From: Mr. 'x' I sold my copy a long time ago, but if I recall correctly it had the same simplistic system as Napoleon in Italy by Avalon Hill. Each leader had a command rating, i.e. how many units he could control and you kept track of unit strength on track under a leader portrait. Horrendous attrition losses, while battle losses were more abstract winner would take a given number (call it x) of losses and loser would retreat y spaces and take x or y losses, whatever was the most. Winner would then pursue for a random number of spaces. If this number resulted in a pursuit into the losers new hex, loser dies. I wish I had not sold it because I would have liked looking at the OB, but the 4 dimension attrition table (yes: distance from base, command points, hexes moved, size of force) and simplistic combat put me off on the game. Still the leadership tracks were quite intelligent. From: Gecko80 Hold hard there boy....anything less than awed admiration for one of Kevin Zucker's Napoleonic masterpieces is just bad form. It is part of a series of games (Napoleon At Bay, Struggle of Nations et al) all stressing the logistics and command in a common framework; learn one and the rest can be picked up easily. And anyone with lingering doubts about the importance of logistics to Napoleonic armies (well any armies for that matter) should get a copy of Martin Van Crevelds book 'Supplying War'. The designer decided that is what was relevant to Napoleonic theatre warfare and *THAT* is why the combat system seems simplistic and the attrition table four dimensional. Now this doesn't make for bean counting. The supply and command processes are intricately linked through a common feature called APs (Admin Points). Hoard them to keep your forces supplied, spend them to move your army. Beautifully simple and quite revolutionary to the board game grognards used to moving everything for free every turn! Anyway, you decide the main thrust of you operation, try to march everyone along it dispersed (keeps attrition down) and then concentrate like mad when you bump into the enemy. Battles (big ones that is) occur as sharp, simple punctuations amongst all your logisitical and command problems. You just roll a D6 and cross your fingers. No careful point counting here to get exactly 3:1 and the like. Your just happy that a good commander (plusses to the die roll) is on the spot with enough nous to lead a couple of corps worth of troops (it's called command span) and that enough outlying divisions have marched successfully under intiative to join the mother of battles (cos Mortier failed his die roll and the Old Guard are going to sit this one out in the rear!). Nice colourful Victory Games maps. Great chrome with all those leaders. Scenarios for Aspern-Essling, Wagram as well as the full campaign. Dipped into it here and there meself enough to heartily recommend it. Of course it depends why yr asking. If you want an intro to the system try Arcola or Hundred Days Battles....want to freak out with the complexities of 1813 in central Germany then try Struggle of Nations. I've not played it enough to decide if there is sufficient game play on both sides...it seems much more fun to be the French with all those sexy leaders (high intiative values, people!), oodles of free ranging cavalry and the man himself at helm. The Austrians can hurt them I'm sure but they seem mainly there to get kicked around. If Archduke Charles pushes West, as he did historically, he might just pull it off (bottle the French up and defeat them in detail). OTOH the Austrian army seems not quite up to it...in one solitaire game I found they stalled in front of Davout's hasty defence and then with Nap counterattacking in front and Bessieres leading a cavalry sweep in their rear...well it all got a bit of a rerun of history. Still next time I'll maybe see if they have more success by not invading Bavaria but defending one of the many river lines blocking the way to Vienna. Find it. Buy it. Play it. At the very least check out http://grognard.com or http://talk.consimworld.com for more opinions. Editor's comment on the above by Kevin Zucker This exchange well illustrates the remarkable divergence of opinion on this series of games. It almost strikes one that the two seem to be talking about two different games. And in a way, they are: each player's own impressions are an important part of his appreciation of the experience offered by the game. Among people who have actually played this 'revolutionary' game series, there seems to be no middle ground. Either you agree that the revolution was necessary and you join it, or you see no need for all the fuss and hold conservatively to tradition. These two viewpoints can be termed the 'strategic' vs. the 'move & fight.' The 'move & fight' camp view warfare simply: they see the enemy, and attack him head-on. But this game system punishes such an approach. Mr. 'x' above gives his game away when he cites 'Horrendous attrition losses.' The gamer who takes all his forces and pushes them hard toward the enemy will be defeated by his own rashness. The strategist, by contrast, disguises where his main thrust will be, uses time wisely, prepares his advance carefully, and then strikes decisively. No single battle in the Napoleonic war lasted longer than two days (with the sole exception of Leipzig). Therefore, all battles have to be resolved in one turn. That is why battles are so short & sharp: at two-day turns, it's a given. So was the revolution necessary or not? Luckily for me, I began this game series with the 1814 campaign. This campaign found the French army outnumbered by a ratio of 2.5:1. Unless we make each Frenchman worth 2.5 allied soldiers, there is absolutely no way to game such a situation under the traditional move & fight paradigm. And with all the young & poorly trained conscripts in the French Army in 1814, there is no possible way to justify that 'easy' solution. In fact, to make my point clearer, I resolved to make all soldiers on all sides equal on a man-for-man basis. I would bring out in other ways the reasons why Napoleon was able to make a real contest of the 1814 campaign. Of course, when I set out to design the 1814 campaign I had no idea what the reason was. I remember well scribbling in the margins on the page in "The Campaigns of Napoleon" where Chandler provided the answer to my question: he called it 'strategic consumption,' and explained that as an army marched away from its base, it had to leave detachments to guard bridges and cross-roads. Soldiers, out-pacing their slow-moving supply wagons, began marauding in search of food. Without food, the warrior's body is less able to fend-off disease. Rolled altogether, these causes are called 'attrition' in the design. I was lucky to be forced to address this concept at the outset, because the impact of attrition on Napoleonic warfare was never small. In fact, a major theme of strategy in the Napoleonic era was the objective of maneuvering against the enemy's Line of Communications. Napoleon is quite insistent on this point, as his 'maxims' show. http://www.NapoleonGames.com/maxim_strategy.htm As Petre says, "His first thought was always for his own line of communcations." If you study Napoleon's correspondances, you will see that a quarter of them are concerned with administration, communications and supply. This is not some poor commissary or clerk somewhere, this is the Emperor himself! If you want to experience the problem of commanding a Napoleonic Army, you cannot ignore a consideration that absorbed so much of the Army Commanders' own time; particularly because a principle objective of all operations was to threaten the Line of Communication of the enemy army, either to induce him to give battle on unfavorable ground, or to abandon his ground and retreat. The goals of Napoleonic Strategy are firmly linked together with issues of Supply. You cannot simulate the campaigns of Napoleon without addressing these linked issues. Back to OSG News November 2000 Table of Contents Back to OSG News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Operational Studies Group. 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