Napoleonic Wargame Club (NWC)

Bonjour Mes Ami,

I have come to the conclusion that our Tiller/HPS games would greatly benefit from borrowing from the Civil War titles a couple of their optional rules.

The first optional rule would be the Optional Melee Resolution Rule. This option creates a separate melee phase AFTER all movement is conducted. This simple options greatly restricts blitz tactics and makes for a much more realistic game.

The Second optional rule would be the cavalry skirmisher rule. This would greatly reduce the ambushing of cavalry units when out scouting. This would greatly free up the scouting ability of cavalry with out subjecting them to numerous ambushes.

Lastly, though not an optional rule I believe the games would greatly improve with reduced stacking limits. This would spread out the game, encourage defense in depth and greatly reduce the shock power of monolithic stacks of infantry and cavalry. I believe stacking limits of around 1000 infantry and 333 cavalry would be a fair compromise with historically accurate numbers of troops that could be realistically deployed and controlled in a 100m x 100m area.

Well I hope this is fuel for thought and look forward to any comments.

Yours respectfully,

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General de Division Thomas Moore
26ème Régiment de Chasseurs à Cheval
Brigade de Cavalerie Légère
4ème Corps d'Armée
La Grande Armée

Somewhere we had the discussion about the Optional Melee Resolution Rule and I think it's a no-go because of the way charges are handled in the game, anyhow besides that I recommend to play phases instead of turns.


What you mean with ambush?
Isn't the visibility of a moving unit down to 2 hexes? So with skirmishers for cavalry you would also get just 2 hexes view in front of your unit not sure how that helps, I would rather resort to conduct careful scouting not commando style behind the lines recon.


Again and again the stacking limit comes up but the limit isn't the problem, I pointed out numerous times that you surely could get much more men into a 100 meter hex than the usual 1800 men stacking limit allows.
Only problem is that massive stacks a formed to break through the defenders line but instead of fooling around with stacking all the rules that make stacking costly like "Column Pass Through Fire" & "Target Density Modifier" should be used, also phased gameplay should be used, overall this should shift the advantage more in the direction of the defender.
Also the style of playing could help, sending out skirmishers a slow the advance buys you time to fire more and the attacker or force him to also use skirmishers, concentrating fire on lead battalions to achieve disruption or even routs could,hamper the advance of a whole brigade if not division.
Some may think fire is ineffective to stop advances but I strongly to recommend to check the extended line values of the PDT of the scenario that is played and to make sure to optimize the defender line as far as possible because many players simply overlook that the engine function at that point rather "harsh"(or rather bad I would say), because a shortened unit fire only at 75% effectiveness but a unit in normal line at 100%, so if you have a unit that has a shortened line you either extend the line or send out skirmishers so that it drops to the level of a normal line, by that you achieve a higher fire value, that is important because unlike the CW series the Napi series will take the size of a unit into the calculation when checking if a moral check is triggered and this means that big battalions also have to take big losses or it's unlikely to trigger a moral check at all.

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Christian,
I think that the cavalry scouting rule will help make careful scouting more effective and allow light cavalry to scout without risking elimination as much. The engine simply does not model light cavalry scouting and I think this would help. One can be as careful as you want but with woods and hills there is more risk to cavalry than was the case historically.

Regarding stacking, I think it is an issue. If I remember correctly, Waterloo and NRC (I am not sure about Wagram and Eckmuhl) allow 2000 infantry. Even with phased play (and Tom and I are playing a phased game right now), attacking units rarely are disrupted, so sure, you pay a price but a massive stack can walk up and melee and win. I think Tom goes a little extreme with the stacking but his limits restore space to the battlefield. By this, I mean that a division can hold a historic front instead of needing to shrink down to avoid being crushed by head on melee attacks.

As currently designed, the games favor an aggressive, meleeing attacker who strikes first, disordering and routing the opponent before being counterattacked. So you see massively tight formations in battles that historically were more spread out. I will read a history book and it says so and so attacked with a regiment, but in our games if you send less than a division you will lost the whole formation.

I think the 10 minute turns helped a lot with these issues (allowing artillery more time to work over the opponent), but in games like the 1809 ones, the Austrians can have a hard time because so much of their artillery is short range and their large battalions mean they have less battalions to absorb fatigue and occupy space....

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I always felt that the different classes of cavalry not only need different combat values(what we have) but also an adjustment to the movement allowance to simulate the advantage of the smaller more agile horses that the light cavalry usually used, if light cavalry could be faster than other none light cavalry it may be saver from any attack.
Well maybe one day we get the possibilities to have different movement allowances for the different cavalry types.
Still I don't think the optional rule from the CW series is something that helps much, maybe if light cavalry could form real small detachments it could help, loosing these small detachment wouldn't hurt so much.


The two core problems of stacking are that the players can attack without any modifier no matter how many men he uses and that there is a strong bonus(+25%) when conducting a melee in column formation.

For the first problem I can only suggest doing a house rule, assuming the defender adjust himself to the extended line values the attacker should maybe do the same, my idea to this is:
1. The Attacker can only melee with a single unit above the extended line value from a single hex.
2. Attacker can attack with multiple units from a single hex if the amount of attacking men does not exceed the extended line value.
3. If attacking from different hexes not more than 1 unit per hex can attack.

The second problem is even heavier, there is no PDT value to adjust the bonus for melee in column and personally I'm unsure if the bonus should be that high.
I read Muir's "Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon" and Nafziger's "Imperial Bayonets" and get the impression that the biggest benefit of the column was its speed & maneuverability and not so much a higher combat power. Also that the attack had to rely on skirmishers and artillery to pave the way for such an attack, so one could assume that the column doesn't deserve a bonus or at least not a such high bonus.
Anyhow that is nothing that can be fixed by designer or user, after a comprehensive research to decide what & how to adjust it would be up to the programmer.

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Hello Christian,

My purpose in asking for a Optional Melee Resolution rule was that we could play the game with out having to go to phased play which has the large disadvantage of requiring 2 e-mail exchanges for each turn.

We have tried using embedded melee house rules to limit blitz tactics with some success but I think an in game prohibition works much better with out the use of a lot of house rules which I dislike. Unless there is programming issue that prohibits the adding of a Optional Melee Resolution which was not the case with the Civil War games. I can't see why it should not be added.

Second, I think the point has been missed in regards to the cavalry skirmisher rule. The problem is that when a unit moves adjacent to enemy unit that it did not see in advance. It's movement factor goes to zero thus leaving it open to ambush and destruction. I feel the cavalry skirmisher rule simulates the fact that cavalry units moving in unknown or hostile territory would have sent out scouts ahead of it's movement.

Lastly, Stacking limits are a problem and I feel are the largest distorter of our games from a realistic and historical aspect. The H & R boys have and excellent article showing 1000 cavalry in a 100m x 100m area would have been completely unmanageable on the battlefield. Like wise 2000 infantry would also have been unrealistic. Also the huge stacking numbers greatly reduces the ability of troops to defend a realistic frontages or in depth with out large numbers of troops. Fortunately the stacking problem can be address with a little pdt. file editing.

Therefore I believe our games can be greatly improved by adding a couple make sense optional rules without resorting to large numbers of house rules.

Respectfully,

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General de Division Thomas Moore
26ème Régiment de Chasseurs à Cheval
Brigade de Cavalerie Légère
4ème Corps d'Armée
La Grande Armée

Well not sure how much you can do about turn gameplay, I think it's flawed and doesn't work with how the rest of the game works.

I'm not sure why the "Optional Melee Resolution" rule of the CW series wasn't used here, my guess is that the way the cavalry charges work in the Napi series would conflict with it and that is why we won't see it here.

Cavalry skirmishers sound good, but afaik you can see 2 hexes so you should get a question mark on the map if you get as close as 2 hexes to an enemy unit, at least I see this in the CW series not sure if the Napi series behaves differently here.
Skirmishers would be good if you would march through terrain that blocks view like forest but such areas should better be scouted by a light infantry battalion.
In other situations the light cavalry has to be handled with more care, no need to come over a hill when you can ride around it and I guess it was used on purpose as usually you have much more cavalry in the Napi battle than in a CW battle, making it too easy to scout for cavalry in a Napi battle has a bad effect on the already bad gods-eye-view that the player has and that almost denies any form of surprise.

As I said stacking limits are only a problem in melee because there is no modifier that reduced effectiveness like there is for fire combat
Battalions could take up various formations including columns as small as 1 company only so there wouldn't be any problem have more than one battalions in a single hex.
The even higher stacking limits of Waterloo are likely coming from the fact that the French I & II corps used dense column formations to attack, the example from the Waterloo companion shows a battalion taking up just in area of 45x45 meters for a unit of about 553 men so you see why there is a 2k limit in Waterloo.
And it simply makes no sense to have even huge battalions take up a single hex but disallowing other battalions to pass between them, there was very well enough room to do so.
While the R&H settings may work with their massively reworked scenarios I doubt you simply can lower the stacking limits for a stock scenario. Again it's all about melee and so a house rule would simply work better than trying to enforce something that impacts gameplay way beyond melee.

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Christian,

I don't understand why having cavalry skirmishers would be a problem. By giving an advancing cavalry unit a 2 hex warning of hidden enemy units you give the cavalry the opportunity to avoid unnecessary losses. The skirmisher rule is simple and effective.

In regards to optional melee resolution rule all it does is add a final melee phase that is already in the phased pay version. Cavalry charges work well in phased play so why not in turn play? Again I think the separate melee phase after all movement greatly reduces the totally unrealistic blitz tactics without resorting to house rules.

Lastly, you say stacking only becomes a problem in melee. Well that's the point why you need reduced stacking limits so you don't have the huge unrealistic stacks of troops. It allows divisions and brigades the ability to adequately defend larger fronts and in depth.

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General de Division Thomas Moore
26ème Régiment de Chasseurs à Cheval
Brigade de Cavalerie Légère
4ème Corps d'Armée
La Grande Armée

Thomas

The question about cavalry skirmishers is if they are really necessary here and so could justify consuming any available resources on programming, I guess there is a reason why this rule is in the CW series but didn't make it here, either because there is no real need for it or because it is wanted this way.
You must also not forget that skirmishers are totally underrepresented in the CW series, they only consume movement points when advancing into there hexes and that not even always, or they cost the one that send it out movement points, they are no detached units like in the Napi series and overall I think skirmishing is rather weakly represented in the CW series.
So it's obvious that there was a much better reason but also a much easier way to expand the skirmisher function of the CW series to cover not only infantry but also cavalry units.
The Napi series handles skirmisher much different and by that the question stays if it is really necessary to have skirmishers for cavalry when they already could break down to squadrons and fan out for recon, at best the range of spotting should be increased but not adding a new function into the game for this.


It may be that charges work in phases gameplay but one really would have to test to see if a turn gameplay with an additional phase works out at all, not only regarding playing style but also it if works at all because this OR you suggest doesn't work correctly in the CW series as it adds for unknown reason additional fatigue recovery, so it's not simply taking a piece of the game and putting it into another game, again it's a question of what does it achieve and what resources would have to be allocated.


About stacking, it's simply much easier to follow a rather straightforward houserule than to demand a change to a value that would demand ALL scenarios of ALL games to be rechecked to see if this drastic change doesn't kill the scenario.
Especially when the only thing trying to fix is the melee, your solution to this would maybe fix melee but would surely fubar the rest of the game, that is basically one step ahead and five backwards, a houserule of any kind would simply just fix what has to be fixed.

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Attacking units are ALWAYS disordered by melee ... unless it is cavalry overruning skirmishers in the open or infantry meleeing skirmishers etc.

Any time you attack a formed unit your units will Disorder. Size does not matter.

Warren Bajan really wanted an arty capture rule ... the spike rule too from the ACW series.

The way to do a phase play of the game is:

1. First part of the Player Phase - move and fire and do charge movement.

2. Melee Phase and Cavalry followup movement.

3. Last part .... move with units that didnt move before and same for fire ... no charging.

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Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Prinz Peters von Dennewitz

3. Husaren-Regiment, Reserve-Kavallerie, Preußischen Armee-Korps

Honarary CO of Garde-Ulanen Regiment, Garde-Grenadier Kavallerie

NWC Founding Member

For Club Games: I prefer the Single Phase mode of play. I prefer to play with the following options OFF:

MDF, VP4LC, NRO, MTD, CMR, PR, MIM, NDM, OMR (ver 4.07)

Attacking units are ALWAYS disordered by melee?

I read from the manual that cavalry using charge will automatically disorder but not that this happens to infantry doing a melee.
All I found was this:
"The melee defender is subject to normal Morale Checks based on their losses and must automatically take a Morale Check at the end of the Phase or Turn if they lose the melee."
Nothing is written there regarding the attacker, so does that count for the attacker too or is he really automatically disordered?

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Due to the ability to split off squadrons of cavalry in NB (MP as well), my take on that is that these are supposed to be serving as the same function of 'cavalry skirmishers' in the CWB series.

In a sense in the NB/MP series there is a flexibility with the squadrons' breakdowns that is not present in the Civil War series; I sort of thought I remembered reading someone post over on their boards sometime ago that they wished that they could breakdown cavalry units into skirmishers but that the optional rule in the series was the compromise to that ... not hundred percent that I am relaying that correctly as it has been awhile since I read that - it might even have been in the notes from the title that introduced that feature.

--- disclaimer---

I am going to have to go back and read this a little closer, as I was reading stacking something? Stacking is set in the PDT unless I am mistaken - I know that it is in MP, because I have played around with them and I can't imagine that it isn't in NB.

Edited: Stacking is the prerogative of the title's scenario designer. NRC/Waterloo as well as BPW were done by different scenario designers, the rest were done by Bill. There is no standardised stacking limits from one title to the next but that is something that would be the responsibility of Tiller's scenario designers, not the engine. These can be changed in the PDT file I am pretty sure, but you can kind of screw up a scenario if you just change it (especially if you decide to lower it, don't ask ... I think I tried it out on accident several times.). Charlie Cutshall did NRC and a lot of Waterloo, with Rich Hamilton doing some of Waterloo as well (I think the way things went was that Rich had to finish off the title so he pretty much inherited things.). In almost every series none of these published scenarios have ever been reworked -outside of those that Bill has spent a lot of time working on. They just don't have the resources to do this. The same rationale goes for retrofitting engine changes into previously published scenarios - they just don't do it (same reason.).

Edit2:

Interestingly enough there is this feature in the MP series - it is coded in the oob file (there is also an armor modifier as well.). I doubt you'd get the armor modifier added to the NB series since what it also does is require weapons ratings to have an vs armor fire rating and a vs non-armor fire rating (effectively meaning that you only get half the allowable number of weapons in MP than in NB). Fwiw.

In regards to playing with altered pdt. files .I have found that changing stacking limits which is quite easy does not interfere with basic mechanic of the game or scenario. You can even change in mid -game. By using new names for the altered scenario and pdt files you do not disturb any of the original game files.

In games where cavalry is in regiments I require all cavalry regiments be reduced to squadrons before moving. In regards to infantry I set the stacking limit to equal the largest infantry battalion so they have no movement restrictions.

One final question is there any inherent reason in the programming of the games that making the 2 optional rules ( Optional Melee Resolution and Cavalry Skirmishers ) not a possibility?

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General de Division Thomas Moore
26ème Régiment de Chasseurs à Cheval
Brigade de Cavalerie Légère
4ème Corps d'Armée
La Grande Armée

You will see the problems when trying to move units around and can't because each battalions blocks a complete hex, especially when you can't even let skirmishers pass.
Besides that the density could be a problem when using "Target Density Modifier" because if the limit is as low as the largest battalion than that battalion would take +50% fire casualties.

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