Factors Decided

Comments from John on Part II have caused me to revisit the base sizes for our battalions, for those who haven’t read his comment John made a very good point:

“I was thinking that a standard base size should imply a standard battalion size? Otherwise your large unit/small unit mechanics have to do quite difficult things to be fair to both Russian and Hungarian battalions.“

So let’s look at how we reached the 40mm base width. We had the following table that was taken from Rod’s Wargaming website:

Looking at the table above if we take the largest unit (Hungarian Line) at 1,308 and the smallest unit (Russian Line) at 621 we have large differences between the battalion strengths and therefore also a large difference in their footprint on the ground.

So our original table showing what footprint each nation would take up width wise is as follows (bear in mind this is based on line formation of 3 ranks apart from the British which is in 2 ranks):

We have a number of options that I can think of presently to get around this issue.

OPTION 1

Our first and most fiddly for the actual gamer would be to have accurate base widths for each nations units:

Some of these base sizes are pretty small, with the Russian units measuring only 20mm in width at 1:5300. This scale would mean only 4 6mm miniatures per rank.

OPTION 2

The second option is along the same lines as option 1, but adjusting our scale so that an the smaller infantry units take up 40mm in width, this would mean adjusting our scale to something almost double, but would mean a 6 foot length which is our aim would represent 3 miles instead of 6. Which would not make large scale battles feasible.

OPTION 3

Build in a mechanic to represent unit strengths on 40mm base. At the moment this is completely open, it could be anything from the number of men in a battalion divided by 100 to represent HP:

If HP is used how would this be tracked for 100+ battalions per side? In all likelihood, HP would have to come into affect even if Battalion width was adjusted to suit their relative footprint as well.

Also does this need to be divided by 100, if tracked easily can it be divided by 10? Thus when a HP is lost, 10 men from the unit are presumed dead or wounded?

OPTION 4

We use both realistic unit width and Health Points for each nation to more actually represent their strengths of the battalion:

The idea of being able to say for example “the British suffered 11,000 losses and the French 5,000” does appeal to me on a statistical level post game. If you were trying to recreate some of the engagements at the time and wanted to see how you stacked up against your real life counterpart this would be something to consider.

But this would require either two or three D10 markers per base, and if you multiply that by the number of battalions that will be in game this would result in 200-300 dice per side……

Or

A number of counters on each unit to represent HP lost. Again, would result in a lot of counters….

OPTION 5

We revert to a brigade system like many other game systems, but then that would mean going through what size base is best for a brigade.

OPTION 6

Instead of Battalion HP, could we use Brigade HP which is marked with the commander of that Brigade. A brigade may be made up of 4 Prussian units each roughly 660 men in strength, meaning a total combat strength for that Brigade of 2,640. Could this then be divided by a factor of 10 and represented on three D10’s? With each hit on a unit in that brigade reducing the value by 1?

There’s a lot to think about here, and I really would like some further opinions from people on what of the above options they think may be best? Or even if there’s an option I haven’t considered. At present, I’m leaning towards having accurate base widths, but using the Command stands to represent Brigade strength as a whole on 3 D10’s.

OPTION 7

The same as above but with all units base widths represented as 40mm.

EDIT

OPTION 8

Have battalions of all nations standardised at a certain strength according to the campaign they take part in and keep 40mm bases.

OPTION 9

Have battalion strength incorporated into the combat ability of the unit and keep the units on 40mm bases.

FACTORS ALREADY DECIDED – from previous posts

PREVIOUS POSTS

Writing a Wargame – An Introduction

Writing a Wargame – Scale

Writing a Wargame – Scale II

INFANTRY MOVEMENT

So we’ve settled on a scale of 1:5300 giving us base sizes of 40mm wide. I think that we now need to follow on from this by looking at Infantry movement rates as well as the various ranges of the weapons at this scale. This in turn may give us an indication what kind of length of time a turn may represent.

Starting with movement, the march speeds of the various nations would differ slightly as shown by the below graphic:

A pace works out to be roughly 76.2 cm, therefore if we look how far each nation would march in 5, 10, 15 and 20 minutes and convert this to our 1:5300 scale we would have the following information:

We can see that apart from the Austrian 1807 Regs every nation pretty much moves at the same rate of 75 paces per minute. This gives us a basis of how far each unit would move in a turn.

The one important piece of information that we can use in the future is that over five minutes a unit will move roughly 5cm at 1:5300 scale. This would suggest that what ever length of time our turn represents, it would be easier to have it as a multiple of 5.

MUSKET RANGE

But we also have to look at the range of small arms fire. The popular weapon of the time was the smooth bore musket, which although devastating on the volley, wasn’t accurate and didn’t have a great range.

Taking the popular weapons of the time and converting their ranges into our scale we have the below information:

As we can see there is a strong similarity in the ranges of these weapons, effective range being roughly 100 yards and their long range being around 300 yards. This discounts the British Baker Rifle at present which we will look at, at a later date.

The interesting information to take from both this and the previous table on unit movements suggests that a musket could fire roughly the same range as unit could move in five minutes.

As for accuracy? Well the following information was taken from www.napolun.com:

“– at 160 and 320 yards out of 200 rounds fired at a large target, approximating the size of a formed infantry company, the following number of hits was obtained“:

This information will be particularly useful at a later date when we come to the shooting phase of our game rules.

So in five minutes a unit could march the distance of a long range musket shot.

OUR SECOND CHALLENGE

So if a unit can move as far as a long range musket shot this could potentially mean that in the shooting phase a unit would fire either 1 volley or none at all. Not much shooting going on there then! However, we know that this wasn’t the case and that historically units would either receive many volleys before charging the enemy or they would stand and fire while plucking up the courage to charge. We have to replicate this.

One solution could be to break each units movement up into a number of actions. i.e. A Battalion has 3 actions it can make over the course of the turn. These can be Fire & Reload, Change Formation, March etc.

By breaking this movement down, a march move would not be the same as the musket range.

This doesn’t solve the issue of the enemy unit being unable to fire however, an addition to this could be that once a unit makes an action, an one enemy unit can make a reaction (i.e. Fire & Reload).

There could also be some kind of morale test for the units to close the gap between themselves. This brings us into additional attributes for each unit. We’re already know each unit will have a movement attribute, but we may also need further attributes in the form of “Leadership/Morale” and “Shooting”.

These attributes are often combined into one in many other war games (such as “Quality” in A Song of Drums and Shakos or “Elan” in Blucher). Do I want to combine these attributes as well?

If we look at the world of Warhammer 40,000 or Age of Sigmar, units may have multiple attributes. You may say that this is due to their being less units on the field, however if we consider an army of 100,000 in the Napoleonic era, this would roughly involve a hundred battalions give or take. In Warhammer 40,000 or AOS, there are often 100 models on each side, sometimes more, so I don’t feel this needs to be a barrier to the speed of play as all units could act in unison if necessary (i.e. all battalions in the 6th Division move towards the enemy, all units fire on the enemy Brigade).

LENGTH OF BATTLE

One aspect of the game that we’ve not taken into account yet is the average length of a battle, they were generally fought over the course of day during daylight (Waterloo was fought between 11am and 7:30pm), so if we take an average battle length of 8 hours for a battle day we can split our prospective turns up over this period of time:

Judging by the above table a turn length of 5 minutes is not feasible as this would result in far too many turns, while 30 minutes would result in troops moving 30 cm a turn which is too far. I also think for this reason 25 minute turns and 10 minute turns are also discounted. That leaves us with a choice between 10, 15 and 20 minute turns. At this point I’m leaning towards the 10 minute turn, and between 3 and 5 unit “actions/reactions”.

So going back to our earlier movement table, let’s see what their movement would be broken down into 3, 4,and 5 reactions over 1 turn of 10 minutes:

This makes things much simpler for us. All the movements are below the Musket range, and in particular 4 and 5 would require 2 actions to move the same distance as musket fire. So an action would then equate to 2.5 minutes or 2 minutes.

This may seem like it makes troop movement difficult, but I would imagine that unless you’re close to an enemy, you could simply say all the battalions in this unit are using all 5 actions to move towards the enemy, and then proceed to move them as one group.

Once within a certain range of the enemy, the enemy could then perform reactions to your actions (but these may be limited to firing or changing formation).

At present I’m happy with going for a 10 minute turn length and 5 actions per unit.

IN SUMMARY

After all this, I believe that we’re set on the following factors of the war game:

We also have a number of attributes we can continue to work on:

As always, I hope you enjoyed and please feel free to offer any suggestions or criticisms. I will be going more in depth into individual units at a later date once the bare bones of the system is constructed.

Next time around we’ll look at formations and their effect on movement.

So scale is where I’m choosing to begin this exercise.

I want a scale that will allow me to fit the large battles (such as Borodino or Waterloo) on a reasonable tabletop but also not be to small a scale so as to have too small a unit size.

So I’ve done some maths behind this. My first point of call was taking all the popular gaming scales and just using that as a basis to see if 1:1 miniature gaming is possible.

If we use Leiozig as an example, the battlefield was nearly 12 miles in length (roughly) so I need a scale that gets this near 6 feet.

But I also need to account for my second factor in the scale, which is Battalion size. A British battalion in line formation of two ranks (500 men in each rank), would take up 279.4 metres. This is based on each man taking up 22″ of room in closed formation.

So looking at the most popular scales of wargaming, we have the following:

Thats some big numbers, but when you do the math on a British Line Formation for 1000 men and the equivalent distance for 12 miles you get the following:

So, we’ve come to our first hurdle. As you can see, with a 6mm scale which is my preferred miniature scale, we can see that there is no chance of 1 model representing 1 man scenario. So what would fit? Below is a number of scales showing the relative size of a British Napoleonic Battalion and the Leipzig Battlefield length.

So we come to our first conundrum. We need to make some compromises. At 1:9000 the battlefield is still a little too wide to fit on a 6 foot table (183cm) but is just about manageable, however the base size for a battalion, will only be 30 mm, which is a little on the small side (if you imagine your average 6mm model takes up 5mm in space, then the battalion would be 6 models wide).

Do we rethink the battalion as the smallest size, and instead start looking at brigades? An average brigade would have 2-5 battalions, which would mean a front of between 1-3 battalions in width (depending on their formation this could also vary). So we’re talking at 1:9000 brigade bases of between 3-9cm. But in that case could we make a compromise of 8cm for a brigade of 4 battalions? If so in an attack formation with two brigades at the front and two supporting that would mean each battalion could take up 40mm in space? Are battalion bases still doable? I think so, but it will require further thought.

Any comments and suggestions are always more than welcome.