Warfare of the Nineteenth Century
Half the game (if you will excuse the pun) in designing is getting the Zen of a period. The nineteenth century by the time it got over its long peace and generated wars did so in ways different from the eighteenth century and even of Napoleonic warfare. Reading Geoffrey Wawro's The Austro-Prussian War reminded me of these, taking me back to the unfolding of The Franco-Prussian War by Michael Howard. Some of these features (lack of knowledge of enemy positions for example) are common to many periods but have special features in this era. Here's my off-the-cuff analysis.
1. The size of armies is such that they cannot be represented by just a number of military counters, in addition we need the train counters that filled the roads behind any army. Misplacing your units not only gave you the difficulty of re-locating them but of reversing their much slower logistics units, leading to massive confusion that could mire an army. As a result an army "pointing" in the correct direction could appear much faster than one trying to move back down its own approach road. To facilitate such a feature might require a higher level of unit simulation (division rather than brigade) to give enough slack for the rest of the counters.
2. To beat the problem of numbers reducing speed the Prussians were forced into the indirect approach with columns converging on a single point in a military version of a gridiron timing pattern. Just as with a timing pattern to a wide receiver there are a number of things that can affect the effective execution of such a move. Sometimes the best generals may not be the most effective at obeying orders. One needs to have a mechanism that pre-programmes movement and then slows or speeds it up, so that the bigger the operation the greater the chance that units will bumble into each other in entirely unsuspected positions. I have a test set of "incremental" movement rules for Miranda's Franco-Prussian War that produced this sort of effect (the lone Prussian Corps believing it is herding back the French runs into them because they cannot get across the river in time, suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted).
3. The often unsuspected effect of technology and the rigidity of doctrine. The war of 1859 saw the better weapon (the Austrian rifle) defeated by the French charge because of poor training. The Austrians accordingly switched to French storm tactics only to find the Prussians had fire tactics well in hand. Frequently in the encounter battles Austrian storm columns were used against needle-gun lines and stopped in their tracks. The Austrian response (rifled artillery) in turn required their army to learn to take positions with good fields of fire. The defeat at Sadowa came so quickly we cannot tell whether in the end they would have flexed their playbook.
4. That no matter how much hindsight tells us the Austrians (1859 or 1866) or French (1870) are completely useless the other side is usually very worried about what might happen, and that worry is compounded by ignorance of intention or capacity. The basic tenets of Chaos gaming alone can handle these points.
5. Generals can appear extremely dim indeed and while this may be the case one cannot help wondering if the increase in size of armies and violence of weaponry had not contributed to worrying commanders like Benedek and Bazaine into a state of twitching incapacity so that they me their fate oblivious to the opportunities which appeared so obvious to junior officers and historians who were not themselves transfixed by responsibility.
Sixteenth Century The Hobby's major ragamuffin Gareth Simon has taken to lending me strategically chosen books to try to distract me into another game. His latest, on England after the Armada, makes a very interesting point. In most games one gets one's army and sets off to do whatever the plan is (invade Bohemia) but run back into the 16th Century and one could waste (or expend if you prefer) a whole season trying to get your army, supplies, funding and ruler together at the same point, only to run out of time to do anything.
This struck a chord with me since the last few months have been overshadowed by a fund-raising exercise including an AIM flotation. This process had the same feel as the attempt to get together an expedition against Cadiz in 1588 - all the parties keep wandering back and forward, sometimes producing things early, sometimes late forever discovering problems or creating them. Sometimes one wonders if the aim of generalship was just to survive into another season while the other side fell apart.
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© Copyright 1997 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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