... because it's more important to know whether or not there will be weather, than what the weather will be." The Whetherman, from The Phantom Tollbooth As I write this, my wife and I are in the final stages of packing up and moving from Charleston, South Carolina, a city with the most severe weather of any place I've ever lived. The weather dominates absolutely everything here. Floods turns streets into rivers, swelling waist-deep within a single hour. "Microbursts" bring down trees across power lines and fling water parallel to the ground for yards before it actually falls. Lightning brings out the "swarmers:" hordes of flying termites that infest your house and make the streets so dark that you can't see stoplights. We all love a nice Spring rain, right ... ? Not in Charleston, where if the rain comes during high tide (which of course changes every day), you have about ten minutes to move your car to high ground before it's half-submerged. And hurricanes... well, we all know what hurricanes do. Needless to say, the rhythms of daily life are completely at the mercy of the weather. As a wargamer, I can't help but reflect that if the weather makes it this hard just to go to the store to buy food, imagine how hard it must make it for a general to conduct a war. This is particularly true of my favorite era, the "horse and musket" period. Imagine trying to march your men through a flooded valley, with horses and cannon bogging down into the mud, or simply being washed away altogether. Consider the difficulty even of keeping paper and ink dry during a downpour, and you can imagine what must have happened to command and control in the rain. In short, weather was absolutely central to the way battles were fought. If it hadn't rained at the Katzbach, Macdonald might have won (or he certainly would have seen the trap 1310cher was laying for him.) If it hadn't been so bright and sunny at Salamanca, would Wellington have seen the over-extended French lines and ordered an attack? The examples are endless. So I have always been surprised and disappointed by the ways in which wargame rules depict weather. Far from being central to the game system, weather is usually. tacked on as a one-or-two-page afterthought at the very end. In Empire, it comprises two pages out of 184. In Shako and General de Brigade, it occupies about two inches of column, under "Optional Rules." Napoleon's Battles gives it about one column of text, also under optional rules. In Fire and Fury, Volley and Bayonet, and many others, it's nowhere to be found. In my opinion, this is a staggeringly wrong-headed way of conceiving wargame rules. Far from being an optional add-on to a system that works just fine without it, weather should be at the very center of everything. It should determine movement, combat, and command/control abilities. It should have as much of an effect on combat outcomes as morale (if not more). After all, morale is frequently dependent upon weather, whereas weather doesn't give a whit about your morale! So in this article I want to propose some general guidelines for how we can place weather in our game designs. I'm going to stick with the horse and musket period for all my examples, but obviously weather plays a fundamental role in all periods of warfare. 1. What You Can And Can't See A general has only two ways of knowing something. He can see it for himself. Or, he can have somebody bring him news about it, in the form of a message. Obviously, the former is far superior. That is why most astute generals tried to place themselves on some vantage point above the battlefield, to get as good a view as possible. (How many wargames; do you know, however, which give a command advantage to the general who is on a hilltop?) The human eye has a wonderful range of vision on a sunny day, but only for general things. We can see that ship on the ocean horizon from ten miles away, but we only see it as a grey blob. It will have to get much closer before we can know what kind of ship it is. Generals had telescopes, but in the period around 1800, these rarely had a power of magnification much greater than X4. And even on the best of days, it was hard to distinguish a man's uniform from a distance. I have read accounts of the French and Prussians mistaking each other's blue coats from distances as close as 100 yards. Now complicate matters by adding bad weather. There is less sunshine, so colors become less distinct. If it's cold and rainy, the men are wearing greatcoats and covered shakos, which obscure their identity even more. In short, an army commander would be lucky to distinguish friend from foe at any distance greater than a mile (roughly 1800 yards), even with his telescope. Weather should be the prime determinant in how command systems work, and yet I've never seen a game which makes a commander's abilities subject to the current weather conditions. The brighter the day, the more the general can see for himself, and thus the faster he can make decisions for those formations under his eye. But the worse the weather, then the more he is dependent upon information brought to him by aides. That slows him down considerably. And don't forget the added hassles of sending out those aides, galloping through mud, to reach units who are indistinct from a distance because they are wearing coats, also covered in mud. A good command system should have two tiers: one level of efficiency for those units the general can actually see at the moment, and another level that is a function of the distance the units are beyond his vision. Furthermore, the game should reward a commander who is on a vantage point. And it should punish him if he has the sun in his eyes, or there is a thick fog, or if he is holed up in some house somewhere, not looking for himself. Many miniatures games try to re-create the various advantages or disadvantages of staff systems by reflecting these differences in a commander's radius. While staff systems did differ from army to army, these differences were more likely to be seen while on campaign, not once battle was joined. When armies deployed for battle, commanders Vegardless of their staff systems) tended to dispense with various paperwork and issued orders verbally, or perhaps scribbled out a few lines to an aide, who then went galloping off with those instructions. Napoleon, for instance, had a very impressive network of staff officers, with triplicate procedures for security and certainty while on the march. But once the army was drawn up into the confines of a battlefield, he tended to bypass Berthier and simply barked out commands like anybody else. In other words, most staffs functioned alike on the battlefield. There were certainly differences in the energy, competence, and perceptiveness of commanders and their assistants, and these differences we could depict in any number of ways. In my current Napoleonic game, I show differences like this with "Command Point" (CP) chits that are available to the generals to issue orders and do other things. But when we speak of a command "radius" (which of course is a complete wargame abstraction), our commanders are more limited by geography and weather than by their staff officers. On a clear, sunny day like Austerlitz or Salamanca, a commander with a good vantage point might be able to distinguish different formations up to two miles away. In a blinding snowstorm like that at the battle of Eylau, a commander would be lucky to see much more than a few hundred yards. Legend has it that at the Katzbach (where it rained all afternoon), BlOcher sent an order to Yorck to delay his attacK until he could see a certain number of French regiments on the plateau. The testy Yorck fired back that he couldn't see his own fingers, much less the French! When the Prussian attack finally came, two Prussian brigades collided with each other, and their commanders spent two precious hours arguing about how to straighten it out. Have you ever seen that happen in a wargame? So this immediate visual distance is important, because it represents the maximum point at which a commander can make decisions based upon what he himself can observe. Beyond that distance, he depends upon news brought to him by couriers, and his decisions are hamstrung by the uncertainty of assigning objectives he can't see to units he can't see. We might consider Borodino here, where Murat and Ney were imploring Napoleon to commit his Guard, because they had ripped open a hole in the Russian line that was begging to be exploited. Napoleon, though, couldn't see it. He kept squinting through his telescope, muttering, "I can't see my chessboard properly..." In my games I make the general's radius equal to the current visibility range, period. Within that radius, he can do certain things. Beyond that radius, doing everythin gets increasingly more difficult, time-consuming, and inaccurate, and that's where dialerences in staff systems and skill play out. And bear in mind that since weather can change from turn to turn, the generals' radii change, too. Your plan might be very good in the morning, when it's clear. But by 3:00 PM, it's started to rain, and now you can't control your forces the way you wanted to. Furthermore, a good command system should make a distinction for when a general gives orders to a unit he can see, and when he gives orders to a unit he can't see. It's very hard to give effective leadership to a body of 20,000 men when you aren't entirely sure where they are, what formations they're in, how many enemy they face, and so on. You spread out your map and you place your colored pins, and you guess that IV Corps should be able to assault the town of Schlurpnitz by 1:00PM. So you give the order, and then you hope for the best. In other words, if you can't see the recipient or the objective of the orders, then your orders should be penalized in some way. A good command system would take that into account. In my game, when you can see a corps, you can micro-manage it to a fine degree. But when you can't see it, then you are at the mercy of the competence, energy, and personality of the subordinate who received the order. Perhaps he doesn't think it's possible to assault Schlurpnitz: by 1:00PM. Perhaps he'll do it at 3:00PM, if he does it at all. Finally, I don't want you to think that I advocate a wandering Field Marshal, roaming the battlefield and doing everything himself. In fact, most wargames allow the army commanders to move around the battlefield without consequence. This was not common practice. The best course of action for an army commander was to find a good observation point, to set up his headquarters there, and to stay put. This is why my game offers a bonus if the army headquarters is on a vantage point, and a penalty for moving the army commander. The army headquarters could be quite an elaborate affair. At the very least, it had to function as a nexus of information; couriers needed to know where they could find the commander and chief of staff, and of course any time spent moving was time that the commander couldn't spend looking at maps, looking through his telescope, reading and writing messages, etc. So moving the army headquarters was rarely done. (Some commanders took this to extremes. Kutusov's headquarters was something between a buffet and a dress ball, and at Borodino he didn't even trouble himself to turn to face the battle!) Admittedly, there were exceptions. Napoleon was prone to wander the field from time to time, but only if he had a specific purpose in mind - usually to see something better for himself. Nobody was as peripatetic as Wellington, who remained in almost constant motion. Still, Wellington did this because he had set up a network of information flowing back to him from all sectors of his front, and he could judge where he needed to be. And since Wellington's army was small and usually on the defensive, he could more easily spare the down-time of traveling, because most of his units were not in motion. Bldcher was never happier than when mingling with his men, and he liked to be where the action was, to cheer them on, and frequently to get in the thick of it, himself. But Blucher had Gneisenau, the second best staff officer of the Napoleonic wars, left behind at army headquarters to handle all the paperwork. (Napoleon had the best, at least until 1814, in Berthier.) So in general, the army commander should not move very much. Corps commanders were expected to be much more active. One might consider the story from Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme, in which the hero follows Marshal Ney around the battlefield of Waterloo for several hours. Although it is a fictional account, Stendhal knew what he was talking about. Corps commanders remained in motion, often under fire. This probably explains why the good ones were so frequently wounded. 2. What's Underfoot? The next way in which weather should affect a game system is in determining the current ground conditions. I advocate three: hard, soft, and mud. Obviously, these can change over the course of the day, as the weather changes. The condition of the ground should have a profound effect on the way everything else in the game is done. If you've ever played a team sport like football or soccer, which is at the mercy of the weather, you should understand instantly how the condition of the earth affects your ability to move and "fight." The softer the ground, the slower everything gets, and the more mistakes are made. If you compound this with bad visibility, then not only is your body less able to react, but your mind, too, is limited by faulty information. And so we can see that things like opportunity fire, opportunity charges, evasions, forming squares when charged by cavalry, etc, etc... all of it is completely at the whim of the ground and the weather. Let's begin with artillery fire. Whether you are dealing with a rolling, bouncing cannonball or an exploding howitzer shell, soft ground absorbs the lethality of the shot. The artillery tables should factor in soft ground and mud right up-front - not as optional rules somewhere else in the book. But... if you're trying to figure out what happens to an artillery battery that is attacked by the enemy, then the tables turn. Assuming the gunners can see the enemy approach, the soggy ground will make the enemy approach slower, meaning that the gunners will have more time to fire canister into the attackers. What if the attacker is cavalry? Horses have four-hoof drive, and are thus less disabled by mud, but that artillery battery is dependent upon wagon wheels, which get bogged down. So if your guns are charged by infantry in the mud, they will have an advantage, whereas if they are charged by cavalry in the mud, they will be at a disadvantage. Musketry seemingly is not affected by ground condition, although it's obviously affected by weather. After a certain amount of precipitation, muskets will become worthless. The Austrians at Dresden, on that rainy second day of the battle, were getting perhaps ten out of every 100 muskets to fire properly. What was really killing them, though, was the difficulties imposed on changing formations on soggy ground. Infantry fire is heavily dependent upon getting into the best facing and formation for firing. And if the ground is muddy, then it's proportionately harder to move. Men become worn out from the extra exertion. In game terms, that should mean that soggy ground saps morale. And don't assume that snow is just a pretty distraction. In addition to ruining visibility, snow actually has to land somewhere. If it lands on a warm hand or a hot musket, it melts. So snow can foul musketry just as badly as rain. And even though it might be below freezing, the traffic of thousands of warm boots, wheels, and horses means that the fallen snow is actually a slippery sludge. So much for "hard ground" in the wintertime. Most games give units a "Road Bonus" of some kind. This is very silly, and I don't know why it persists. A "road" in the early 19th century was usually little more than a muddy track, wide enough for a wagon axle. Its main advantage was usually that it represented a cleared area in otherwise rough terrain (a road through a forest, for instance), and was thus the only way for the army's thousands of wheeled vehicles to move. Most infantry and cavalry units marching along a road were actually marching along the sides of that road, because the road itself was reserved for artillery, supply wagons and ambulances, and of course officers and couriers who would gallop by, splattering everybody with mud. When the ground became soggy, the road became a trap - worse than no road at all. In bad weather units should actually suffer a penalty for using a road. There are some other obvious things I haven't mentioned. Rain should make it very hard to ford a river or build a bridge. Muddy ground should slow down the command system because it reduces the speed of couriers. Movement overall becomes more difficult on wet or icy ground, and that should include a unit's chance to react in various ways, such as changing formation when attacked, evading a slower unit, recalling skirmishers, and so on. Since most games claim that their "melee" system actually simulates close-range volleys and other sorts of ranged combat, then the weather will affect that, too. And finally, bad weather should lower everybody's morale. (Look, if you can't even get your friends to come out for a drink in the rain, imagine trying to get them to march and die!) 3. Daylight Here in Charleston, you can be sitting at your desk at 10:00AM, looking out the window at a perfectly blue, sunny sky. An hour later, it will be as dark as dusk, the clouds nearly black. You have to turn on all the lights in order to see and get work done. It's an eloquent reminder of how people worked in the days before electricity: you worked when there was light, and when the light ran out, you stopped. One of my big gripes about army-sized wargames is that there's no provision made for pursuit, or for anything that happens at the end of the day. In some games with "army morale" rules, once one army breaks, then Poof! it's gone, and the game ends instantly. There's no incentive to preserve your light cavalry for protecting your retreat (or, if you're the winner, for pursuing your beaten foe.) And most importantly, there's no consideration for when in the day the loser lost. Was it getting dark? Or was it mid-day, with plenty of daylight left? If the latter, then there's a chance for a devastating pursuit, turning defeat into catastrophe. But this, again, is completely dependent upon the weather. The battles of the Napoleonic wars were usually long. Americans, who live on more southerly latitudes, may not realize that the North-European day in summer begins around 4:00 AM, and the sun doesn't set until about 11:00PM. A single day can seem like forever if you're worried about being killed or maimed. On the other hand, however, the European winters result in very short days, with sunrise around 9:30AM and sunset as early as 3:30PM. And so you get those short, unfinished battles of the dreary 1814 campaign. A good game design should use weather to determine how many turns of daylight there will be. This will have an impact on fatigue and morale. A summer battle would be twice as long as a winter battle. Many battles ended simply because the day had ended. Others ended right at the close of the day, and the beaten side was able to slink away under cover of darkness. Only in a handful of decisive engagements did the victorious side win so spectacularly that the enemy army was literally torn apart. A general who hurls his whole army into battle early, without keeping a reserve, runs the risk of breaking it early, too. That means that the enemy pursuit will have all afternoon to run him down. It is no coincidence that most battles were decided in the waning hours of the day. The commanders tried to set up a situation where they could make a final push when the enemy was exhausted, but they also wanted to make sure that if this big gamble failed, darkness would prevent the enemy from punishing them too severely. So a good game design should include both weather and time as factors in the calculation of Army Morale, and what happens after "victory." If your army breaks with a lot of daylight left, then the victor has a better chance of destroying you in a pursuit. If the weather is bad and your army held until nightfall, you are more likely to get away intact, as the allies did after Dresden, Ligny, Eylau, and others. Putting it All Together By now you are probably envisioning a game with hundreds of rules and modifiers for weather. But it doesn't have to be difficult. In my upcoming Napoleonic game, Grande Ann6e, I place the chapter on Weather very early in the book, right after the Sequence of Play. We begin with basic concepts like visibility, ground condition, and weather change. And then, as we go through the different chapters for things like command, movement, artillery fire, and so on, these concepts are factored into everything. It's just a question of making it integrated, making it always one of your basic considerations whenever you write rules. You wouldn t write a table for artillery fire without considering the different sizes of guns that might be firing; you'd factor that in from the outset. And so I also factor in weather. The effects on game-play are astonishing. I'll give you two brief examples from scenarios designed for Grande Armee, (All the scenarios have variants and what-ifs, frequently involving a battle fought under different conditions.) First is the Katzbach scenario. What if the weather had been overcast, but not drenching? Macdonald can now see his dilemma. Does he spread out his forces? Does he even continue with the attack at all, or does he consolidate? It's an entirely different battle without the rain. The second example is Vitoria. Interestingly, Vitoria was fought after a week of unseasonably nasty cold and rainy weather in northern Spain. Right as Wellington needed it, the sun broke out and he had a clear day in which to carry out his very complex, risky plan. But what if the weather had remained bad? Now Wellington's army is spread out over some seven miles of front, and he can't see his different divisions; they're all on their own. It's no longer a question of Wellington directing this sin~le battle using his telescope. It's four different allied wing commanders, each fighting is own way forward as best he can: a completely different command situation. The French in their central valley position are at a terrible disadvantage on a clear day; they're sitting ducks. But on a rainy day, they have the advantage now, and the chance of defeating the distant allied wings in detail. In a game without much emphasis on weather, Vitoria is boring: an allied walk-over. But if the weather is variable, and at the center of the rules, then it's a real nail-biter. In conclusion, it is absurd to think of "simulating" a battle without simulating the conditions under which that battle was fought. Back to MWAN #113 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com