I was a bit conflicted. I’d never heard of the virtues of simplicity in rules design, and it would take me decades to be a convert. The sheer intimidating size of the thing was an actual plus when the worst things in life were the high school jocks. On the other hand, it was a very poor read by the standards of Grant or Young. Mostly, you just memorized the order of operations and basic mechanisms. They were simple enough, but often hard to find. And it was getting worse. The CLSII text of 1969 had inserted pages, and often on the last few pages would be something that should have been brought up elsewhere, but in pre word processor days, no one wanted to retype everything. This created some difficulty, partially overcome by “THE INDEX” which mysteriously appeared and circulated in the group. But over the next few years, Preferred Optional Rules, Local POR’s, and Reviewed Referee Rulings, to say nothing of Potential Optional Rules were added.
By 1979, in an effort to clear away the underbrush, I personally retyped the thing, admittedly photocopying where I could, to produce a better organized draft, and proudly took the result to Baron Vietmeyer, who was horrified. The copyright wars were under way, and I had just walked into the line of fire. He patted me on the head, gave me a shiny new rule book, and stuffed my accomplishment in a drawer. There it would sit for more than 15 years.
We all rather expected the Baron’s retirement would lead to a third edition. He had after all been the benevolent dictator of the Midwest Napoleonic Wargamers Confederation for most the Second Edition period. To this day, we can only guess why it didn’t happen; illness perhaps, and an inability to remember why things had been written in a certain way in the first place. Like Burke’s view of society, the pieces depended on one another in a fashion hard to determine, and disturbing one piece could have unexpected consequences. There, matters stood through the disbanding of the Confederation and Baron Vietmeyer’s death—and through the invention of the personal computer.
About 1997, there were stirrings of life in the old Confederation. Old players had returned to the area, or become active again, and we were scrounging for a mutually acceptable rules set. Several were tried, but we were all based for CLS and used to it. We knew the ranges and mechanisms, but to try to find anything in the rules remained difficult at best. Also, there was the problem of “CLS tactics” which were doubtful or wrong historically, but the thing to do from a game standpoint. “tactics” such as stuffing a house with as many different basic units as possible to make the garrison less likely to fall back or purchasing lancers in the biggest regiment but the smallest squadrons obtainable, or shuffling the combat effectiveness of cavalry squadrons or grenzer divisions. This was not tactics so much as lore, but only a revised edition would eliminate it.
While some of us were debating the virtues of a third edition, Rick Vietmeyer had been doing the practical work of clearing away the copyright jungle, always on the assumption that no one tried to make any money on the result. Little did we know that there was never any danger of that.
The first step was to take the old 1979 re-ordered Second Edition and log it into the word processing program of a computer. I would pay my more computer-savvy son over a period of weeks to install the old text in a format from which we could modify it. Then the young punk had to be forcibly dissuaded from changing the text to suit himself as he went along. I caught everything eventually, I think.
Meantime, informal discussions were held with an Old Guard of CLS players. (What do you call a CLS player with under 20 years’ experience? Marie-Louise. This was a real bunch of silverbacks.) The question was what had to be changed. The answers were all over the map.
IIlustrations: everyone liked the old Ted Haskel illustrations. He had given his permission for use of the art, but it was a more complicated thing than that. Shoehorning the illustrations into the text went from a cute idea to an ongoing project. Several times good, clear copies of the illustrations had to be found, and scanned in. My old 486 wasn’t up to accommodating a scanner, so commercial help had to be obtained, for a small donation. . I had the bright notion of using them as a sort of personal clip art file, to designate areas within the rules, but Ted had illustrated what took his fancy, and so art was thicker on some subjects than others. . In my mind, the text wrapped around the illustrations, but the computer had a mind of its own on this point. Neither that computer nor its successor proved capable of wrapping text around the illustrations, thus probably adding several pages to the finished product. Also adding time to the successive drafts to keep the illustrations where they were intended. Even as it stands, in the final draft some of the illustrations on the bottom of pages were simply glued on and photocopied to the final text. That was the easy part.
The messy part came from divergent views of the rules. I came to think of them, roughly as the negativists, the nitpickers and the revolutionaries. The negativists had played CLS once and hadn’t liked it. Often the whole critique came down to a bad die roll, or a very strange rule omission or interpretation. Basically, the negativists got ignored. There were other tactical Napoleonic rules out there, and few of the negativists knew enough about CLS to make an educated critique.
The nitpickers were old CLS players, often of considerable experience, who could go through an extensive rules set, and lecture interminably on one feature they felt to be historically inaccurate, tactically unsound or just plain bad rulesmanship. EVERYBODY was a nitpicker. These were listened to very attentively.
The revolutionaries wanted to keep the name CLS, but to gut the mechanisms, to create a game less suitable for small battles and more suitable for large ones. Overall, one might reject the proposition, but it was harder to ignore point by point, since the revolutionary program involved a lot of rules simplification.
The good news is that there was a fair area of agreement on certain matters. I’d expected ferocious fights over the layout of the rulebook, and in fact there were none at all.. No one argued over the end of the guerilla rules, the demise of sieges, the introduction of alternate movement (in the abstract) and stickless artillery.
Then came the bloodshed. The big game advocates liked homogenizing some of the mixed elite battalions, but didn’t like retaining line elite companies. The cavalry commanders liked squares not being able to run in bad morale, but didn’t like them being so darn hard to crack if morale held. The gunners liked not keeping track of ammunition, but didn’t like the slight reduction in hit probabilities per round. The small battle players would have liked musketry divided into range bands. The infantry officers…need I go on? I really like to think we disappointed everybody—in the right way, of course.
And while the debate over changes progressed, we had the mechanics of putting the rules together. We’d had “cheat sheets” in mind from the beginning, but placing more than one spreadsheet on a page proved troublesome, and again some real cheating was indulged in. With a little more space, there would be a fire modifiers chart. Maybe next time.
So what, apart from layout, did we wind up changing?
First, we put everything in order, and approximately the “natural” order that flows from the order of operations.
Second, we tried to have no more than one rule per topic. For ease of reference, we’ve retained some redundancy, but we hope no contradictions.
Third, we tried to eliminate the features which led to consistent disputes and bad feeling: fewer “judgement calls,” or misuse of map-marking. This meant replacing the stick and burst circle system with a dice mechanism. It also meant reverting from the “simultaneous movement” of CLSII to the alternate movement of CLS. Certain “responsive moves” were permitted, but the whole map-marking/order writing sequence was eliminated, with very great savings in playing time, especially in large multi-player games.
Fourth, we tried to focus the game a little. A CLS commander runs something from a reinforced regiment to a division in a one on one game, and might get up to corps level in a very large event. He shouldn’t have to worry about civilian temperment, or what ammunition the gun captain has chosen, and troops based for CLS played very badly in sieges and stormings. The siege and guerilla sections are no more, and the supply sergeants are trusted to keep the guns stocked for an afternoon (In plain English, we trimmed the fire effect of the artillery a little, but eliminated ammunition restrictions).
Fifth, we made a number of minor changes which (we hope) speed up the game and/or make it a little more realistic. Lancers have a “3” charge increment rather than the extra die which gave such an advantage to small squadrons, for example, and gunners are harder to shoot to avoid the use of spare gunners. Squares, once formed, are harder to break, but can no longer run away in bad morale but still in square. Especially, we simplified the terrain rules. These more than anything else, we expect to see modified locally. They were meant to give a game designer a handy selection to choose from, and not to restrict his freedom to invent other rules to reflect the conditions of the battlefield as he understands them.
Lastly, we tried to accommodate some of the known variants in basing and organization among old CLS groups without creating a free for all. For that matter, anyone based for “Playable Napoleonic Wargames” or “In the Grand Manner” should be able to use these rules easily enough.
Throughout, we had two guiding principles; not to change any basic rule mechanisms or distances unless under the most urgent necessity, and to use the simplest rule mechanism which created the desired effect.
At last the time had come to place the results in print, far enough (we hoped) ahead of the resumption of club play to let everyone read it, or at least leave them with no excuse for not having done so. So the final result went off to Kinko’s—who wanted twice what we’d figured based on earlier conversations. Yet another old line CLS gamer dug into his pocket to make up the money.
And so here we stand. If we sell out the print run at the asking price, we’ll still lose money overall, though by this time I’m not quite sure how much. I found at least three typos after the print run, and no one, I think was entirely satisfied with the text.
Well, I guess we shouldn’t have expected anyone to be. When I sit down and write rules to suit me, with my castings and basing, my terrain, and my notion of what makes a satisfactory wargame, I at least am content, and the same is true of most of the other contributors. This has been more like moviemaking, where time, money and dozens of different areas of expertise and interests have been balanced off, and no one gets everything they were hoping for. Still, sometimes you create a classic that way, and if not, there’s always someone to blame.
Was it fun? Well, talking over old battles real and wargame, is always fun. Playtesting has a lot to recommend it. I got to meet a lot of old CLS players I hadn’t known before, and loved talking things over with most of them. Calls from old friends late at night to critique the results are a little more mixed, as are detailed written critiques arriving in the final stages of proofreading. Let’s say the whole thing was necessary, and thank Heaven I didn’t lose any friends over it.
Would I do it again? Sorry, people: only one cherished rules set of my youth. Other people get to do their own.
Have I, as they say, learned from the experience? You betcha! It’s increased my respect for every long published set, reminded me never to volunteer for anything, and really pushed me toward back of the envelope rules for everything but tactical Napoleonics. The word processing program is retired, and I’m going out to push some lead.
You should too.
Well, it all started back around 1969 when a very young and quite enthusiastic version of myself was shown an absolutely HUMONGOUS rules set. For an adolescent just out of the “line of sight kills” school of 54mm sandbox warfare, it was very impressive. “Column, Line and Square” it was called, or, in certain quarters, “Fred’s new-fangled Second Edition.” It was my introduction to “serious” historical miniatures play, and I fell in love.
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