Recently played a Napoleonic game in which the various divisions on the field were given Command Points (CP) to enable them to move… when a side ran out of CP, no movement, and if the opposing side had a couple of extra CP, it could get in additional movement and attacks. I thought I’d try my hand at the CP routine business. A side would toss dice for its CP, assign them for movement, and then determine exactly how many CP each division ate up in advancing. For example, a side could start out with 10 CP, and decide to move four divisions forward. Then it diced to see how many of its CP supply were actually used… each division could use from 1 to 3 CP for its movement. If, say, the four divisions used 3, 2, 1, and 1 CP, for a total of 7, that would leave 3 CP for use during the next bound, meaning that only 3 divisions could advance on the next bound. I finished outlining the rules and foisted them upon Pat Condray and Jim Butters, who happened to come in the door at the right time. And so we went back to 1447, wherein Jim’s force was that of Prince Walakonis, fighting for the freedom of Lithuania, while Pat controlled the troops of Prince Val The Usurper, looking to mount Prince Walakonis’ head on a platter. Each side had 5 “battles”… call them divisions, and each division had 3 units in it. Since each unit had 3 stands, a division was composed of 9 stands. Additionally, I assigned to each side 4 unattached missile units, i.e., single stand units, that could roam anywhere they wanted on the field. I had a special phase placed in the sequence just for the missile units. When this phase occurred, the active player could move his missile stands forward a distance of 10 inches, fire, and then attempt (70 percent chance to succeed) to have the missile troops run back to shelter, another distance of 10 inches. If the unit failed its 70 percent test, it remained out in the open, at the point at which it had fired, and could be cut down by advancing heavy enemy troops. This ability to run up and zip back gave the missileers an ability to perform a lot of harassing… it was hard to run ‘em down, and during the battle, when a missile unit failed to fall back after firing, the opposing side immediately took advantage of their clumsiness and ran ‘em down. Jim had Prince Walakonis’ cavalry division advance right up the middle of the field, thinking to bash into Prince Val’s cavalry. But the crafty Prince Val ran his own pike units out to intercept the cavalry, and a pike-versus-cavalry encounter boded no good for the horsemen. I had prepared a huge chart, a matrix, which accounted for every type of unit-on-unit melee in the battle, and gave each type of unit its own percentage chance of success. The matrix is shown below, and for the pike-vs-heavy cavalry affair, do the following: (a) In Chart #1, in the left side column labeled STRIKE, refer to pike units and read across until you come to the particular type of cavalry (heavy medium, or light). Note that the pike against any cavalry always have a 75 percent chance of striking the enemy. This is my subjective view of this type of encounter… I want the pike to win about 75 percent of the time. (b) Now reference the heavy cavalry in the STRIKE column, read to the right, and you’ll note that the horsemen have a 25 percent chance of striking pike successfully. (c) Both sides toss their percentage dice, and we refer to Chart #2, which takes into account whether or not the opposing strikes were successful. In all of the pike-vs-cavalry melees, due to the small chance of success (25 percent), the cavalry failed, while the pike were successful. (d) This brings us to the second row of Chart #2 (attacker successful, defender no) , which says that the attacking pike will lose 3 Efficiency Points, while the defending cavalry will lose 4 Efficiency Points for every stand in the pike unit, or 12 points total. (e) Thus far, what (a), (b) and (c) have told us are the losses in Efficiency Points incurred by the opposing units. Now we have to decide which unit actually won the combat. For this, it’s back to Chart #1, which says that pike should prevail against cavalry three out of every four times, i.e., a 75 percent rate of success. (f) So we start with 75 percent, and to this, as icing on the cake, add the Efficiency Points lost by the cavalry (12) to get a total of 87 percent, and this is the final chance of success for the pike unit. (g) With an 87 percent chance of success, it’s hard for the pikes to lose, and the losing cavalry fall back 10 inches, and, of even more importance, lose one of their 3 precious stands. Jim’s cavalry didn’t have too much room to maneuver midfield, and as Prince Val’s pike attacked again and again, Jim’s cavalry took it on the chin, each unit losing some 12 Efficiency Points every time they bonked heads with the pike. In short order, all of the cavalry Efficiency Points were ground to dust, and the cavalry division left the field. When I refer to Efficiency Point losses, I’m not looking at the individual losses of each of the cavalry units. What we did was to record the Efficiency Points, not of the units, but of their division commanders. Each commander started with 40 Efficiency Points (EP), and when one of his units lost, we reduced the commander’s own EP total. Prince Walakonis’ cavalry commander, Count Razza, started out with his 40 EP, kept losing melee after melee, and went rapidly down to zero… when he hit zero, his entire division essentially fled the field. Another use for the division commander’s EP was to furnish a reference for the morale level of a unit. Each time a unit was hit by those pesky missile units, it took a morale test, and the morale level was defined as Morale Level = 45 + (Current value of division commander’s EP) Thus as the division commander lost points, the morale level of each of the units in his division sank lower and lower towards its basic value of 45 points. In the middle of the field sat the Abbey of Puy, a key goal for both sides. At the beginning of the battle, Pat set his 4 missile units inside the Abbey grounds, but after a bound or two, Prince Walakonis’ own troops entered and drove out the missileers. Once in, never out, and Jim kept control of the Abbey for Prince Walakonis throughout the battle. At battle’s end, the points lost by both sides evened out, but the fact that the Abbey grounds remained in control of Walakonis, was considered decisive. Back to PW Review February 2002 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com