[Editor's Note: This is part of a series of articles discussing the different facets of the Napoleonic Brigade Series. The theme of today's sermon is: Organizational Structures. Military ones.]

One problem when designing Napoleonic simulations is that the era spans almost 25 years of military developments, and at our scale the main issue is how to handle the lack of standardized army organizations. As NBS is built around CWB it works best handling those very neat and practical "regiment- brigade-division-corps" armies of the Civil War, meaning that as long as long as one creates NBS scenarios with only armies using the Corps d'Armee system in them one will be safe.

Let us recapitulate. The permanently organized corps came into being during the French Army's stay in Boulogne 1803-1805 and is still one of the cornerstones of military thought. It solved the problem of handling the huge armies created by the introduction of conscription, and was eventually adopted by most nations involved in the Napoleonic wars. It formalization during those years is in a sense the "invention" that divides the Revolutionary Wars from the Napoleonic Wars proper, and the enormous battles of 180913 would have been impossible without it.

An A1 Army of the Napoleonic wars was made up of a number of quite similar corps plus a number of "army assets" such as guard, heavy cavalry, and reserve artillery formations. Each corps consisted of a number of (usually three) quite similar divisions that each in turn broke down into two or three brigades. Each division had a battery of light guns and the corps also had one or two (one heavy, one horse) batteries under the corps commander's control. This packet was then rounded out by a small brigade of light cavalry and there you are. The corps. A small, self-contained army. A very solid package that works perfectly with the CWB/NBS command rules.

Of course reality was seldom this clear-cut. But before we look at the different corps variants, let us take look at something else, the brigades. This is the Napoleonic Brigade Series, right? Built from the Civil War Brigade Series. But a Civil War brigade was a very orderly thing compared to what had passed for a brigade sixty years earlier.

During the wars of 1792-1815 a brigade could be anything from a couple of very depleted battalions to a 6000-man horde. In game terms things work rather like this: NBS juggles suitable chunks of troops; regiments, small brigades, half a division. Indeed, anything that makes up a convenient 1500-2500 man strong "chunk" will do. But as The Napoleonic Chunk Series does not sound too sexy, so we are struck with the B-name.

Anyhow, the corps. The French used the organization described above between 1805-15 (with exceptions, of course, and The Army of Reserve were already using corps during the 1800 campaign). The reborn Prussian army used it, but insisted on calling their divisions "brigades" and having no brigade structure at all. They had also done away with the light cavalry brigade and instead given a few light cavalry squadrons into each brigade (division).

The Russian Army started to use the corps system in time for the 1812 campaign. They did manage without any organic cavalry, and the remarkably set structure fielded artillery parks of monstrous proportions, most corps having more guns than a fairsized pre-1805 army. Also, both Prussian and Russian corps often had an Advance Guard, a small, more agile, division made up of infantry, cavalry and horse artillery.

The Austrians sort of drifted into using the corps structure. It was introduced during the preparations for the 1809 war, but were viciously opposed by the arch-conservative Hofkreigsraat. But by 1813 these structures was rather set, with most corps having two massive infantry divisions and a small all-arms advance guard. Still, these very solid looking formations were often disrupted by the Austrian commander's almost pathological drive to micro-manage (more on that later) things.

Besides these nations, few other countries used the corps system. Some German states as well as the Kingdom of Italy had entire corps formed along French lines, and the Swedish Army that took part in the 1813 campaign was in effect a large corps. In the end all these corps-based armies are easily handled by the system; all we have to do is to figure out if any of them need any special rules. For instance, the rules for the rather uncoordinated Federals in Bloody Roads South will do nicely for the Prussians in the early 1813 battles, and we may for instance cut down on command spans for some Russian formations to give them a more "bulky" feeling.

By now someone surely has recalled that the AngloAllied army of 1815 had a corps structure. But it was an altogether political arrangement and Wellington worked, as he had always done, within in what we may call "the Divisional System." This system is the second most-common organizational structure of the era, used throughout the era by the British and Spanish, by the French before 1805, and by the Russians during the 1807 campaign. The main features of this system or style are the lack of corps organization and the use of rather permanently formed divisions.

In most cases these armies are quite small and can be handled-rule-wise in the same way as any other army. One just replaces "corps" with "division" everywhere. And as long as we are handling Napoleon's nimble little three-division army of 1796-97, or Wellington's army during the first years in Spain, we will have a small, efficient package that works fine within the framework of the rules.

But if one tries to lead the Russian army of 1807, or Wellington's of 1814, one will run into trouble. That is, the player will run into very realistic problems created by the system. These armies each had about ten divisions and one does not have the time to juggle that many formations in an efficient way. Some units are bound to get lost or just stand around and stare. As in real life, so in the games.

Solution

One solution to this problem was to create "wings" by uniting three or four divisions under one commander. But these were often formed on the morning of battle, and furthermore the guy tasked with leading this new-born beast was often the commander of one of the divisions involved. And "wearing two hats" is never an easy job, on a battlefield or elsewhere, especially as these poor guys seldom received any extra orderlies or staff officers to help them out. In some cases a commander kept a few gifted higher officers at his HQ to use to command wings, but few of those had with any permanent staffs either.

These practices and their problems can easily be recreated within the rules. One must just be careful not to give a modern "task force" feel to them. More than often the commander running a wing had to be chosen from among the senile or juvenile noblemen that hung around Army HQ, gilded heroes that could pull an awful lot of rank but not much else. At best they showed the suicidal bravery their lineage demanded and were shot dead quite quickly. Only Wellington, who operated far away from home, could risk dismissing such people, but more often the situation resembled that of the 1813 Army of Bohemia where Schwartzenberg tried to fight a war with a decent chunk of Europe's royalty hanging at his coat-tails.

The sight of the Army of Bohemia leads us to the last type of organization: "The-total-disregard -for-organizationorganization." This 18th century method (or bad habit, rather) is almost an Austrian specialty, but the Russians and the pre-1808 Prussians were quite good at it too. In the worst cases everything and everyone in the army were kept more or less pooled, and when the need arose units and officers were pulled together into wings or divisions. (The term "Order of Battle" originates from this period. "Today, General Befuddled, you will command the Kinski and Herzog Regiments out on our right.") Although this might seem like a flexible and very modern way to handle an army, the lack of set structures led to glacial reaction times and both units and commanders could disappear for hours and days as they became forgotten or bypassed.

All in all it is a marvel that some of these armies managed to move, let alone win battles. For instance, von O'Reilly never commanded a set formation during the weeks preceding Marengo. Instead he seem to mostly have picked up stray units as he went along, something that in a backwards way made him an good rearguard commander. Just reading about stunts like these gives one a headache, and trying to figure out how to depict them in a game is even worse. It is one thing if a player is forced to cope with a nutty commander that he can curse and blame all his problems on. But forcing the player to accept an entire mind-set that with hindsight he knows to be dumb, faulty, and out-dated is hopeless. The player will just try to maneuver himself out of it, creating a "fight the restrictions" game within the game.

A situation such as Marengo is the easiest to handle as the (rather moderate) shuffling is over and done with when the game starts. Some of the other problems can be handled by very low command ratings, and the Austrian habit of dumping of units at every other intersection can be prompted by giving VP's for "holding down ground." But in a situation such as Lindenau, just trying to figure out what good FML Ignatz Gyulai saw in totally re-shaping his command just before the battle is near impossible. Making a player see whatever point Gyulai saw in making his divisional commanders lead units from four different divisions, but none from their own, is even harder.

These are some of the problems facing the NBS team. Another, later, problem will be the few battles featuring multiple armies. In effect the "Army Group" command level will enter the stage. Leipzig, the pinnacle of Napoleonic mayhem, has four Allied armies, close to thirty corps-sized formations, fighting nearly twenty French corps, juggled back and fourth between several army-sized wings. This lies ahead of us, but any decisions made now must take these juggernauts as well as the Byzantine workings of the armies of Wurmster and Alvintzy into account.