VLB test battle 2
Yesterday night we had a second test of the Napoleonic VLB using a computer program handling the chain of events produced by orders, melees and others.
I have introduced the modifications proper in the first test (see VLB with modern Babbage machine test).
The game went much smoother respect to the first test. The main difference being that events belonging to a time interval of ten minutes are now shown/happening in the same bound.
This difference removed the micro bounds of one minute that were happening in the first test, but produced a large amount of information per bound.
The fog of war caused by the system was considerable, which can be considered positive or negative.
A large amount of infos are produced by the program, windows with:
- movement of units
- units firing and under fire
- units unlimbered
- units shaken
- units in melee
- units changing formation
- units falling back and routing
- a health page were an estimation of the badly damaged units is shown (messages fro brigade commander tend to exaggerate the extend of their casualties, quite fun to read during the game!)
One 12 pdr battery for example at the beginning of the game was firing in counter-battery mode, but during the attack was not brought to bear to the advancing infantry. The player was commanding fire to the infantry but we forgot to give the order of ceasefire.
What happened at the end was that the battery kept firing at a 1000 far battery while the russians were 200m on the right of the battery.
The counters used to identify units are produced by the program, used on the command chain defined in the battle roster, were much better respect to last week. They are shown here:
At the beginning of the game the russians started with an artillery bombardment that lasted for about 30 minutes, then the attack started.
One question that came out was how much time of bombardment should a napoleonic battery be allowed. I will pose a question to the experts on the VLB Yahoo group.
