Where the Heck was I?

Today I was going to do a little post on my new Spanish line officers, but sadly I haven't finished painting them, so that will have to wait a day or so. I was also going to write up the next week of the solo campaign, but I haven't got the housekeeping sorted out yet, so that will have to wait as well.

One of the things which has taken up time in the last couple of weeks is the auction of various Historex items which I volunteered to sell on eBay to raise money for cancer charities. Since I volunteered I can hardly complain about the hassle, but it has reminded me of the amount of labour needed to sell stuff on eBay, especially if you are as verbose as I am when it comes to the listings. Then there's all the questions to answer, and all the peeking to see if anyone else is watching or bidding yet...

Everything is sold now - some 100 unopened kits from the 1970s, plus a collection of 60-odd finished figures. Some things I learned about Historex during the last few weeks:

(1) The interest is very substantially from outside the UK - most of the items have sold to buyers in Italy, Germany, France and the USA. Unfortunately, because of the weight, I could not offer the big collection of complete figures outside the UK, though most of the questions and interest I got came from overseas. In particular, the insured shipping cost of the 2Kg+ parcel to the USA worked out at about £90, which is crazy.

(2) Maybe predictably, the kits generated much more interest than the completed figures - there seems to be more interest in building them than purchasing someone else's efforts, however good. That shouldn't have been a surprise, I think.

(3) The completed figures are horrifyingly fragile - you dare not sneeze near them, and some of them will hardly support their own weight. A challenge - even for a fastidious (fusspot) packer like me. (I love the sound of bubblewrap in the morning.)

Anyway, they are all sold and mailed now - one or two still have to be formally accepted as safely received, but shipping has been remarkably quick. One small packet to Indianapolis arrived in a little over 2 days, which is fantastic. I have to make a detailed breakdown of proceeds-less-expenses, since I have to pay the net amount over to the charity, so I have been more than usually focused on the fees charged by eBay and PayPal. Man, they are not cheap. OK - I'm not really grousing - there is no other easy way to sell stuff like this, but the 10% completion fees on eBay really add up. However, I'm delighted to say that - assuming the last few items have arrived safely and we don't get into any disputes, we should have raised about £730 for the charity, so I'm very pleased with that.

It fairly knocked a hole in the time available for painting and other hobby stuff, though.

Next topic. I wrote a post not long ago about my apparent weakness for big shiny wargame books, and how they are usually not as useful as they might look. Well, I did it again. Having already bought and browsed Wargames Foundry's Napoleon rule book (great title, by the way, guys), I had decided against looking at Warlord Games Black Powder publication, which looked like another of the same sort of figure-promotion-disguised-as-rules jobs.

However, a few people whose judgement I have a lot of respect for have played the game and made positive noises about it. The most guarded comment I have heard was from John C, who said the game he played was "the most excellent fun, but had very little to do with Napoleonic warfare". So, when I got the chance of a good, cheap, second hand copy, I bought it, and it has been my bedtime reading this week - it is a bit large and heavy to be ideal for bedtime reading, and it also tends to hit the floor with an alarming thump when I doze off, but it has been most enjoyable.

It is refreshing to read a wargames book which appears to have been written by adults who have a nice way with humour and who can actually write both entertainingly and grammatically, and without getting unpleasantly nerdy or giving in to the temptation to slag other people's efforts. Anyway, the book is entertaining, the game looks like a lot of fun, and a few bells rang.

For a start, all ranges, moves and everything else are given in multiples of 6 inches - Ding! - hexes, I thought. I'm not sure if I intend to rush to try the rules - I think I'd like to sit in on someone else's game first. Fat chance around here. One slight difficulty I have is that, since the book is written in a nice, conversational style, there isn't a formal statement of scales and so on - or at least I didn't find one. The illustrated scenarios seem to be played with 28mm figures (as you would expect) on a 6-feet-by-12 table (and no-one expected that...), but they do not appear to be very large games, in the sense of numbers of units.

Anybody played Black Powder? Any views on what size of battle it works for? What did you think of it? I realise a lot of people use these rules, but I hadn't really considered them before. They look practical, and I like the simple, commonsense approach - anyone like to offer a brief critique?

If you'd like to invite me to watch a game, I'll be delighted - please just send the return air fare and I'll bring some beer.

Hooptedoodle #53 - The Dreaded Small Print

This is intended to be an observation rather than a rant - I state this right at the start in case you cannot tell the difference.

I think my theme is basically the counter-productive effect of our modern dedication to Health & Safety. All the warnings printed on everyday items, all the overcomplicated messages printed on product packaging, all the safety stuff in user manuals, all those crazy garbled codas on radio adverts for financial services - all that - be aware that no-one actually cares whether you hurt yourself, or suffer financial loss, or even die. This is not to say that they wish you any harm, of course, but their main concern - you could say obsession - is to ensure you do not blame them or try to get any money out of them if something goes wrong.

I recently bought a new flat-screen TV, which came with a very thick owner manual. Being very careful to keep my back straight when I lifted the manual, I found that it was printed in 17 languages, including Arabic and Slovene. The remaining 8 pages in English started off with 5 sides of safety information, including details of how to dispose safely of the item and its packaging, a surprising amount of detail about the risks of epileptic seizure if I watched the thing, and solemn advice about not watching it underwater, or on top of a mountain in a thunderstorm. Whatever goes wrong, they have told me about it in 17 languages, so what's my problem? Sadly, the manual did not explain how to edit the tuned channels, or configure the DVD player, and was very sketchy about quite a few other practical operational matters. This is partly explained by the fact that the manual is issued with a whole range of very different models, and so can only refer in general terms to some topics. In truth, the TV is fine, once you poke around with the menus and stuff, but, basically, the manual says:

"Congratulations on buying this TV. We think it's quite a good TV - don't do anything daft with it, and further instructions on anything that isn't intuitive about the operation might have been found at the following internet URL if we hadn't moved it 2 years ago. If anything goes wrong, or you hurt yourself, don't bother getting in touch - our legal department is bigger than our technical development section."

And it says this in 17 languages. One reason why these documents have to be so multilingual was made clear to me some years ago when the previous Mme Foy recruited the services of a student to help with the housework. If there is any implication of a fantasy au pair in a short overall, forget it - this girl was not of that breed, and her main qualification for the job was that she was penniless and Mme felt sorry for her. Maria didn't understand how to use the vacuum cleaner, or how to do much else, as far as I could see. The arrangement lasted some 5 weeks, until the Great Bath Disaster. Because she had poor eyesight, and was Spanish, she had problems with printed English instructions on packages, and one morning she cleaned the bath with a cleaner which said, in small print on the package, "Caution: not suitable for enamel baths". Remarkably, she must have put an unusual amount of energy into cleaning that bath, because she turned it into a horrible, matt-finished, piebald item which had to be replaced - could not be rescued. It was about 4 years old, and it cost something like £1500 to remove it, replace it and restore the bathroom to a proper state. Neither the cleaner manufacturer nor my insurer were the slightest bit interested in sharing the financial grief, since the product package said clearly it was unsuitable for enamel baths - assuming you had very good eyesight and could read English - and that got everyone off the hook. This was about 20 years ago, and £1500 bought a lot of food and beer in those days.

I confess that in some ways I am a slow learner, but I took due note of the incident. The warnings are not there to help the customer - primarily, they are there to protect the manufacturer.

What brings it all to mind this morning is that, once again, I find that the present Comtesse Foy - bless her - has put interesting bottles of new products in the shower. Some of them may be familiar items with new packaging - I wouldn't really know, mostly, but I had better be sure to do a little label-reading to be on the safe side. It might seem astonishingly remiss - even eccentric - but I tend not to wear my spectacles in the shower - is that unusual? - I wouldn't have thought so. Whatever, it is not unknown for me to attempt to wash my hair with skin cream or bathe with something which turns out to be hair conditioner. It hasn't got any worse than that, but the scope for disaster is impressive - chilling, even. If a new green plastic squeezy bottle appears on the shower shelf, there is no immediate way that I can identify what it is unless they give me some very large print and maybe some pictures. It could be a new German shampoo containing caffeine, which is fine - Mme Foy is a tireless researcher - or it could be Mr Muscle's Extra Strong Barbecue Cleaner. I wouldn't know. Taking a shower can be a major act of trust.

Of course, it could be that the legal requirement to print all those disclaimers and warnings on the label in microscopic fonts leaves no room for pictures. There is probably even a message that says, "If you can't read this, it isn't our problem - have a nice day." 

Just Can't Rush These Things

I'm currently doing some conversion work and painting to get a supply of command figures for my next lot of Spanish line infantry, and in the breaks - since I have the brushes and the tools out - I am taking the opportunity to do a few other bits and pieces. Tidying up, finishing things off - that sort of stuff.

Here is an example. This, you will see, is a British artillery caisson. I have a few such caissons, and there are still a couple more to be finished. Most of them are models by Lamming - the older the better, to get the scale right. This one is slightly different - the limber and the caisson (actually, I think it is officially an Ammunition Car) are both from  the lovely old Hinchliffe 20mm series - long gone; the horses are Hinton Hunt, the driver is a converted Minifigs S-Range RHA gunner. Nothing particularly notable in the mix, I think you will agree - all the castings date from the 1970s. If you were to be a little fussy, you might suggest that the horses are a tad small for the rest of the kit, but that is certainly my fault for removing them from their bases in 1972. Anyway, you wouldn't suggest it out loud.

That is the point - the horses and the limber have been attached to this plywood base since late 1972. When I switched my house standard from 2 gun limbers per battery to just one, I had a few spare limbers like this kicking around the place. Last year I got hold of a matching caisson from the same maker and the same vintage, and added a suitable driver. Some very slight freshening of the paint on the original bits and here you are - a brand new addition to my Allied artillery which has only been 40 years in the completion.

That must be a house record, I think.

Solo Campaign – Siege Tweaks Re-tweaked

If something is worth doing, my grandmother used to say, it’s probably worth doing over again. Here I was, quite happy with my new Hassle-Be-Gone automated siege rules, and then some insightful comments from Ross on my recent post and an unusually coherent email from De Vries the Impaler sent me back to the drawing board.

One of the truly great things about blogs is that you can get other interested parties to shine some light on your own thoughts, and you can learn a huge amount. [By the way, any fans or students of Water Logic? – I used to be a firm believer in all that creative evaluation stuff, though I seem to have forgotten about it since I stopped being paid to think. I might do a post about it sometime – you have been warned.]

The purpose of my mathematical, off-table siege rules is to strike a workable balance between convenience and realism such that sieges can be handled easily in the background while the campaign rolls on. The tricky bit is finding the correct balance – rephrase that – an acceptable balance.

The part of the siege under particular scrutiny here is the actual assault or storm. For a start, Ross raised the very good point that not all sieges are the same. If the defenders are unusually determined, it can change things. I carefully avoid the use of the word “fanatical” here, since it has kind of rabid overtones. Let us merely identify that there are certain situations and certain armies where the defenders would be prepared to fight for every building, and to sustain unusually high levels of casualties. De Vries’ original suggestion was that the defenders might be “Spanish or mad”, but that won’t do at all. 

Further, De Vries cited the Agustina Effect (after the heroic lady celeb from the Siege of Zaragoza), where the civilian populace are prepared to help with manning the guns and the barricades – i.e. commit to a level of active combat over and beyond merely trying to defend their own property. We also agreed that there might be situations (though I’m struggling to think of an example) where the citizens are on the side of the besiegers, and take a part in the attack on the garrison. To put all this into effect, I have changed the calculations of ASS and DSS (as defined in the rules below) in the storm – the defenders can get an extra dice if they are ready to fight for every building (the Suicide Dice - suggestions for a better name will be most welcome), and either the defenders or the attackers might possibly get yet another bonus dice (the Agustina Dice) if the civilians are prepared to fight on their side, during the actual storm. All storms take a week, however they go.

Agustina de Aragon - "No - it's OK. If she really wants to stand there when
we fire, just let her get on with it..."

Ross raised the matter of levels of loss – applying an overall factor to the complete besieging army’s strength to get the casualty figures is over-simplifying things, and may give inconsistent or illogical results. Prof De Vries also pointed out that calculating the besiegers’ losses retrospectively for the whole siege, based on the “total force employed” is, to use his terminology, dumb, for a number of reasons:

(1)  Though the total force, represented by the variable Assault Value (AV) may justifiably be regarded as all at risk during the weekly routine Bombardment Phase (which includes all kinds of missile fire, mining, sorties, hunger, disease, bad breaks and random demoralisation), this number AV will vary from week to week, apart from losses, as a result of troops being detached from the siege, or new troops joining it.

(2) During the actual storm (as Ross also mentioned), only a portion of the total available AV may be called upon to actually assault the place – losses for that week should be restricted to this subset.

(3) In a campaign where weekly returns are made for all units, it makes no sense at all to do the casualty calcs for a siege only when it has ended. It is much better to perform the calcs week by week, as AV varies up and down (or is subdivided), and carry forward the actual totals.

Though still determined to keep this manageably simple, I accept all of this, and the re-tweaked section of the Siege Rules now reads thus:

11.3.3 Storming:

Defenders’ Storm Strength, DSS = FV + GV + 1D6 + the Suicide Dice + the Agustina Dice

Attackers’ Storm Strength , ASS = AV(st) + 1D6  + the Agustina Dice     [BV, the Battering Value, does not count in a storm]

Where:

* The Suicide Dice is a bonus 1D6 available to the defenders if they are prepared to fight for every building.

* The Agustina Dice is an extra bonus 1D6 available to either side if the civilian population of the town will fight for them.

* AV(st) is whatever subset of the full current AV the attackers commit to an assault.

Results:

* If ASS > DSS then the fortress falls and the garrison surrenders. Attackers lose 0.25 x DSS (rounded to nearer whole number) from AV(st). Defenders lose 0.5 x ASS from GV.

* Otherwise, if ASS <= DSS, storm is repulsed; attackers lose 0.5 x DSS from AV(st); defenders lose 0.125 x ASS from GV

[Losses in GV and AV are not simply casualties – they represent all manner of loss of ability to continue – and note that GV and AV can become negative].

Each week during a siege, losses for each side are calculated as one tenth of the percentage loss in AV or GV for the week. During a storm, AV(st) replaces AV if it is different. Thus, for example, if AV is reduced from 7 to 6 during a particular week, the actual loss to the besieging army in killed and wounded is 1/10 x 1/7 = 1.4% of the troops present/engaged.

Hooptedoodle #52 – On Being Rich and Famous

Nothing gets Breakfast TV switched off quicker in our house than the scheduled few minutes with the Show-Biz Correspondent, possibly live from Hollywood, with tales of who has been seen with whom. Glossing over the fact that I have not heard of most of the people mentioned, I really cannot believe that anyone gives a rat’s about this stuff. Does someone out there actually care?

Not being interestingly rich or famous myself, I have never paid much attention to the private lives of those who are. I accept that I appear to be in a minority here, so let’s be a bit more specific – I don’t care much about the private lives of people who are still alive, anyway. Once, long ago, astounded to learn on the BBC’s lunch-time national news that a Palace Spokesman had told the world’s press that Princess Diana was suffering from a slight cold (she was still alive at the time, I hasten to add), I complained to my wife-of-the-day that I was once again thinking of resigning from the human race, or any other species which spent its time waiting for daily news of this calibre. Bad move – I was immediately skewered with a familiar laser-beam stare.

“You,” she said, “should be trying to get in the queue to JOIN the bloody human race”.

To this day, I am sure she was right, so since then I have tried to keep track of areas where I don’t quite line up with the mainstream – not because I necessarily wish to change, you see, but because a little understanding never did any harm, and forewarned is fore-something-or-othered. Armed – yes, that was it.

All those magazines that stare at me next to the checkout in the supermarket – the ones with an exclamation mark at the end of the title – all plugged into some national obsession. “Katy Price tells all – exclusive”, and there is Katy on the cover, looking right at me – sharing her secret just with me. Good on you, girl. You tell em. Don’t tell me, though, for goodness sake.  

That’s what nearly all kids want to be now – rich and famous. Rich = famous. I’m not so sure about that, but there is a general assumption that fame brings riches, and you have to be rich to be interesting. Just as well that Jesus or Gandhi aren’t around now, then – they would get no coverage at all.

I see special celebrity editions of shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, and many of the supposed celebs are unknown to me. There are more and more famous people, it seems, and I’m still not one of them. I’m probably jealous – that must be it.

I knew we were in trouble a few years ago when I saw a bit of a TV show which featured people who earned money from being professional look-alikes – being booked to turn up at hen-parties and suchlike. I found that an interesting idea, and I thought the Bruce Springsteen clone was really good, but there was one character I had not come across before, and it turned out that this particular guy earned his living from impersonating one of the then-current stooges on the Big Brother reality TV show. Just a minute – but isn’t that a reality show, featuring real people (i.e. non-celebrities)? Does that mean that exposure on reality TV converts people into celebrities important enough to justify the existence of a paid look-alike?

This is scary – especially since anyone who thinks he sings quite well in the bath can now get publicly humiliated on Britain’s Got Talent – are they all famous too? At this rate, everyone is going to be a celebrity eventually. I hadn’t thought of this – if I become the last man on earth that no-one has heard of, surely in its way that would be, like, really exclusive? I mean, you know, such a person would be interesting enough to warrant some media exposure. Someone should interview him on TV to see what’s wrong with him. Ghost-write his autobiog. Hmmm.

On the radio recently there was a pointless phone-in about something or other, and someone was sounding off at length about the obscene amount of money Wayne Rooney gets paid a week, and what a disgrace this is. [For non-UK readers, or UK readers who could not care less, Rooney is a prominent football (soccer) player with Manchester United – arguably the most gifted English player at the moment, and his private life keeps the media and the public in a state of great excitement]. For once, the pundit in the studio seemed to me to have something sensible to say:

(1)   If Rooney is offered a certain, very high, wage, is he expected to say (as we all would, of course), “Oh no, that’s far too high – I’m not worth it”? Bear in mind that a single bad injury could end his playing career tomorrow, so this whole issue is very high-geared. The man is not a filing clerk.

(2)   This is a free market – if the complainer begrudges him the money (or envies it?), all they have to do is apply for Rooney’s job. I’m sure that Man Utd would be delighted to talk to them.

Is all this, ultimately, just about envy?

I fear that, once again, I have not progressed my ideas very far – I’ve just sort of wheeled them out of the shed. No matter, I can wheel them back again for another day. On the general topic of not fitting in with the times, here’s a good song from Loudon Wainwright – this is the best clip I could find. I’m sorry that the last 4 minutes or so appear to be silent – you can stop it when the music ends or, if you prefer, you could use the silence to meditate on a topic of your choice. I guess LW is not rich or interesting enough to justify a better clip.

Once, back in the days when I wore a suit every day, I was mistaken for someone famous. I was hurrying up Charlotte Street, in the centre of Edinburgh, late for a meeting with a lawyer, as I recall, when I was stopped by two middle-aged ladies with beaming smiles.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” said one, “him on the telly.”

I was a bit taken aback, and explained that I was sorry, but I was not him.

“Oh, come on!” said the second lady, “we know who you are!”

I muttered something appropriately pathetic, and continued to my meeting.   

Later the same day I was telling some colleagues about this. One of them couldn’t believe that I hadn’t asked who they thought I was. I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t asked, too, but deep down I’ve always known that I would probably have been upset if I had found out, so I’m glad I never knew. Sometimes I do wonder, though.

That’s as near to famous as I ever got.

Solo Campaign - Siege Rule Tweaks

Since it looks as though my campaign may produce a siege quite soon, I was encouraged to go back to my mathematical siege rules, since there were some bits in there I wasn't sure about. There was a post on this system a few months ago - I explained there that, though an algorithmic system for sieges is certainly not a big attraction from visual and fun-generation aspects, it is (sadly) necessary to handle sieges in this way in a map campaign, since a siege will last for a number of campaign moves (and thus must be able to coexist with armies marching and fighting elsewhere on the map in a different timescale) and also since it might be necessary to have more than one siege running concurrently.

The particular bit I wasn't happy about was the section on Storming. Without getting too deeply into the nuts and bolts (again), the idea is that the defenders have a couple of numbers associated with them - a Fortress Value (FV), which represents the strength of the place and its guns, and a Garrison Value (GV) which indicates the fighting capability of the guys in the fort - this is a kind of lumpy amalgam of numerical strength, attitude, and their current ability to carry on - for whatever reason. Similarly, the besieging force have a Battering Value (BV), which is a measure of their heavy artillery capability, and an Assault Value (AV), which is the amount of force they could bring to bear in the event of (you guessed) an assault, but this number also makes allowance for the men who are available for digging ditches, carrying stuff and just constituting a threat.

The detail of the siege rules is set out in the orginal notes, here and here, so I won't go through all that again, but the idea is that bombardment and (implied) sorties and mining etc wear down these numbers. At the point that a storm is attempted, the appropriate section of the rules is set out in its new form below, with the odd explanatory annotation here and there. The inclusion of a dice roll for the defenders and the besiegers is intended to reflect performance and luck on the day. The calculation of losses bothered me - something struck me as counter-intuitive. If the totals for ASS and DSS (as described below) were very close - in other words, if the result of the storm was a close call the casualties would tend to be relatively light, which intuitively seemed completely wrong. A close-fought storm might have the heaviest casualty rates of all, so I've made a couple of changes - I now use the absolute values of DSS and ASS, rather than the difference between them, when calculating loss, and have changed the formulae slightly. It's a minor tweak really, but I'm a bit more comfortable about how it works now. In a campaign, losses have a lasting significance.

Here's the revised section from my Campaign Rules:

11.3.3 Storming:
Defenders’ Storm Strength, DSS = FV + GV + 1D6
Attackers’ Storm Strength , ASS = AV + 1D6  [BV, the Battering Value, does not count in a storm]

* If ASS > DSS then the fortress falls and the garrison surrenders. Attackers lose a final, further 0.25 x DSS (rounded to nearer whole number) from AV. Defenders lose 0.5 x ASS from GV.
* Otherwise, if ASS <= DSS, storm is repulsed; attackers lose 0.5 x DSS from AV; defenders lose 0.125 x ASS from GV
[Losses in GV and AV are not simply casualties – they represent all manner of loss of ability to continue – and note that GV and AV can become negative].

Whenever it is necessary, at any moment during the siege (or when the siege is broken off or completed), actual casualties may be computed as one tenth of the %age loss of AV or GV since the start of the siege. 

Example – if a successful besieging force started out with AV = 8, and end with AV of 6, then they have lost one tenth of 25% = 2.5% of the total force present; if the defenders started out with a GV of 5 and end with GV = -1 then casualties are 1/10 of 120% = 12%; if the fort surrenders, the remaining 88% will become prisoners.

[It occurs to me that if I don't actually get to a siege in the campaign then it doesn't really matter that I've improved the rule, but it's the principle of the thing!]

Solo Campaign - Week 13

Ciudad Rodrigo - General Reixas checks that everything is ready

Week 13 - Narrative

Having received further prompts from Paris to carry the fight to the Allies, with the objective of invading Portugal, Marmont detached D’Armagnac, with two infantry brigades (6400 men) and the Italian foot artillery battery (8 guns), together with the siege train and engineers of the Armee de Portugal. This force marched to Zamora, where they joined with Clauzel’s command.

Jourdan, with his newly assembled force, carried out a splendid piece of forced marching, travelling from Toledo, via Madrid, to Avila without any straggling.

Karl, Baron Von Alten

Karl von Alten, with the Anglo-Portuguese Light Division, the KGL Hussars and Maceta’s Spanish volunteers, became aware that there were now French forces to the north and the south – Maceta’s contacts among the civilian population confirmed that the force at Avila (Jourdan – though the Allies did not have this information) was large enough to cause concern. The combined Allied force accordingly fell back to the area around Ciudad Rodrigo, since their relative lack of cavalry would make it impossible to withdraw if attacked.

General Barbot

Concerned about the possibility of sea-borne landings on the north coast, the French moved Barbot and his garrison troops at San Sebastian to Bilbao, replacing them at San Sebastian with a force of 4000 National Guard plus artillery from the Bayonne reserve.

Gregorio Cruchaga

Gregorio Cruchaga has been appointed in Navarra to lead the irregular partisans formerly commanded by the Gomez brothers.

Strategic Note

With the Allied army occupying Galicia, the French cannot get into Portugal without getting past the fortresses at Almeida and/or Elvas.

Marmont is convinced that the Allies will not attack him across the mountains from Galicia. Since he is once again directed by the Minister of War to invade Portugal, he has detached his siege train and some of his infantry to join Clauzel to the south.

Jourdan has moved from Toledo to Avila, and the French now have some interesting possibilities:

(1) If Von Alten stands his ground at Salamanca, attack him with some combination of Clauzel’s and Jourdan’s forces – then move to lay siege to Ciudad Rodrigo, which would require two weeks march to receive support from Cotton (who is at Orense).

(2) If Von Alten sees the threat and retires back to Ciudad Rodrigo, there are choices – either pursue him and attack him there with the combined Clauzel/Jourdan force or (riskier but potentially more decisive) hold him there with Jourdan’s force while Clauzel (now reinforced by Armagnac’s 2 brigades), attacks Cotton and Espana at Orense. Defeat for Cotton would leave Wellington isolated in Galicia and allow more time for a siege at Rodrigo.

Either way, Rodrigo is the objective.

The roads from Lugo to Almeida are not good, even in decent weather, and it would be difficult for Wellington to support Rodrigo quickly or force a siege to be lifted. He is really obliged to move south now, back into Portugal, even though this may allow the French an alternative (tortuous) route to Lisbon, bypassing the border fortresses.

The situation of Maceta, whose Spanish troops are currently in Ciudad Rodrigo alongside Von Alten’s, is interesting. He and his troops belong to the Junta de Castilla, and will not serve in Portugal. If Von Alten is forced to retire into Portugal, Maceta may have to separate his forces and head for Caceres instead.