Hooptedoodle #8 - Hither Pommerania, anyone?

This follows pretty much from yesterday’s posting about the near-completion of my Peninsular War armies. I used to wargame the ACW (at a very basic level) and had some decent Ancient armies, but I got rid of them to concentrate on the Napoleonic stuff. I have no regrets about this, but I have reached a point (rather to my own amazement) where I need to take stock of what, if anything, I do next.

It’s easy when there is no question of doing anything about it. The most fruitful periods for my imagination are invariably those times when I am too busy, too impecunious or otherwise too distracted to develop the ideas beyond the eye-twinkle stage. And yet there have been times...

Let’s have some realism here – I feel I am too old now to start another new period, or convert everything to 15mm, or do anything which might be regarded as in some way understandable or sensible. I don’t have the free time or the patience, and, apart from anything else, my eyesight is no longer up to mass-production of painted battalions. Equally, there is no question of my giving up my hobby, or quietly folding my hands and waiting for the Grim Umpire to come and roll a double 1 – I shall be more than happy to pursue my version of the Unpleasantness in Spain indefinitely. As I have probably mentioned before, I am aware that my own private Peninsular War has now been going on for about 5 times the duration of the original, so it is not without some historical significance. If I do feel a sudden urge to fight the ACW, I can probably arrange to get myself invited to have a go at someone else's house.

So – what to do? No urgent requirement to do anything at all, of course, but I have always had a soft spot for the Imagi-nation approach – right back to my earliest readings of Charles Grant and Peter Young. To an extent, the Napoleonic period is already a bit like that – I’ve recently been building up a couple of brigades of Rheinbund units, and those quaint little duchies and principalities do get quite close to fantasy.

It’s all Pjotr’s fault, really. He casually suggested recently that I could invent a Napoleonic nation – almost certainly a French ally, obviously. What a crazy idea! However, as it happens, I do have a bit of a stock of unpainted Scruby French Napoleonic figures, and I have nothing to do with them. Hmmm. I have thought of selling them. Nah – no-one will want them. I’ve offered them as a freebie to a couple of people. No takers. I have enough for a battalion of grenadiers (using Old Guard figures), probably 3 battalions of foot chasseurs (Light Inf and Young Guard figures), plus probably 2 regiments of chasseurs-a-cheval-type cavalry. If I scratch round in the spares box, I’m sure I could come up with a foot battery and some staff.

Hmmm.

You see, until recently I would just have got them painted up as yet more French Line, but I’ve already got several times more French troops than I can get on the same battlefield. I also have a strong interest in the 1813-14 campaign in Northern Italy, so maybe I should make them into Neapolitans? Snag, of course, is that this campaign would require me to come up with a large Austrian army, which I don’t really want to get started on.

Hmmm.

Last night I started looking idly at the map. For some reason, I think I would be more comfortable coming up with a slightly distorted version of history for a real place, rather than inventing a complete new place. Don’t ask me to explain why.

Anyway, I got very interested for a while yesterday in Vorpommern, or “Hither Pommerania” as I believe we are supposed to call it in English now (much to the imagined fury of the Hither Pommeranians). It is right next to Mecklenburg, near the Polish border on a modern map. In Napoleonic times it appears to have been divided up between the Margrave of Brandenburg (which I suppose was Prussia) and Sweden, so maybe it is spoken for. I’m still only scratching the surface of this, but it is interesting. There must be a whole bunch of candidate places.

Anyone got any ideas? If I’m going to have a fantasy nation, I’d rather not copy someone else’s, I think. Maybe what I really want here is for someone to send me a slap, and tell me not to be silly!

My French Army - new pics

I recently got some new units based up, and am now in a position where, once I get a single battalion of foot dragoons ready for garrison duty, my French army has finally attained the organisation target I set myself about 30 years ago. Admittedly there has been a little scope creep over the years.

To celebrate this landmark (saying nothing at all about all the limbers which are still to be built and painted!) I thought it was time we had some more soldier pics on the blog - there's been an awful lot of words lately!

They are all set out in order, staff and artillery at the front, skirmishers at the rear. From left to right (as we see them), the columns are

King of Spain's Guard

Spanish line troops

Italian brigade

1st German brigade

2nd German brigade

6 French line brigades

Reserve artillery, plus garrison troops and artillery and engineers

Heavy cavalry

Light cavalry

With a couple of minor pieces of wargamer's licence, the army is a representative section of the Armee de Portugal with a rather more colourful reserve contingent, dating from around Spring 1812. The Emperor (who doesn't get out of The Cupboard very often) has obviously flown in from the frozen north to review the troops.

Hope you enjoy these - see how many figure manufacturers you can identify!

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.

Hooptedoodle #7 - Death by Communication - omg

I've had a Facebook account for a while now, but I only recently started making use of it. I have a friend who insists on using his for just about everything. Some of the things he uses it for surprise me. Some of them, I think he dreamed them up specially to give himself another excuse to use it.

In the month or two that I've been making more use of Facebook, it has been useful on about 3 occasions. To balance that, it irritates me and wastes my time a couple of dozen times each day. That is not a positive balance. OK - I can just close the account, or stop using it. Or maybe I can't - I know it's damned hard to remove a photo - maybe you're not allowed to close an account? - who cares, actually? I have friends who cannot listen to a CD without telling everyone. I have seen enough mobile-phone pics of drunk guys with their tongues hanging out to last me a very long time. Graffitti.

So - yes, I'm a bit hostile, and I'm certainly aware of getting old and grumpy, but I worry a little. I worry about the time and bandwidth that are wasted, the consumer cost and the technology investment that underpins the immense exchange of drivel that passes for useful communication. Facebook exists primarily to make a lot of money for the guy who invented it. Facebook is just another manifestation of something which has already been around and growing for years. Why do we need an infinite number of TV channels when the programme content is almost entirely crud? - who watches this stuff? When you 've paid for your new TV, bear in mind that watching crud in High Definition is hardly a mighty step forward (imho).

How many people do you know who dare not switch their mobile phone off, in case they miss out on something? Perhaps you yourself are in this position? I am fortunate enough to live in a rural area where there is no mobile service. When I am at home, you can ring my mobile all you want - it doesn't work. Sometimes this is a nuisance, but mostly it just means that I have got into the habit of switching the mobile on only when I need to be contactable. That's right - weird, eh?

When I used to commute into Edinburgh on the train, I used to be astounded by the girls from the posh private schools, texting each other - from adjacent seats. I guess their parents were paying for this. I used to pass the time trying to ignore it, trying to be absorbed by my book, but distracted by vague thoughts involving chainsaws. I guess the juvenile texters all grew up to be mainstream Facebook users.

A while ago I heard a man on the radio expressing his theory that the amount of initiative people display is inversely proportional to the speed and ease of communication. It was a lot more interesting than it might sound. The example he used which stuck in my mind was the East India Company, back in the 18th Century. They had their own army, as we know, and they had their own army exactly because it would take maybe 6 months to send a message to London and get a reply. If someone attacked them, there was no point at all trying to ask Head Office what to do about it. Nowadays they would have to convene an electronic conference to decide who they needed to talk to, just to define their Terms of Reference. In the last month, I have been chasing a local (village) committee to get some information to put in the local community journal. Amazing. The whole committee are in endless mobile contact with each other, there is a greater degree of convoluted, tangled misinformation than I would have believed and - since everyone always has to consult everyone else - no-one is empowered to make a decision. I never got my notice for the journal - they missed the deadline. Something wrong here, chaps. If you provide a bunch of weasels each with a Blackberry, you achieve nothing. Weasels could not have managed the East India Company.

So, if anyone was thinking of sending me a message on Facebook to tell me how much you enjoyed your coffee this morning, please don't bother. Unless I hear to the contrary, I'll assume everything is fine.

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.

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