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.

Home Brewed Flags - Nassau

And yet another - this is derived from the illustration in Vol.3 of Flags of the Napoleonic Wars by Terry Wise. Once again, I did my own only to get better resolution than the Warflag download.

The flag was a small one - only about a metre square. I find you have to watch flag sizes - I don't like to see beautifully painted French Napoleonics staggering around with a 6 foot flag - you see it a lot, but it's wrong. On the other hand, if you make your flags too small, the thickness of the pole and the bloody-mindedness of the paper can result in something that looks like a fancy hatchet. I printed this at 16mm high, which in 1/72 is slightly overscale, but looks OK.

The Nassau regular infantry regiments all had flags like this throughout the Napoleonic Wars - whichever side they happened to be on!

Home Brewed Flags - Kleve-Berg

I needed a flag for one of my new Peninsular War units - this is for the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of Kleve-Berg, who in the Autumn of 1812 were part of Lamarque's Division of Decaen's Army of Catalonia, on counter-insurgency duty in Northern Spain. This doesn't sound like much of a great gig until you realise that all the rest of the Kleve-Berg units had been sent to Russia, so it could easily have been worse.

I thought it would be friendly to offer it here in case it is useful for anyone else. Usual drill - if you want a copy, please just click on the image to display the big version, then right-click on that and save it to wherever you want.

I wasn't keen on the available downloadable versions of Berg flags from the usual sites, so I constructed my own, for better resolution. This is the post 1809 version of the flag - I have printed mine at 18mm high for 1/72 scale, which looks OK, but I confess that I have no idea what size they were really. It was just gold on white - a lot less attractive than Murat's pre-1809 design, but you'd expect that. All units had the same flag, just overprint the numerals in the corners.

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!