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.

Foy's Sixth Law

This was considered earlier as a possible addition to the list. After comments and emails following recent blog postings, I see now that this may, in fact, be the greatest of all of Foy's Laws.


Foy's Sixth Law is:

If there are wargame figures which you want, and they are available, buy them now. Sell the house if necessary. The manufacturer will be history by next month. Your wife will understand.

Lamming

Lamming are one of the great figure makers from the classic 1960s-70s period, so, if this seems like an inappropriately sketchy treatment of them, it is entirely because I have never really bought much of their stuff.


Lamming British infantry, with giant mounted colonel and Minifigs ensigns

For one thing, rightly or wrongly, I always regarded them as specialists in medieval subjects. For another, my local shop (Archie Alexander's Toytub in Edinburgh) didn't stock Lamming - certainly they didn't do the Napoleonics, so it wasn't untill the eBay Age that I got to see any. For a sensible presentation of Lamming's output, visit VINTAGE20MIL or The Old Metal Detector - this is just going to be a peek through the keyhole, which about sums up my experience of this manufacturer.

For reasons which I can't quite put my finger on, I subconsciously group Lamming with Garrison. Apart from the fact that I actually had some Garrison figures about 30 years before I had any Lamming (though they were roughly contemporary in anyone else's real world), there is the scale creep thing which was quite similar for both. Later Garrisons, from about 1975 on, got bigger and bigger, presumably to cope with the general inflation of the Wargame Millimetre, as 25mm came to mean something entirely different. Lamming appear to have done the same thing, only their later figures got fatter as well (there is a nice pictorial demonstration of this aspect of Lamming's history in Lazy-Limey's blog). I tend to avoid the two makes, not because there is anything fundamentally wrong with them, but because I don't understand the ranges well enough to be able to predict whether a specific model is going to be of a suitable size. I have made a few blunders on eBay.


53rd Foot, with ensigns and mounted officer by Art Miniaturen

I like Lamming's very early 25mm Napoleonics - the French have hats which are too big for me, but the advancing British infantryman is a nice little, ectomorphic figure which stands nicely alongside Les Higgins men in stature. I have, I think, 3 battalions of these chaps. I don't care much for the very tall standing officer that goes with them, but the drummer is fine, and it seems right to keep them together where possible. Right from the outset, there is a recognisable facial style - thin faces with high cheekbones. As time passed, this family characteristic (because they are clearly all related) developed into the full, and very distinctive, "Easter Island" look. My cousin used to say that the early figures reminded him of the Treens, from the Dan Dare stories in the old Eagle comic - it goes without saying that my cousin must have been far, far older than me.


Apart from the infantry, I once had a (now rare) mounted officer to go with them, but he was far too big, and a couple of batteries of RHA, which were very nice but so obviously different from everything else I had that I sold them on.



That's about all for Lamming, really - I very much like the look of their cavalry (nice horses!), but fear of the unknown and my eBay experiences have prevented any closer acquaintance - thus far, anyway.

Size Comparison

Since I was asked, here's some size comparisons - from left to right, in each picture, Les Higgins/PMD, NapoleoN, Hinton Hunt.


I have to say that the NapoleoN infantry are bigger than the HH by more than I thought - I think the British infantry may be a bit taller than some others in the range.

NapoleoN Miniatures

I am not going to grind any axes here. I thought, and still think, that NapoleoN Miniatures were underrated. I bought a lot of them, and am still hoping that they come back from retirement so I can buy some more.

First problem is - what do you call these guys? You can't stress the final capital in NapoleoN, so I tend to refer to them as NapoleoN 20 (their original name) or NapoleoN Minatures, as they became. Based in Murcia, Spain, and set up by a small group of real wargame enthusiasts, their range included, in addition to 1/72 white metal figures, hex-based rules (still downloadable from the website) and army lists for the Peninsular War.


The first, considerable attraction for me is that the chief sculptor (Ventura?) is a real talent. The horses, cannons and general officers are especially lovely, though there were also odd figures which are clearly the lovely ones with a spare head tacked on. They produced a limited range of positions - infantry are marching, with flankers, officers, standard bearers and drummers (plus loading and firing skirmishers for French, British and Spanish armies), cavalry are also fairly calm - sabres shouldered, walking horses. They added a nice touch by casting variations of the figures with differing head angles, and there was a choice of horses - they sold the figures primarily in multiple packs, though they were also available singly, and a pack would normally contain a mixture of poses to make the units interesting.

They did have a tendency toward extreme optimism when announcing launch dates for new products, but they were really nice, courteous people to deal with. They sold the figures directly, or through online dealers like Kamar. It was wonderfully refreshing - quite nostalgic, in fact - to be able to browse through a catalogue and say, "I'll have 70 of those, and 30 of those, and I'd better have some of those...", and just order them! Shades of Hinton Hunt in the Old Days, except - for a while at least - the stuff that came back through the post was a bit more predictable than HH.

The muskets on the British infantry were a bit fragile, a problem that they sorted out with later releases. At the time they ceased trading, they had just re-launched the old Les Higgins/PMD range, were bringing out some terrific Spanish cavalry, and were talking about diversifying into other campaigns - helmeted Austrians with separate heads were mentioned.

Sadly, it didn't happen. I understand that they ran into problems with the casting facility and, especially, the courier service which handled their shipping. Also, their new, improved website-cum-online-shop, which was always a little clunky, got choked to obliteration by the inevitable moronic Russian spam engines (I have fantasies about being locked in a room with one of the degenerates that write these things, and a baseball bat...).

Around the beginning of 2009, just as they announced changes in the packaging, some new 15mm Spanish Civil War figures and the first Les Higgins re-issues, things suddenly went quiet. Presumably the economic unpleasantness didn't help - maybe someone just got fed up. The intention was to get themselves sorted out and then start trading again, but since then Angel, the main man, has started a related business elsewhere, so I guess we just wait and see.

I am uncomfortably aware that I brokered the sale of the Les Higgins moulds and masters to NapoleoN, so I do not propose to say very much about that - I cannot believe that they are lost forever, so I have to trust that they will reappear sometime in the future, though I have nothing definite to base this view on. We all need a little faith.

Like composers, wargame figure manufacturers seem to acquire status after they have gone. I do not propose to present any sort of cod eulogy - I am simply putting out a lot of pictures here - admittedly with my painting! - to let the figures speak for themselves. Please enjoy, and perhaps shed a little tear with me.

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!).