Napoleonic Wargame Club (NWC)

You might want to contact JTS yourself, and put forward your pitch, instead of waiting.

I must confess I stopped myself at the JTS contact form a good half dozen times over the last couple of years...
For several reasons - first of all my lack of experience at coding under commercial constraints - I'd prefer to avoid take on the full responsability of such a project, paperworks, team recruiting/coordination and so on.
It scares me a little bit the outlook of diverting my concentration from coding so much, at this stage at least.
Hopefully this will change anytime soon, but meanwhile I'm eagerly waiting to enter in any good "slipstream".
I had never been a wheelsucker at bike racing, but in this context I am ashamed of myself...
Ciao.

Fair enough, but let me tell you a bit about WDS, since you mentioned it, and that is the admin side of that is largely run by David Freer (or rather directed by him).

He isn't the one doing the coding (not the programming coding at any rate), there, but he does have access to someone that does (and I am pretty sure that was the result of a relationship that they both built up over some years), however that is a distinct set up to JTS (as far as I have read how things are going -I haven't bothered to question Mr Freer much directly on it, because I think it has been the result of some years' working relationship with JTS and probably John Tiller himself (I haven't been cc'd on anything they'd communicated about so I couldn't prove it in a court of law, but I believe it to be so.).

I don't really know exactly what all JTS would respond with, and I only put that out there because you'd mentioned it. I doubt that it could hurt but at the end of the day it has to be something that you'd be willing to check into (no one here is going to have that much sway I don't think.).

One subject I think has been over looked so far is stacking limits. 2000 infantry and 1000 cavalry are way to high. In a previous article by the H&R fellows called" Version 1.03 Jun- 2012 " which is quite detailed calls for

1) Max stacking of approximately 300 cavalry. There reasoning that any numbers much greater in a 100m hex would have been uncontrollable and totally unrealistic.

2) Infantry was a little more complicated because of the different formations, namely column and line. For line 450 was the max for 100m and 900 for column.

3) Artillery per hex is calculated at 8 guns per 100m.

In the Waterloo game I have played with 1000 infantry max stacking and 333 cavalry ( which is set as a fraction of infantry , in this case 1/3 ). These limits allow for more defense in depth, reduced casualties and eliminates those 1000 stacks of cavalry that act like tank battalions and run over almost anything.

Finally a couple of more tweaks to the pdt file.

1) I increase the disrupted movement rate from 2/3 to 3/4 of normal movement. This improves the ability to conduct a fighting retreat without sacrificing your disrupted units.

2) I make the strength value of artillery very low like 10 men. The reason for this is to reflect that artillery guns were placed in front of a battalion of infantry with the infantry deployed in close support. This in effect allows almost any infantry battalion to stack with a 8 gun battery.

Now in the parameter data it will show a stacking limit of nearly 100 guns. I solve this problem by having a simple house rule allowing only 8 guns in a hex.

3) change extended line limits from 800 to 500. This allows for more 1/2 battalions to be formed so there is greater flexibility in stacking.

4) I reduce the cavalry strength multiplier for melees from 5 to 4. This was done to further reduce what I see as unrealistic melee strength of cavalry.

Lastly, The nice thing about all these changes is that they can be done by simply editing the pdt. file for any scenario.

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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

Regarding artillery stacking:
Not sure where you see 100 gun limit, I only see a stacking limit of 16 guns per hex and that is OK. 8 guns per hex are about 10 meters between guns what gives enough room to halve that distance and by that double the amount of guns per hex to 16. That is perfectly acceptable had it opens empty hexes to let the infantry pass through the Grand Battery, 8 max per hex just makes it impossible to recreate that.


Regarding infantry stacking:
When ever the stacking limit comes up it's about Waterloo, it's strange because it has the best example of the most dense formation used in the Napoleonic Wars. If the Waterloo Companion is correct the way it depicts Marcognet's 3rd division than that formation took an area of 125x75 meters and it was about 4000 men strong. In my opinion that is the reason why the stacking limit in the Waterloo game is even higher than the 1800 that we usually see in games by Bill Peters, but even th higher limit in Waterloo is not enough to reenact that dense formation.

AFAIk those complaining about stacking limit have a problem that such huge stacks can conduct melee, but for that you do not need to lower the stacking limit.
1. Optional Rule "Column Pass Through Fire" makes the attacker pay stacking multiple units together.
2. Optional Rule "Target Density Modifier" makes the attacker pay stacking over 2/3 of stacking limit.
3. Finally one can consider a house rule that allows only a certain number of units or men to melee. It seems indeed strange how 1800 men or even more can melee a line of just 100 meters and all men of the attacker have an impact in the melee result, I doubt that those further behind had even the chance to see the enemy so what impact could they have had in the melee? Just a minor one I guess.
I had already formed a house rule but it's currently untested:
- Limit melee attacker strength:
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.


Regarding cavalry stacking:
Besides the "Target Density Modifier" OR that one can use, there is a "Cavalry Fire Modifier" in the PDT:
- Fire against a Cavalry(6 hexes or less) +20%
- Fire against a Cavalry(7 to 12 hexes) +10%
That makes cavalry take more casualties if it comes closer for a charge.


Overall I prefer to work around the stacking limits instead of enforcing much lower limits that prohibit the recreation of many things that historically did occur.

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Christian,
What is nice about the tweeks Tom did is that they only require one optional rule (artillery stacking-he sets it at 1 gun =ten men so that any battalion can stack with an artillery unit, so if the stacking is 1000 men a hex then you could stack 100 guns, but you would not actually do it). He and I are playing Quatre Bras Ligny and the cavalry stacking really fills up the map more than normal. As he mentioned, it leads to it being easier to defend in depth, keep reserves, etc. I would like to try his stacking limits with on of Bill's games that feature the 10 minute turns and see how that would play out.

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Stacking in the more recent games I have done is 600 cavalry but let me ask you something: if 400 cavalry at Marengo could run over an entire brigade of Austrian grenadiers just imagine what 1000 could do?

I think that people forget how powerful cavalry were if infantry was not in square.

Cavalry may not be a one shot deal but they also are vulnerable to fire. Trying to defend out in the open is an invitation to being hit by cavalry if not in square.

Now as to what is the correct stacking. Al Amos and I discussed this long ago. The discussion resurfaces quite a bit.

I went with 600 cavalry and 1600 infantry. The confines of a hex are not a boundary but merely a point of reference. The unit is in that area. That is why there is a ZOC for most units.

Players that pack in their units trying to achieve a "killer stack" find themselves hit multiple times by artillery.

I have tried playing the other format of play (H&R) and find that the units get in each other's way. In one game I played I had 2x the usual number of units and defense in depth meant "sardine can." Trying to get a unit to the front line while pulling another back became an arduous endeavor. Routed units didn't rout through a unit - they remained stuck at the front.

David Andrews did an admirable job in our Leipzig game of setting up a defense line using squares and guns. While I agree that this was not standard practice I think that whenever you get into total historical accuracy with any game you will find it comes up short.

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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)

My problem with 600 cavalry stacking is that it is an unrealistic number when historical research ( H & R Version 1.03 Austerlitz add-on ) shows that 300 is nearer the max number of cavalry that could be controlled in a 100 x 100 meter hex. Add to to this the cavalry multiplier of 5 times and your 600 cavalry act more like a company of tanks rampaging over all.

As for infantry stacking, that requires a bit of compromise. The most infantry that could be formed in 3-rank line in a 100 meter front is about 450 men but in our games we must also allow for column formations.

Now the number of men in column in a 100 meter hex did vary with the type of intervals that were used between companies. These were called full intervals, half intervals, section intervals and closed intervals. Thus you might have as many as 2000 men in a hex. In most attacks columns started out in full or half intervals and then closed up as infantry got closer to the enemy. To further complicate matters column formations were obviously used to maneuver infantry about the battlefield. Which could hardly be done at closed intervals. I therefore feel your 1000 man stacking for infantry is a good compromise.

The last thing I would like see is an Optional rule like the one in the Civil War games called Optional Melee Resolution which in essence creates a melee phase at the end of a turn. This one simple option all most completely eliminates blitz tactics.

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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

May I thrown in that this seems to depend on the regulations of the certain countries, for example the French use a wide per men of 26 inches while the British used 22 inch, at least according the Nafziger. It seems the later of 22 inches was used because a simple calculation based on 22 inches shows 357,90 men for 2 rank and 536,86 for 3 rank, both values are close to the Extended line values of 360 men for 2-Line Infantry and 540 men for 3-Line Infantry that are used in the game.


Well we are on 10 minute in most of the games what already lowers Blitz tactics but besides that the Optional Melee Resolution in the CW series does not work correctly as for some unknown reasons fatigue recovery happens if nothing is done in that Optional Melee Resolution phase although it should not happen.

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