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.

Hooptedoodle #6 - The Three Excuses Rule

Like everyone else, I came into the world knowing nothing, and have only occasionally managed to improve this situation - and always, I believe, by personal experience. Maybe I was never a good listener, but words of received wisdom only ever come back to me when I am trying to strip off curdled varnish, or lying in hospital, or pleading with the bank, or whatever. By and large, I found stuff out the hard way - one day you will see me listed in the Darwin Awards.

Once upon a time I used to go running at lunchtime with a group of colleagues from work. We used to go Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Life being what it is, now and then someone would send a message apologising for absence - popular reasons included:

(1) I have to look for a present for my wife's birthday - you know how it is.

(2) I think I have a cold coming on - I'll give it a miss today.

(3) I am struggling to finish off a presentation I have to make to the Board this afternoon.

No-one could take exception to any of these, obviously, and the runners would look forward to seeing their missing companion next time. Occasionally, someone would come out with a multiple reason:

(1+2) I have to do some urgent shopping, and anyway I'm not feeling too great, so I'll not be running today.

Poor chap - such a strong case for not being there might even generate some sympathetic (if monosyllabic) discussion during the run. But only very rarely did anyone attempt to claim that they had three simultaneous good reasons for absence. At that point it becomes obvious that they are making it up. The chances of anyone having that good a reason not to do anything at all are so remote as to be discounted without further thought.

Foy's Seventh Law is known in our family as the Three Excuses Rule, and states:

If someone has three good, separate excuses for not being able to do something, that person is lying - they just don't want to do it.

This is a very useful rule indeed - you will regularly be able to use it to judge the merits of politicians, and to apply it to discussions with tradesmen, mail-order retailers, your children, all sorts of people, in a great many practical situations. Only yesterday, the phone helpline for my Internet Service Provider had three excellent reasons why we had no broadband for the second time in four days, and the girl appeared mystified when I laughed as she got to the third excuse.

Art Miniaturen

Another manufacturer who is still doing well, but a rather different style of figure. Jorg Schmaeling's super 1/72 metal figures are, in my view, diorama-style, and very nice too - a little pricey, but lovely. Art Miniaturen are also nice, helpful people to deal with. Herr Schmaeling is happy to provide odd figures from his listed sets, and I understand that he will even consider spare parts - hats, pelisses and so on.


Apart from the price (which is not astronomical, by the way), the only other slight snags are

(1) there is occasional flash trouble - these figures are very detailed, but no compromise is made in animation to ease the casting process - some of the older figures can display signs of mould damage, particularly swords and muskets, and horses' legs can require a bit of dremelling to make them perfect

(2) Schmaeling does not accept payment by credit card or PayPal (at least he didn't a couple of months ago) - this is a bit of an issue for UK residents, since the good old British banks still make it very expensive to transfer money internationally. It is not a real stopper, but how you choose to work around the problem is up to you. I would never, of course, advise anyone to send cash euros in a registered letter. Perish the thought.


I have only one unit which is entirely Art Minaturen - my beloved French 3rd Hussars. These cost me a real arm and a leg, since I felt that my painting could not do justice to such fine figures, so I commissioned the very talented Jez Farminer to do the full collector-standard paint job on them. I am very pleased with them, but I cannot afford to follow this route very often!

I have some French voltigeurs, and a good number of command figures. Here are a few pictures, which I hope speak for themselves.




Finally, here's a conversion - I produced this Spanish colonel by grafting a Les Higgins British Light Infantry head on to an Art Miniaturen Belgian officer figure. The width and quality of the range make these figures ideal for conversions.

Kennington

Unusually among the figure manufacturers I have featured in this series, Kennington are still in business. The figures are available in packs from SHQ, and they are inexpensive and have a very decent range. They are at the smaller end of the size range I can use - maybe 22mm average height - but have acceptable proportions, apart from a tendency to big hands(!) and tiny bases. Hands apart, they are a good size match for Hinton Hunt, for example.


I like them - I don't have many complete Kennington units, but they are an excellent source of command figures. I decided quite late in my collecting career to add mounted colonels to most of the infantry units, and Kennington have been very useful, especially for the French. They make a little French infantry colonel on a rather tubby horse who is a pleasing little character, complete with bristling moustache - I have a lot of these. Kennington are also the only 20mm source of rarities such as proper flank-company Highland skirmishers - their range is certainly worth checking out.


French light infantry - these are pro-painted, as you can probably tell.


Nassau infantry (the colonel is a mixture of bits - Minifigs horse, Art Miniaturen figure with an old Garrison head).


Portuguese artillery - the howitzers are by Scruby.

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.