The Grand Tactical Game - Rules Revision

As suggested in the last post and subsequent comments, a minor revision to the MEP rules has been made, to simplify the artillery fire phase. I have left the skirmishing procedures unchanged for the time being.

The revised rules can be downloaded from here.

The Grand Tactical Game - Action at Los Arapiles

This was the planned refight of Salamanca, using my new MEP rules. It's the first time I have attempted to stage a historical battle, and I thought long and hard about the best way to do this.

Since part of the objective was to prove the rules, it seemed inappropriate to attempt just to act out what really happened, yet ignoring the history altogether would kind of nullify the whole point of making it Salamanca. I decided to set up the action as it stood at about 1pm, put a few of the principal events into the first few bounds, and see what happened.




Well, it didn't turn out to be a very close copy of history - my starting point was to be the attack on the French left flank by Pakenham, with cavalry support, and Pack's independent Portuguese brigade's assault on the Greater Arapile, a hill in the middle of the French position.

Things started pretty much as in the real battle - Pack's attack was repulsed, and Pakenham quickly broke Thomieres' leading brigade, though his own losses were severe. History stopped dead at this point. The British heavy cavalry (Le Marchant's brigade) made no progress at all in following up - they were checked by Thomieres' weak second brigade - so much for the most glorious cavalry charge in British history. Then Cole's and Leith's Divisions were very badly mauled by the divisions of Barbot (vice Clauzel), Maucune and Bonet in the centre, and the momentum was lost. The French position was strong, any further British attempt to attack would have been foolhardy (the Allied off-field reserves, primarily the 7th Division and De Espana's Castillian troops, were not due for an hour, and were not capable of affecting the outcome), and there was little else that Wellington could do but resume his retreat towards Portugal. The French cavalry was not up to the job of harrying the withdrawal, and both sides left the field in reasonable order around 3:30pm. French casualties were slightly higher at about 10% of all troops engaged, and they lost two senior generals in Bonet and Tirlet (commander of the artillery reserve).

The rules worked well enough - artillery counter-battery fire seemed possibly a bit too effective, but it's debatable. The weather was fine and dry throughout, the only command snag of note was when Lowry Cole called off his attack on Bonet, which was probably good judgement. The game (it didn't feel very much like a game, since I spent much of the time with my nose in Dr Muir's book, checking the script) was over in about 90 minutes - I was running the rules on a computer, and did cut back on the skirmishing, which was mostly ineffective (which is probably correct, and was expected).

So a bit of a damp squib, all in all. I was persuaded by Dr Muir that Maucune was accompanied by an amount of artillery which could only have been possible if part of the reserve park was so deployed, and that may have been a significant element. Don't know, really. I also have to say that, when you see the real numbers of troops set out on the battlefield (scales were 1 hex = 1/4 of a mile, 1 bound is an hour, 1 figure = 125 men for this game), it seems improbable that the French could lose, unless there is some major morale advantage working against them.

I do not intend to repeat the action, so I include some pictures, just to prove it happened.

All right - it was a lot of fun, really, but I'm rather disappointed that the big battle stalled! It was pleasing to be able to attempt a battle on this scale, but the little units still feel a bit strange.

General view of the battlefield, looking West. The French position is down the near edge of the table, then up the left hand edge. From the right, the French have the Divisions of Foy (far right), Ferey, Sarrut, Bonet (on the hillock and beyond), Barbot, and Maucune in the centre on the ridge. At the far end, on the left flank, is Thomieres, with support from Taupin and the light cavalry of Curto. Note the rather exposed position of William Anson's British brigade, on the hill of the Lesser Arapile in the centre of the picture.

Wellington's hammer - the Allied Third Division on Wellington's extreme right, under Pakenham, with cavalry on both sides, forced-marching to attack Thomieres. It didn't go too well...

The rest of the Allied position - Leith's Division in the foreground, supported by Clinton, then, further away, Cole, Pack's independent brigade, Henry Campbell's First Division and the Light Division (Karl von Alten) on the extreme left.

View from behind Clauzel's position. In the real battle, the French were convinced that the Allies were in retreat - you can see why - there's not much over there, is there?

Almost the end - the French haven't moved very much, but their centre looks pretty solid. Time to get marching and try another day.

Weather in Wargames

In my experience, weather is an important addition to wargames, but it is one of the most likely things to get forgotten about when you are trying to rally the troops one last time at about 2am, and it is certainly one of the most likely things to be dropped from the rules for big games.

Accordingly, I really only consider the weather in detail in computerised games – the old computer, he never forgets, he never gets tired. I’m sitting here this morning, happy that the last lot of snow has gone, but aware from the TV news that more is expected, so some mention of weather seems appropriate.

I have to apologise immediately for the fact that, since they are primarily intended for Summer campaigns in Spain, my weather rules, in their present form, do not cover snow or extreme temperature, neither do they allow for fog/mist (except by implication). Oh – and wind isn’t covered either. In fact, I’m becoming increasingly ashamed of the whole thing as I write.

So this is just an outline – food for thought, if you like. If you find the ideas interesting, I’m confident you can easily improve on what I do, or produce something more suitable for your own games. My weather rules are very much based in the scale and style of games I fight. For example, my main Napoleonic rules have 30-minute bounds and 200-pace hexes, and do not allow for formed musket volley fire – musketry is included in close combat, and the effect of weather on the combat rules reflects this. My MEP Grand Tactical variant will use the same set-up in its automated form, with some adjustment for the 1-hour bounds, the halved ground-scale and the simplified combat rules.

Although the implementation of these rules is on a computer, I shall attempt to illustrate them in the form of dice-throws.

My starting point is a simple, linear, numerical barometer which I think I originally adopted from Charlie Wesencraft (or it might have been Featherstone) about 40 years ago. You can use a cardboard track, or a homemade numbered pegboard – whatever you like. You start with a 2D6 throw to set the weather indicator (wr) – the detail of all this is set out in the attached note – 2 means that it’s fine, 12 that it’s bucketing down with rain.

There are 4 indicators, Weather, Visibility, Mud and Dampness. You’ll need to keep track of the time of day, and determine (at the outset) the official time of dusk, and you’ll need a pair of weather dice – just normal 6-sided dice, but different colours. I use a white one and a black – where necessary, the white counts as +ve and the black as –ve – in all that follows, w is the white dice score, and b the black one. At the end of each bound, roll the 2 weather dice once and adjust the indicators (note this is just a single roll of the 2 dice - eveything can be worked out from this one roll):

Weather (wr), which is the main sliding barometer – this is set initially by rolling the weather dice and adding them together (w + b) – thereafter it is moved up and down each bound – increase by 1 if w > b, decrease by 1 if w < b. If w = b then it stays the same.

Visibility (visi), is the number of hexagons at which units may be seen on the tabletop, and thus the limit of artillery fire. The distance at which Blinds may be spotted, and it which generals may influence the conduct and discipline of their troops is also limited by small values of visi. visi is calculated as (12 – wr), tweaked for the onset of dusk and given a minimum value of 1.

Mud (mud), which is another sliding scale, is initially set equal to b, and its subsequent change is driven by the current value of wr and the value of (w + b) each bound – progressively higher values of mud will limit artillery “bounce-through” for deep targets, prevent the use of movement bonuses, reduce movement rates for all troops, and ultimately prevent all movement of artillery and vehicles.

Dampness (damp) , is initially set to w, and subsequently changes in a manner very similar to mud. damp is a measure of the effect of wet weather on powder-dependent troops. At high values, it stops skirmish fire, reduces the combat effectiveness of infantry and, ultimately, also limits the effects of artillery fire.


At the outset, the start time is set, and the time of dusk (from a scenario, or whatever), and the initial values of wr, visi, mud and damp are set, as described. . If they agree to do so, the generals may request a re-throw, but they may only do this twice – after 2 recalculations they must accept the conditions as given.

The Grand Tactical Game - Salamanca OOBs again

This has been a very odd two weeks - I was effectively snowed in for most of the time, and, now that we are getting back to what passes for normal around here, I've been rushing about catching up with all the things I couldn't do during the bad weather.

Hence the drop-off in the blogging activity. I have, however, managed to spend a little time putting the MEP Grand Tactical rules onto the computer, and things are progressing well - I hope to have everything up and running in a week or so.

I've also been refining the set-up and scenario for my proposed Salamanca battle. I'm still not sure whether I just try to act out the actual events, or (more likely) set it up at a point in time and then let the game rules rip, and see where I get to. My intention is to start the action at about 1pm, as the French left flank is becoming over-extended and just after Marmont has been carted off, wounded, and replaced by Clauzel.


To set the context and check details I have a full set of Oman's history available, and various other useful works, but have had an absolutely wonderful time re-reading Rory Muir's book. Just great. He dissects the battle into its principal actions, and at the end of each chapter there is a commentary section which discusses the inconsistencies between the various sources and tries to resolve areas of doubt - in many instances this is at least as fascinating as the account of the fighting. Yes, this is a well-known book, but I thought I would record my appreciation, and recommend it most highly to anyone who has not read it.

So here is my (tweaked) Order of Battle, as printed out by my computer program.

The figures are EL: Elements (750 inf, 500 cav, 1 battery), QB: Quality Bonus, SK: Skirmish capability. The numbers in square brackets are the identifiers for the computer.


I have followed what I believe to be current thinking on the French organisation: Barbot stands in for Clauzel, Col Loverdo for Barbot, Taupin is in charge of Brennier's Divn, Thomieres in charge of Souham's; the cavalry brigadier Carrie de Boissy is absent, since he had been wounded and captured 4 days earlier. Senior colonels command brigades wherever appropriate.


On the Allied side, I've excluded the Spanish lancers (because it's a small force, and I'm not sure where if at all they were engaged), and I've put all the Spanish infantry into a single brigade, just to make it large enough to be useful.

Throughout, units which are known to have been absent or posted off the field are omitted, and the listing of battalions and cavalry regiments is fudged a bit to balance the total numbers against the historical OOBs. If your favourite regiment has disappeared then I apologise - I too was disappointed that my newly painted Regiment de Prusse was excluded by the rounding rules!

The Grand Tactical Game - Complete Rules

I'm supposed to be working today, but it's snowing heavily, so I've taken the opportunity to get the various pieces of the MEP rules stitched together. Result is the first proper version of the game, downloadable from here.

I've taken a little time to check it hangs together, but there will certainly be some typos and inconsistencies remaining. If anyone spots anything daft, please let me know - I am reconciled to an open-ended period of tweaking and fixing!

I'll do some serious playtesting over the next few weeks, and then transfer the rules onto the computer - the game, however, should work perfectly well with dice and lots of red wine...

I'll have to get on with organising the Salamanca session. Watch this space.

The Grand Tactical Game - The Butcher's Bill

Bits and pieces, today.

First off, sadly, un petit dommage - after the photo session for the Combat examples, I managed to drop General Maucune, and had to superglue his horse's ankles. Seems OK - better than I feared it might - but it does occur to me that a Hinton Hunt horse would have withstood the fall without problem. The NapoleoN horses are a bit on the elegant side, though less fragile than the current Minifigs horses, especially the rearing ones, on which the old fetlocks cannot support the weight of the figure if you remove the reinforcing struts.

After going over the Combat examples, I am now thinking that a Unit attacking a village or other built-up area should be limited to a Pinning Attack (2D6) - there must be a limit to how many men they can actually bring to bear against a wall?

Finally, since I am not going to include a rule for Weather, here is the last of my proposed Optional Rules for the MEP draft. This gives a method of determining the actual casualties in a battle (or a day of a battle), which is really of more relevance in the context of a campaign. I hope to have a new draft of the Rules downloadable in a few days. At that stage, it should be the first attempt at a full set - I may even write a Contents page and all that!


As ever, all comments most welcome. Apologies for the amount of dice-rolling required for the casualty calculations - another advantage of using a computer.

The Grand Tactical Game - Combat Examples

Rather later than I had hoped, here are some examples of Combat under the draft MEP rules, which can be downloaded from here.

Two Units Attack One

In this example, Maucune's French Division of two Units (brigades), coming from the bottom of the pictures, attacks a single British Unit. Maucune is visible, with his right hand Unit. In all that follows, black dice are for the French, red for the British.


The first action is an exchange of skirmish fire - each of the Units has a skirmish (SK) value of 2 (denoted by the bright green counters next to each skirmisher base - yes, in a sensible example I would have skirmishers mounted individually, but I haven't), and the Brits choose to split their skirmish strength so as to take on both sets of French skirmishers. Skirmishers hit with a throw of 1 - in the exchange with the French Unit which has Maucune present, each side scores 1 hit, so they cancel out - no net effect; in the other exchange, both sides miss - no net effect.


The actual Combat is fought as two 1:1 Combats. Because there is no requirement for one Combat to be fought first, Maucune (the attacker), chooses to start with his larger Unit. This Unit has 5 Elements present (don't count the skirmishers) - the max number of Elements which can count towards PV is 4, so PV is 4. The adjusted PV has a bonus for the presence of a friendly Unit in the Combat, and for the presence of the General. Adjusted PV is theoretically 6, but since a throw of 6 is always a miss anyway, 5 is the maximum. The French are going for an all-out attack (in both Combats - must be the same for both), which means they roll 4D6, and they are looking for throws of less than or equal to the adjusted PV of 5 (for clarity, I've set the required throw on a large white dice). The British Unit has 4 Elements, so it may match the full 4D6 allocation set by the French, there are no adjustments applicable, so the throws have to be less than or equal to 4 to hit. In the event, each side scores 3 hits.


Because this is a tie (a "score-draw"), each side loses 1 Element (and therefore 1 from its SK), and the attacker (the French Unit) retreats 1 hex. We have to test to see if Maucune himself is a casualty - the Unit lost 1 point from its PV, so a throw of 1 will put Maucune in trouble. In fact it's a 3, so he's OK. Disgruntled, but OK.


Now the second French Unit attacks. It has 4 Elements, but it gets no bonus for multiple attackers, since the support has disappeared. No adjustment - PV is 4, it throws 4D6, and required throws for hits are less than or equal to 4. The British Unit now has only 3 Elements present, so it is restricted to 3D6, and throws must be less than or equal to 3.


In the event, the French have 1 more hit than the British, so the British Unit loses 1 Element (i.e. 1 from its PV), plus 1 from its SK - so the skirmish capability is now eliminated - and retires 1 hex. The French lose nothing, and since they were the attackers, they may advance into the vacated hex if they choose to do so.

Attack Against a Village


French Unit advances against a small British Unit in a rather unattractive village. First action is skirmishing. SKs are both 2, so each side throws 2D6, looking for 1s to hit. Both score a hit, but the British skirmishers are a Protected target, since they are in hard cover, so a checkroll of less than or equal to 2 is needed to confirm the hit. The checkroll fails (it's 6), so the British have a net skirmish advantage of 1 hit. French lose 1 skirmish point.


Now the Combat - French have 4 Elements (i.e it's a brigade of about 3000 men), and are attempting all-out attack against cover. PV is 4, so full 4D6 attack is allowed, but PV is subject to a deduction of 2 since the defender is in a village, so the dice must come up 2 or less for hits. British defenders have a PV of 2 (2 Elements), so may roll only 2D6, which must come up less than or equal to 2.


The dice roll gives the British a rather lucky win by 2 hits to 1, so French lose 1 Element (and therefore, also, their last SK point) and retreat.

A Flank Attack


In this example (and apologies to any Spanish readers - it's just an example!) we have a Spanish Unit which has 3 Elements and a Quality Bonus of -1 (white counter), and thus a PV of 2, and an SK of 1; it is charged in the flank by a Unit of French dragoons which has 3 Elements, plus a General. Note that the Spanish can't use their skirmishers here - skirmishers can act only to the front of the Unit, and, in any event, cannot act against cavalry. So the first thing to check is whether the infantry can manage to react to the charge, forming squares. For this test, their PV (which is 2) must be reduced by 2 because of the flank attack. The minimum of 1 for adjusted PV comes into play - a throw of 1 will allow them to form squares. In the event, the throw of 4 means they are unable to react in this way.


In this example I used red dice for the French - yes, it was a mistake. The French have a PV of 3, so may throw a max of 3D6, and the adjusted PV is 3, plus 1 for the general, plus 2 for the flank attack. The dice must turn up 5 or less to score hits. A flank attack is unopposed, so the infantry do not get to roll any dice in reply. In this example, the cavalry score 3 hits - the 1st hit is the white counter plus 2 Elements (plus the SK point), the 2nd hit is the last remaining Element, the 3rd hit is not required. The infantry have been eliminated, and the cavalry, if they choose, may occupy the vacated hex.

The Grand Tactical Game - Generals & Command

I've amended the downloadable draft of the MEP Rules, which you can get to from here. This revised version now includes the Rules for the use of Blinds, and I have amended the Game Sequence accordingly.

In this post I've also included previews of some more of the optional rules I propose to add, firstly the procedure for General's Personalities, which is a prerequisite for the Command rules, and which sets an Ability Rating (compliance/initiative, really) and a Leadership Style, which ranges from Cautious to Aggressive.


And then there are the Command Rules themselves - as previously mentioned, these are supposed to be as minimalist as I can get away with - please forgive any lack of elegance here! In my original notes, these are described as "Command Hassles", which kind of sums up the approach.



As ever, I would be delighted to receive comments on these - this is, after all, supposed to be a working draft.

Killing Rates - Wells & Lanchester

I recently obtained a cheap reprint of HG Wells' Little Wars, since my old copy seems to have vanished. Regrettably, and rather shabbily, the reprint appears to be cheap partly because it omits all the diagrams and illustrations. Anyway - to get to the point - I was pleased to renew my acquaintance with a jolly old friend (and that's intended as "old and jolly" rather than "very old").

Wells has a very blunt approach to melees - if troops come into contact, they wipe each other out. Thus two equal-sized units will just eliminate each other, and if a unit of m men is involved in a melee with a smaller unit of strength n, the only survivors of this awfulness will be (m - n) men from the first unit.

Obviously it works, and it is quick, but it does seem a bit crude. I also had a quick squint in Peter Young's Charge! - the melee procedure there is refined by the introduction of probability (dice) and limiting the number of rounds in each melee, but otherwise the line of descent is clear to see.


I dug out the Theorems of Frederick W Lanchester, just to check. If you are familiar with Lanchester then read no further, but FWL was an English engineer and mathematician, who died in 1946 (same year as Wells), and he is most famous as an automotive inventor. I wish to mention, in passing, that my Uncle Harold had a green Lanchester 10 saloon when I was a boy, and a big solid thing it was, too - the Lanchester marque was swallowed by the British Daimler company during the 1950s. More relevantly, in 1916 – 3 years after the publication of Little Wars - Dr Lanchester produced a mathematical analysis of warfare, and the two best known elements of this are his Linear Law (an abstraction of ancient-style warfare) and his n-Square Law. If you look these up on the internet, you'll find so much diverse explanation that it is hard to believe that it all relates to the same ideas. In the interests of providing yet more redundant information on a subject which has already been hammered to death, I'll attempt to provide yet another lightweight view on Lanchester's Laws!

The Linear Law

Imagine two groups of warriors, armed only with (say) a club. One of them has m men, the other has n (a smaller number). Men can only fight one-against-one, so anyone who has no-one to fight presumably stands and watches, cheering (or placing bets?). Anyway, in this remarkably organised and chivalrous form of melee, they match off into n fighting pairs. Assume that each man has an even chance of winning his fight. On a given word or command, there is an almighty thwack! and the casualties are removed. On average, we would expect each side to lose n/2 men. So the (m - n/2) survivors of the first group will now fight the n/2 survivors of the second group. Since n/2 is the smaller group, there will be n/2 fights, of which each side will lose n/4.

And so on. If you are keen on the theory of finite differences, you can solve this as the sum of a series. If not, you can put in some real numbers and do it on a spreadsheet.

If the first force is 1000 men and the second force is 500, and each man has an equal chance of winning each fight, then - on average - we find that we can expect the first force to wipe out the second, while themselves losing 500 men. If the forces were of equal strength, they would eliminate each other.

Step forward, Mr Wells [applause] - in this rather stilted form of combat your rule is exactly correct. It does rather gloss over what the unemployed warriors would be doing during each thwack, for example, and it also ignores the possibility that someone might decide this was a bad idea before reaching the point of actual annihilation. Otherwise, nice job.

The n-Square Law
Let's now consider a more modern form of warfare, in which all the troops on one side are able to kill any of the troops on the other side - perhaps they are all armed with long-range automatic weapons.

If, again, there are m one side and n on the other, and if each man in the first side has a killing rate (the number of enemy troops he can kill in 1 unit of time) equal to Km (this allows for his own effectiveness, the defensive capability of his opponents, and any other relevant contextual factors), and the other side has a killing rate of Kn, then the actual rates of loss will be proportional to the numbers of men


Now, the armies would be considered equally matched if they are wiping each other out (proportionally) at the same rate - i.e. would both be reduced to half strength at the same time, for example.

In this special case, we have m Km = n Kn at any instant; if we substitute in (1) & (2) and integrate, we get

This is Lanchester’s n-Square Law – in words, the total fighting strengths of two forces are equal when their fighting effectiveness (killing rate), multiplied by the square of the numerical strength, is equal.

Thus a force which has half the numerical strength of the opposition would have to have four times its killing rate to be equally matched.

Let's look, again, at our 1000-man force attacking a 500-man one, with equal values of Kn & Km. Running it on a spreadsheet demonstrates that we should expect the 500 man force to be eliminated for a cost of 130-something casualties to the other side. This is very different from the HG Wells situation. It also demonstrates the importance of concentrating your armies, thus:

if two identical 1000-man forces engage, then Lanchester’s n-Square Law has them eliminate each other. However, if one side divides (or is divided) into two 500-man forces, then the 1000-strong enemy force will eliminate the first 500 men and still have 870 or so troops left, which is more than enough to eliminate the second 500 men. Napoleon was right, even though he never met Dr Lanchester.

And that is quite enough of that.

The Grand Tactical Game - Blinds

Here is another of the optional rules for MEP, which I air for public criticism before incorporating into the draft (probably next weekend, all being well).


Blinds provide an interesting element of "Fog of War" - highly recommended. My solo game has an option where you can shuffle the identity of the blinds for one or both armies, so that one or both commanders has/have no idea who or what is arriving when - that is a decent working definition of chaos. Probably takes the idea a little too far, though it can generate some furious fun.

This draft rule will be identifiable as heavily influenced by TooFatLardies - but who else am I going to borrow ideas on Blinds from?

The Grand Tactical Game - Downloadable Draft

This is an attempt to get organised. You can see or download the latest draft of the MEP rules from Google Docs by clicking here.

In future, so that I only need to maintain a single link, all references to the downloadable draft of the rules will link to this post, and the version you get to from here will be the latest extant version.

*** Very Late Edit ***

Some six years later, I removed the link, since the game is no longer in a maintained, playable state. Apologies if you came here looking for it.

*******************

The Grand Tactical Game - End of the Day

This week, progress with the blog has been upset a bit by events in the Real World - a place I avoid whenever possible. The Combat examples have been a bit delayed, though I have done some re-writing of the MEP rules draft, which will appear shortly in downloadable form.


In the interim, here's a general note about victory conditions, nightfall, what happens at the end of the day - all that stuff - which is to be incorporated into the draft as one of the optional rules.



As ever, I'd be very grateful for any comments or (polite!) suggestions.

The Grand Tactical Game - Morale (or Not)

This week I started doing some detail testing of the Combat mechanisms for MEP, and it became obvious that there are a few more changes needed. Simplifying the actual Combat, and calming down the casualty rates a bit, will be addressed in a forthcoming post – probably next week, in which I also hope to do a couple of walk-throughs of examples of Combats. I’ll make a new draft of the rules available at that time.

But the first surprise, and the most radical (for me) was the realisation that the whole subject of morale needed a rethink.

I remind myself that this is a grand tactical game, and the basic units are brigades. As I have mentioned before, it is spiritually close to being a boardgame. In passing, I must observe that I don’t recall seeing very much in the way of detailed morale rules in boardgames, though I’m sure there are some somewhere. Maybe this is a clue.

In a tactical game, I am used to seeing a battalion routing from contact, subsequently rallied – maybe by the personal intervention of a general officer – then turned round, formed up smartly, and sent back into action, though maybe a bit more circumspectly than before.

But this grand tactical game has brigade-sized units comprising Elements which are each a battalion or equivalent. Losses are counted in Elements – a complete battalion is the smallest amount of loss which we bother with. Let’s think about that for a moment – if a 3-Element unit loses an Element as a result of some incident, it does not mean that 750 infantrymen have just been vaporised, it means that the combined effect of actual casualties and demotivation caused by the incident have reduced the combat capability of the unit by an amount which is roughly equivalent to a battalion’s-worth of the soldiers not contributing any more. They may be dead, or hurt, or they may be shocked into uselessness, or they may be legging it to the rear – it doesn’t actually matter. The point is that there are not so many of them taking part - the “loss” is an amalgam of reduction in headcount and loss of morale. The italics are deliberate.

Continuing this theme, when a unit has lost all its Elements it is eliminated. At risk of unnecessary repetition (after all, this is not a difficult concept, though I seem to have some trouble getting the hang of it!), they have not all been wiped out, they have been reduced to a crowd of fugitive survivors, retreating in disorder, probably throwing away all military paraphernalia as they go, to speed their exit. Whatever else, they are not coming back. Again, their elimination is as much – maybe more – to do with morale as it is to do with casualties.

In view of this, I suddenly had a blinding flash of the obvious – having morale tests in addition to this process is too much of the same thing. What if we dropped the stand-alone morale tests altogether? Also, what is the point of having units on the tabletop explicitly marked as Routing when the casualty mechanisms already allow for people running away? A unit which is reduced to zero strength is running away, and won’t come back – that’s probably all we need. OK – we won’t have Routers, so we don’t need to try to rally them, so that’s another morale test scrapped.

The initial draft has morale tests for units which suffer (significant) loss to artillery and skirmisher fire. OK – it is possible to imagine a unit being reduced to zero by continuing fire – they have run away. If they have not run away, and have just been damaged a bit, there is probably a need for some Activation or Command style check to see if they are prepared to follow orders if they are required to advance (or whatever), but the reaction-type morale test as drafted is not necessary.

So I propose to drop the morale tests, and units losing in combat will be pushed back – they will not run away until they are eliminated. There will be no Routers, and no rallying of Routers.

I feel a bit elated at removing a sizeable piece of fiddle-faddle from the game – I am also nervously aware that the morale tests may be back next week, after some more playtesting, so am not going to make too much of a fuss about it!

More soon.

The Grand Tactical Game - Rule Tweaks

Righto - updated version of MEP rules is now downloadable from here. Thanks again for comments and general help with this.

Divisional artillery may now share a hex with a brigade from their own division, and I've changed some of the Combat rules to suit. I did consider making such a battery just part of one of the brigades, but that becomes complicated if you wish to separate them, or have them acting independently.

I've also made a small change in the scaling of Elements in a Unit (brigade) - if the action is based on a historical OOB, the Elements will now be rounded to the nearer 750 men (500 for cavalry) rather than the higher. Nearer is probably more intuitively sensible anyway - it was higher only to prevent small units vanishing from the OOB. I've thought better of it - let 'em vanish!

Thoroughly enjoying my return to Rory Muir's book. There were a number of incidents which occurred at the Battle of Salamanca which affected the outcome, but which are at much too fine a level of detail to be covered by Grand Tactical rules. Examples are:

(1) Wellington himself detached a couple of guns from the 7th Divn's artillery, and put them on the Lesser Arapile (these were young Capt Dyneley's RHA boys - a tale straight from GA Henty if ever there was one)...

(2) ...and (according to Dyneley), a shell from one of these guns wounded Marshal Marmont, the French commander...

(3) ...and a major panic ensued, while the French HQ went to find General Clauzel, to tell him he was now in command...

(4)...alas, Clauzel had been wounded also and had been taken to the rear, so they now had to find Bonet, who was next in seniority...

(5)...but Bonet was also a casualty. Luckily, Clauzel, with his wound dressed, was able to take command shortly afterwards. Throughout this confusion and this series of bad breaks, Thomieres' Division was still heading for the horizon, which did not help the French situation at all.

None of this fiddly stuff, I promise you, is going to be covered by the intended scope of MEP!

I hope the changes in the draft make some sense - I'll attempt some low-level Combat experimentation with dice and toy soldiers to see what other horrors I haven't thought of...

The Grand Tactical Game - Salamanca Battlefield

Having put together a first-cut OOB, the next task has been to draw up a battlefield diagram and see if it is possible to get everybody on! Here is my first attempt - I learned a lot in the process, and found some things where I need to decide on some rule changes.

This is all a fudged approximation, based on my understanding (such as it is) of maps in Oman, Marinsin, Ian Fletcher's Osprey book, Rory Muir's excellent study and various other sources. I also consulted the set-up instructions for Maplay Games' Salamanca boardgame and for the Simtac Los Arapiles game.


You will see Thomieres heading off to the left, his orders based on the incorrect assumption that the Allies were retreating in that direction. The Allied 3rd Divn is moving down to attack him. Green hexes are woods, green troops are Portuguese.

Behind Point A are Bradford's Portuguese Brigade, De Espana's Spanish division and George Anson's Light Cavalry Brigade.

Behind Point B are the Allied 7th Division.

Some slight changes in the OOB - no doubt there will be more:

(1) Victor von Alten was wounded early in the day, and his brigade is commanded by Col Arentschildt of the 1st KGL Hussars. For convenience, I propose to include D'Urban's small brigade of Portuguese dragoons in Arentschildt's force.

(2) French 15th Dragoons were detached, off the battlefield to the French right, so I propose to amalgamate Boyer's 3 remaining dragoon regiments into a single brigade, as shown.

(3) Bock's KGL dragoons are also detached, somewhere off the table on the Alled left, so I'll omit them from the OOB.

(4) Just for commonsense, I'll give one of Thomiere's batteries to Bonnet.

Now - Artillery. Shock horror. I have suddenly realised what was probably obvious from the outset, which is that scaling down the numbers of infantry and cavalry units while keeping the artillery unchanged results in the table suddenly becoming covered in artillery. Why didn't I think of that before?

If I try to deploy all the artillery in its own space, the table gets swamped again. Hmmm. You will notice that this first attempt at the battlefield shows no artillery at all, while I decide what to do about them.

First thing I did about them was I did some more reading of other people's rules. Sam Mustafa's Grande Armee, which is of a similar scale and approach to MEP, makes no attempt to represent divisional-level artillery on the table at all - they are simply assumed to be part of each division, and the only guns that are explicitly deployed are reserve batteries. I can see how that would work, but it doesn't appeal. As with the skirmishers, I'd rather have the divisional guns visible on the table, but in some way that isn't a nuisance.

So my current idea is that a divisional battery just squeezes into a hex with one of the brigades. I'm still thinking this over - a hex is about a quarter of a mile (500 paces). What's the frontage of a 6-8 gun battery? Maybe 100 paces - maybe a bit more? Would it be possible to squeeze them in like this?

I'll do some more reading on the subject - as ever, I'd be delighted to receive advice here. I'm also intrigued to know what Marmont did with his artillery - there are some odd references to the work of divisional batteries - supporting Thomieres, for example - but I've never seen any reference to the reserve batteries, and there were 5 or so, as far as I can see. Further, I've never seen any map or depiction of Salamanca which showed any positioning of French artillery.

Since Marmont started the day assuming that his army was about to resume their march to keep pace with Wellington's retreat, maybe the artillery reserve was simply limbered up in order of march, ready for a long trip. I'd like to get a bit more detail on some of that. So - back to the books.

More soon.

The Grand Tactical Game - Salamanca OOBs

This feels like jumping the gun a bit - it is my intention to stage some kind of re-run of the Battle of Salamanca at some point during the playtesting of the MEP Grand Tactical Rules. As I mentioned before, I have very mixed feelings about any kind of re-enactment of a real battle, but I've never been able to do it before, so this will be proving a point. In the interests of humanity, it will probably be a solo effort!

One of the things I need to do is check that I am actually going to have enough troops to do it (and that they'll fit on the table!), so I've translated the historic OOB's into MEP terms - you'll find the tables below, somewhere. The numbers in brackets after the unit names show how many elements that unit contributes - this will not necessarily be the number of actual battalions which took the field in 1812, the numbers are tweaked to match the overall headcount. And, especially on the Allied side, some of the very small regimental units have been omitted - the numbers still add up.

Thanks once again to my loyal friend Marco, who emailed me some very useful feedback on the MEP draft. He pointed out that a very large brigade is potentially unstoppable, and that a very small one with bad morale could have a starting points value (PV) of zero, which means, of course, that they are eliminated before they set out! Accordingly, two new amendments have been incorporated in the draft (which can be downloaded here):

* a maximum of 4 elements count towards a unit's (brigade's) PV, thus (for example) a unit with 5 Elements and a Quality Bonus of +1 has it's PV restricted to 4 + 1 = 5.

* any single-element unit whose QB is -1 should have a minimum PV of 1 - do not attach the white (negative bonus) counter. Unless such a unit has a significant role in the battle, it is suggested that single-element units be dropped from the OOB, or rolled into another unit.



So here is my first attempt at the OOBs for Marshal Marmont's Armee de Portugal and the Earl of Wellington's Allied army on 22nd July 1812. Remember that the "Units" are the entities in the "Brigade" column. PV figures in red in the table are ones which have been adjusted for Marco's new rules. I have consciously been niggardly in awarding QB points, and I have also marked Bonet's Division down a bit since his troops appear to have had little battle experience. The "Sk" notes in the details of the Allied army show where, for mainly cosmetic reasons, skirmish figures should be from a particular unit.

Conclusions? I'm a bit short of Brunswick skirmishers, but I can do it, fairly comfortably, if I use stand-ins. I think I'll omit the Portuguese cavalry and Don Sanchez's Spanish lancers, just because they were tiny units.

I am thinking of commencing the action at the point at which the French left becomes over-extended. Since it is a (sort of) re-enactment, I will not need to use Blinds or Command rules, so the current MEP draft will probably suffice. I could do this playtest quite soon, in fact.

I'd better get myself organised. More soon.

The Grand Tactical Game - More Skirmishing

Thanks very much for invaluable input - comments from Ross on previous post, and emails from Marco, Andy and Paul M. I've revised the draft of the Grand Tactical rules - you can download it here if you wish.

There are some changes for movement in woods and for combat involving buildings and built-up areas, but the big changes are for Skirmishers {Rule 9}.


I am impressed by arguments that casualties as a result of skirmisher fire would be mainly restricted to the other side's skirmishers, and thus would be unlikely to cause an enemy brigade to recoil or break. Thus I've changed the rule so that any skirmish hits will be deducted in the first instance from SK (the skirmish factor), if it is non-zero, until it runs out, and thereafter they will be deducted from the Unit's actual PV (which will require morale tests). This does mean that unopposed Skirmisher fire on an infantry Unit is potentially nasty if it scores any hits.

Skirmisher fire on artillery will impact directly on the PV, but, since an artillery battery is classed as a Difficult target (consisting, as it does, mostly of space), the required checkrolls will mean that the skirmishers miss quite a lot. Skirmish fire on cavalry can't happen, since skirmishers are not allowed to operate within 1 hex of cavalry.

I also took out the restriction on using Skirmishers in or against buildings - it's probably unnecessary - if you wish to use Skirmishers in such a situation then carry on, and the defenders can fire back, too.

Once again, thanks to all for your views - very pleased with that.

The Grand Tactical Game - Skirmishing

Here is the first of the explanatory posts on various bits of the rules of my new (and incomplete) Grand Tactical Napoleonic ("MEP") game. You can download the current draft here and, if you can't understand why I would want to produce such a simplistic set of rules, there's some background and a few objectives in earlier posts.

Old School treatment of infantry skirmishers is normally explicit, and very much the same as formed troops firing volleys - the most common difference is that the figures get a dice each rather than 1 dice per 4 (or 6, or however many), they can hop about all over the place and still fire, and they do not get on very well if they meet with cavalry in the open. This is all fine - if you have the time and space, this is a very good way to address the matter of skirmishers. If the battles get large and complex, the skirmishers become a nuisance. They get lost on the table, and separated from the people they are supposed to be with and, since they are never very effective anyway, tend to be ignored or forgotten as the action heats up. If you really try to keep them involved and busy, you get back into the problem situation where a lot of fiddly effort is required to produce very little effect. A regular feature of tidying up after one of my battles is trying to work out who all these lost skirmishers were supposed to be with, and how they got to be where they are.

A number of the rule sets for big battles, and Grande Armee is a good example, solve the problem by abstracting it - brigades will be allocated some adjusting combat factor which reflects the number and quality of their light troops, but the skirmishers do not actually appear on the tabletop. Or you also see rules where the skirmishing rules are optional, and you can just ignore them altogether for large battles.

That is practical and sensible, but it jars a little. For one thing, the use of skirmishers is pretty much one of the distinguishing characteristics of Napoleonic warfare, and it seems a bit disappointing not to have it represented on the table in some visible form - the special and valued role of the British Light Division, for example, becomes a difficult thing to demonstrate if they are just bog-standard line infantry in the game. For another thing, what about all those lovely painted skirmishers in The Cupboard? On balance, I would prefer to have skirmishers visible on the field, but I do not want them to bog the game down (or be such a nuisance that they end up being ignored, which is a close relative of the same problem), and I do not want them to be more effective than they should be.

Tricky. Getting some kind of a satisfactory answer to this has been a background task for many years. I have an approach for the MEP rules, which is in the draft. It makes some assumptions, some of which are maybe speculative, and I would welcome any guidance here.

My starting principles, and some of this is entirely in the interests of convenience, are

(1) Skirmishers are organised at brigade level, and hang around the edges of their parent brigade

(2) They are not enormously effective – annoying rather than destructive, though the odd good shot can have a disproportionate effect – the probability of causing significant loss of Points Value (PV) to the enemy is not high on any particular turn

(3) However, since they can get a shot both on their own and the enemy’s turn in each Push, and since there may be up to 3 pushes in a 1-hour Bound, they are bound to hit something occasionally

(4) Their primary role is to keep enemy skirmishers at bay, so my rules allow skirmishers to cancel each other out to some extent

(5) This is the area where I am guessing a bit – I assume that if a brigade is making a serious attack, its skirmishers will get out of the way, though they may stand off to the side to mask it from a neighbouring enemy unit. This is relevant in the MEP game because the rules state that all enemy units with whom you are in contact must be attacked in some way or other, and the ways available are by skirmishing or by an actual assault (which itself may have varying degrees of wholeheartedness). Now I’m confident that an assault might well involve some skirmisher activity, but for the purposes of the game I define these as mutually exclusive – in other words, a unit may attack an enemy unit by skirmish or assault, but not both at the same time.

(6) Again, this is in the research area – if a unit moves into contact with 2 enemy units, and is forced to engage them both, it may skirmish against one (not both), and may assault the other (not both).

(7) Let us also stipulate that a skirmish attack – which involves fire by both sides, remember – can only be initiated by the player whose turn it is. The other player cannot choose to take skirmish action against an attacker which has not itself used skirmishers against him.

That is quite enough words. Let’s try a couple of examples. Here’s a French brigade (at the bottom of the picture), with a PV of 4 (number of elements) and a skirmish factor (SK) of 2. Their opponents are a brigade of the Allied 7th Divn, with a PV of 4 (3 elements plus a Veteran bonus of +1, hence the black counter), and they also have an SK of 2.


In a sensible illustration, I would have all my skirmishers mounted individually, on pennies or similar, equal in number to the SK. However, all my skirmishers are currently mounted in threes, so I’ll mark the skirmisher base with the SK number.

The French advance up to the Allied brigade and engage with skirmishers. Both sides will throw a number of dice equal to SK – so 2D6 for each side, and each dice has to score 1 to hit, so this is an even match. Since the action takes place in the open, there is no need for checkrolls.

In this case, the French have thrown 1 and 6, which is a hit for the 1, and the Allies have thrown 1 and 2, which is also 1 hit, so the hits cancel out, and there is no effect. If the Allies had missed entirely, they would have suffered a net loss of 1 from their own PV, and their SK would reduce to 1. If the Allies had hit with both dice, they would have inflicted 1 PV net loss on the French, who would also suffer a corresponding reduction of SK by 1. Sorry if I’m labouring a simple system, but it is the very simplicity which I wish to demonstrate. So – in this case, no losses, no morale test. When all skirmishes and combats are complete for the French turn within this Push, the French will have the option to pull their unit back 1 hex to break the contact, since it was their turn.

Next example – same units, but this time the Allied brigade is in a wood.

The French thow 1 & 4, the Allies 3 & 3. So the Allies have missed, while the French have, potentially, scored a hit. Because the Allies are in a wood, they count as a Difficult target, so a check roll of 3 or less on 1D6 is needed to confirm the hit. In fact the checkroll comes up as a 2, so it is indeed a (rather lucky) hit. The Allies suffer 1 net loss from PV (take away the black counter – PV is now 3) and their SK also reduces to 1. [Remember that the loss of 1 PV does not mean the skirmishers have somehow eliminated a complete battalion, it means that the impact of the hits (mostly psychological, I guess – maybe they hit the brandy barrel) has reduced the overall effectiveness of the Allied brigade.]

Now we need a morale check for the Allied unit – their PV is now 3, but they get a bonus of 1 for being in cover – they throw 2D6, and need to get less than or equal to 4 on each dice to hold their ground. In fact, the dice come up 6 & 6, as bad as possible and, since both failed, the Allied unit breaks and routs out of the wood, which may be now occupied by the French brigade – rather a lucky result?

This is a very simple mechanism, and deliberately so. I’m interested in any views on how this works, and also on my starting assumptions. Subject to whatever debate comes from comments and emails, the next examples will be of combat (i.e. assaults).

Please remember, if you find yourself horrified by the over-simplification or the lack of elegance, that this game is designed for very big battles, and is (hushed whisper) really a board game!

The Grand Tactical Game - Clever but Not Useful

There is an ancient Scottish joke about James Watt (of steam engine fame). I apologise in advance if you have heard it before, or if it isn't amusing, or if you are American and believe that Edison invented the steam engine. It seems that young James had an astonishingly enquiring mind when he was a young man. One morning, so the story goes, he was so fascinated watching the kettle boiling that he missed his train to work.

That's it. It's quite a short joke - maybe that's all it has in its favour. However, it strikes a chord with me - it is very easy to hide yourself away in a cave somewhere and brilliantly deduce stuff that everyone knows already because their granny told them.

Since the topic will become a requirement for my Grand Tactical rules in the near future, I wanted to spend a little blog space considering the merits and pitfalls of Command rules. It's been done before, but I want to have another go at thinking this through from basic principles - this may be entirely for my own amusement...

To start with, a cautionary tale. There have been times when I've realised that my wargames are missing something important. A few years ago I was watching the Sergei Bondarchuk Waterloo film for the umpteenth time (isn't it great?) when I realised that my battles would be improved enormously if I had some way of allowing cavalry to get out of control and charge for the horizon. So I did some fairly extensive reading, both of history and of rule sets, and I decided the rules which handled the matter best were (you maybe guessed) The Big Battalions. Since my main wargame rules are computerised, it took a fair amount of grunt to build “recklessness” into the game, but I was pleased with the way it played out in testing. For the next year I had a pretty sophisticated set of monitoring logic in there which checked all cavalry actions, and which (I assume) continued to give reasonable results, and you know what? In a year, not a single cavalry unit ever got out of control. Not once. Every time I fought a battle, all cavalry combat was beset with questions about whether they had a general with them (and the aggressiveness/restraint of each general was well known, as was the quality of the units), and the benefit to the game, as it turned out, was not worth all the bloody effort. The rule was clever enough, was intended to simulate something which appeared to be historically valid, and yet in the long run it wasted a lot of time with scarcely any effect at all. Readers who have seen Foy's Fifth Law will know what I think of that sort of thing.

And there have been other examples. One, for which I have tried very hard not to fall down the same trapdoor, is the nippy matter of Command rules.

So what's all that about? Well, I think it's an attempt to stop wargame generals having a level of control which is completely out of whack with what would have been possible on a real historical battlefield. As the cliché explanation goes, there were no radios, no helicopters - precious little visibility at all, sometimes. Big armies with many layers of commanders, some of them lost, some of them stupid, all of them under unimaginable pressure and constrained to communicate by means of written notes carried around Hell by the idiot sons of the nobility (in the British case, at least). It is little wonder that the 2-evening refight of Ligny seems to boil down to half-an hour's concentrated action, if you analyse it just by theoretical rates of march - the real guys at real Ligny certainly spent most of their time waiting for instructions, wondering what the blazes was going on, or advancing towards a cloud of smoke, or all of these. I guess they did not spend many periods of time advancing 12 inches in column minus 3 inches for crossing a wall.

Chaos, my friends. Chaos. That's where the Command rules come in - anything which gets us away from the idea of a perfectly choreographed, all-pieces-move-at-once game of chequers has to be good. However, it is impossible to simulate all that vagueness in an exactly realistic manner, and most of the rules which are in vogue appear to address it by introducing an element of disruption in various ingenious ways.

The most common approach seems to be the use of a Command Radius - a general of a given calibre can immediately influence units within a certain distance of where he is, and that distance is big if he is Davout, and is small if he is Cuesta. OK - it must work quite nicely, because lots of people do this, but realistic? There is an implication of telepathic or force-of-will communication in there. If Davout really can influence subordinates 35 inches away this move, then the only way this could happen would be by sending an ADC, and it would take that fellow a little while to get there - maybe 35 x 20 paces divided by the light cavalry charge move (etc etc), and that is ignoring the need to write something and read it at the two ends of the journey, not to mention the probability that the ADC wrote down the wrong message, or doesn't find the recipient, or does find a cannonball. However you work this, the reality is that it would not be instantaneous, yet the delay is not explicitly built into Command Radius rules. That's OK - this is just a device to introduce imperfection into the control exercised by the C-in-C, and it has a lot of merit as a practical solution, but please don't get snooty about realism.

Or we might have Command Chits, or CPs or whatever you choose to call them. Depending on an individual general's supposed ability, plus maybe a couple of dice throws, that general will be able to spin a certain number of plates at the same time. OK - I can see that - I have used rules like this myself, and it works. Sometimes the Chits and the Command Radius co-exist in the same set of rules.


And then there's cards - I have used cards, there's something nice and Waddington-like about cards - you know you're in a proper game. I've used Piquet cards, and derivatives of Battle Cry cards and various others, including my own. It's comfortable to have a hand of cards you can develop secretly and play when the moment is right. However, I am not comfortable at all when the card restricts me to control of a formation on the left flank, or of a unit which is arbitrarily classified as "Red" (as in Grognards & Grenadiers) - this is so obviously an artificial, randomly-generated hassle that it can be mostly just frustrating.


Because I do a lot of solo gaming, cards and chits do not work so well for me, and look at the mess they make of the battlefield! So I became very interested in the dice-driven Command system in Fast Play Grande Armee, it is simple in operation, and does not require any special kit or record keeping, though it does require each commander to be allocated a stash of Command Dice each bound, which he may use in various ways, from assisting his subordinates to comply with his wishes to generating re-rolls for poor artillery fire. I implemented a cut-down version of this in my own game, and it worked really well. The bad news, of course, was that it added a huge time and effort overhead to the game.


Not outfaced, I modified it so that only troops and officers within a certain distance of the enemy needed Command actions. It still took a while, but it was better. The fiddly overhead came down but – guess what? That’s right – I was back to the out-of-control cavalry effect – the occasions on which a commander was unable to correct a non-standard Command result, where it actually affected the game, were so few that it really wasn’t worth the constant effort of checking. By default, the Command phase would be dropped from the game – I would just stop doing the testing when fatigue set in.


All this negativity is not leading up to the conclusion that Command rules are a bad idea – I think they are an excellent idea, but they can also get your battles bogged down worse than anything in the entire history of wargaming. I have developed a minimalist set of Command rules, which I’ll explain in a future posting, at the time when I start adding a Command section to the draft.

The Grand Tactical Game - First Draft

With a bit of luck, you should find the first draft of MEP here.

If it looks surprisingly polished for a draft, that is illusory, and is entirely because it is a cut-&-stitch lash-up from the rules of my main game. This is very much "warts and all" at this stage - the Command section is missing, as are a few other bits and pieces - what is here is a collection of the main combat and morale mechanisms, plus movement rules.

In a few days I'll set out some examples of how combat and skirmishing work, with pictures, which should help things make a little more sense. Please bear in mind that this early version has not been written for publication - this is really just my own notes.

My PV points system gives a kind of amalgam of troop quality and numerical strength - it is, so to speak, an Effectiveness measure. When a Unit loses a point from its PV, it doesn't necessarily mean that a complete battalion has been wiped out, it just means that the Unit (brigade) is now a bit less effective than it was. If artillery fires on a Unit and does not cause any PV loss, it doesn't mean that they managed a complete miss - it simply means that the overall impact of the losses suffered and the loss of confidence has had very little effect.

If you do have a look at this lot, I hope you find it interesting, but please prepare to be underwhelmed at this stage. I will, of course, be pleased to receive any comments. In particular, if the download doesn't work, or you can't find or read the file, please let me know.

My intention is to update this draft as I incorporate changes and add missing bits, so the downloadable file will evolve with time (i.e. I'm not storing a version history online!).