Napoleonic rules

[Dragoon]

Napoleons wars are bound to cause problems because of the type of game to be played for instance the gamer wans to play all the battles from the start of the revolutionary wars to the last musket shot in 1815.
The requirements :- Must be playable by two people the best known and useable is Age of Eagles (AoE) for short.
Each player will have a CinC, a Left Wing General and a Right Wing General. Each commanding two or more Corps commanded by Generals who then has several Divisions under his command. They in turn command several brigades. The brigade is the smallest manoeuvre element. The Centre is usually commanded by the CinC himself. Cavalry will have the same structure as the infantry.
The CinC will also have a Reserve commanded by a General.

So the Brigadier isn't on the table because he is always part of the brigade.
The battle must should or maybe have orders which is really a plan depending on how you want to play your games. As movement is IGOUGO orders aren't necessary but if you have a CinC, 4 corps commanders and a cavalr general as at Waterloo and you have to send orders to a corps commander which he has to read and decide how to implement those orders  so depending how you play there could be two moves befor anything happens. This isn't in the rules you the player has to decide weather there is any delay or none.

Each move is 30 minutes and the start is 11 am and the game finishes by 9 pm that's 10 hours or 20 moves.
There are free scenarios for every major battle and some smaller battles.
The scale :- 1 figure = 90 men and 1 inch = 120 yards. That's about 14 inches per mile so Borodino can be played on a 12 foot X 6 foot table.
Not impossible for a club game.
The dice is a d10 and 0 = 10 to save an argument.

On the other side of the coin there are rules like General d Armee GdA) where 1 figure = 20 men wher yo have brigadier Generals and at this level you are the divisional general and orders are sent to your brigades by ADC's .
At that level a 2 to 3 hour game is easy thplay on a club night.
There is a corps level came where you as CcinC are a corps general  getting a 3 hour game might take some work with a lot of units th move but the play aids that you can buy or make from card there's a forum and help is always forthcoming if you need help.
With my figures I can play both gams of GdA and AoE  I'm undecided with 10mm figures. On a 20mm x 20mm base I can fit 6 figures in 2 ranks it looks great for peninsula battles wher a Brit unit can be down to 4 or 5 bases in 2 ranks a battalion of 4 bases I still 24 figures..

This brings me to another problem : I have all the bases sorted out for the scenarios I have on the peninsula battles but I've looked for all those beautiful Brit figures but I can't see any on the web site???

[DecemDave]

I remain highly confused by Napoleonics having looked at the basing requirements for
DBN
FOGN
General d'armee
general de Brigade
ESR
La feu sacre
Brigades & batteries variant
Grande Armee
Blucher
Age of eagles (L Armee francaise)
Bataille Empire
repbulique
Thomas
Quarrie/Griffiths
Drums & Shakos (VnB)
Black Powder
Grand battery
Colours and Guns
Brigades & batteries
Shako 2
Command & Colours
March Attack
Lasalle 2


More rulesets than there are armies!

Ways can be found to make 20*20 work with most with a bit of flex (e.g. its near enough an inch isnt it?) as would 30* 20, 30*30 and 40*20 in practice.  But I'm heading to the depressing view that I will need TWO of each army .  One (with big bases 80cm wide) for the bigger scale games like Blucher and another with the smaller bases for the battalion level games where you need to form squares and different varieties of column.  Meanwhile,  I find 20*20 and even 30*20 quite fiddly and tiresome to move armies about in practice.  (true I have old and stiff hands) so I am drawn towards 80 wide bases for that reason as well .   

if I was really clever I'd play lots of games with cardboard counters until I found a ruleset I loved and then go with whatever basing it wanted.  But I'm not.

[John Cook]

I'm bemused by the obsession with basing that keeps cropping up here and elsewhere. 

[fred.]

Sabot bases are you friend

Leon can cut these to any size of cut-out, and any size of base (for sizes that make sense for wargames rules - just getting in before any pedantry)

Remember to add 1-2mm to the cut out size to ensure bases fit reasonably snugly, but can be removed. While 20x20mm are a pain for moving around individually they are a good size for putting into sabot bases. Smaller bases give you flexibility, bigger bases give you more opportunity for displaying figures / units and building interesting formations or dioramas on the base. But you have to make a choice what works for you.

[Gwydion]

It used to make a difference in the days when rules had ground scales and figures either represented so many men or had to fit a unit footprint that meant something for the mechanics.

Now every unit is like a board game counter, often with no relationship between ground scale and movement rates, ranges etc BUT if you want to play other people the units are meant to be the same sized counter so you have to choose a base that fits other people's armies and not all rules have the same counter size

That's why people bother about base sizes.

(and the tedium/damage factor of rebasing)

[DecemDave]

I'm bemused by the obsession with basing that keeps cropping up here and elsewhere. 

Not sure its an obsession, in my case its just a desire to not waste all that effort put in to basing in the first place and try out lots of rulesets.  I would agree its easily bypassed anyway by switching rulesets, switching picky opponents, fudging  rulesets or providing both sides.  

Maybe it also starts from the days when WRG ancients standardised the old school x mm per figure and before other sets got creative to either accommodate scale creep or to be different?  So we feel there should be ONE right answer.      

Where I am obsessed is representing the long thin line of a British unit relative to a French or Austrian one to try and understand that dynamic.   I think it should be a single rank of figures but I suspect everyone else would laugh it off the table.  

I do use Sabots in ECW but then the elements come out so rarely, I might as well have used big bases in the first place i.e. the "boardgame counter" approach.

I should have stuck to Ancients.
42-45 AD
North of the channel, lowland warbands only.

[mmcv]

I should have stuck to Ancients.
42-45 AD
North of the channel, lowland warbands only.

But are they large, standard or small warbands? And what about that time Cynbel the One-Eyed fielded a double depth warband in a border skirmish with Morcant the Wise, who was of course using his trademark light skirmishing warband tactics? How do you represent them?

Basing is a minefield. I was led down the path a bit with "standard" basing methods that ended up making units that were too large to get painted and on table in what I thought a reasonable manner. I'm reasonably happy with my "mini basing" for ancients stuff, on the basis I can scale it up in future (though with so many other projects on the todo who knows when). I've a few special projects on larger bases. I generally favour a single base where possible. Though suspect if I do get into Napoleonics and the like I'll have to go multibase. Maybe 4 25mm bases? That's a battle for another time.

I'm bemused by the obsession with basing that keeps cropping up here and elsewhere. 

What's your go-to basing? I imagine those who are no longer bothered by such questions are those who have settled on a basing that they are happy with and so don't need to think about it anymore!

[steve_holmes_11]

I'm bemused by the obsession with basing that keeps cropping up here and elsewhere. 

In Napoleonics it reflects the obsession with "formation" (Infantry battalion formation).
It looms far larger in Naps than other gaming eras.

[Gwydion]

My Napoleonics have been Volley and Bayonet brigades (at half scale 1.5" per base/unit) since c1996 so I haven't had to worry about the stone scissors paper of formations. However, I am now tempted by Keith Flint's  Shadow of the Eagles, with Pendraken figures, so may have to consider the horror ofdecisions about basing.

[FierceKitty]

It used to make a difference in the days when rules had ground scales and figures either represented so many men or had to fit a unit footprint that meant something for the mechanics.

Now every unit is like a board game counter, often with no relationship between ground scale and movement rates, ranges etc BUT if you want to play other people the units are meant to be the same sized counter so you have to choose a base that fits other people's armies and not all rules have the same counter size

That's why people bother about base sizes.

(and the tedium/damage factor of rebasing)

Thiss is not universal practice, and though the advantages are attractive, there are very clear limitations.

[John Cook]

It used to make a difference in the days when rules had ground scales and figures either represented so many men or had to fit a unit footprint that meant something for the mechanics.

Now every unit is like a board game counter, often with no relationship between ground scale and movement rates, ranges etc BUT if you want to play other people the units are meant to be the same sized counter so you have to choose a base that fits other people's armies and not all rules have the same counter size

That's why people bother about base sizes.

(and the tedium/damage factor of rebasing)

Well, I've been wargaming since 1962.  Rules didn't concern themselves with the ratio of figures to men, time or distance in 1962 either.  They were unsophisticated, undemanding, and ultimately unsatisfying. 

If units are reduced to something like a "board game counter" where time, distance and numbers do not matter, I would have thought that a board game was the rational, and cheaper, option.  I can't imagine how ranges, movement and casualties are calculated without this knowledge.  Other than the aesthetic why bother with figures at all? 

Playing against other people's armies is not an issue.  I don't do it.  I game with a couple of people, or did before COVID, and when 'at home' it's my ball and my game.  When 'playing away' the reverse is the case.  I would not even consider rebasing my armies to suit them, any more than they would to suit me.  The concept hadn't even crossed my mind. 

[John Cook]

What's your go-to basing? I imagine those who are no longer bothered by such questions are those who have settled on a basing that they are happy with and so don't need to think about it anymore!

I allow 7-8mm frontage per figure which works fine for everything from medieval to ACW at a ratio of 1:10.  My ACW infantry, for example, with 10 figures in two ranks fit on a stand measuring 25mm deep x 40mm wide.  Dimensions vary for other periods and types of unit.  I've been using the same rules, in various iterations, for more than 25 years.  Rebasing is the path to madness. 

[John Cook]

In Napoleonics it reflects the obsession with "formation" (Infantry battalion formation).
It looms far larger in Naps than other gaming eras.

Do you mean representing each sub-unit on a separate stand so that a battalion can execute all the various changes of formation in the drill manual, deploy skirmishers etc?  That, I think, unless using 6mm figures and lots of them in big battalions, is almost impossible.  I use 1:10 for my Napoleonics which are based on historical OBs so no two units are quite the same size - some are considerably smaller than others - and I haven't found a satisfactory way to do it.  I don't see why it is unique to Napoleonic though and wouldn't affect almost any 18th or 19th century game. 

[FierceKitty]

Or virtually any other period. Troop formations are a practical necessity for efficient movement, for strong defence, for concentrated firepower, and for mutual support. There is something distubingly incomplete about the reading and indeed the common sense of a gamer who believes they were just a product of thousands of years of international blimpishness.

[Norm]

In some respects my own views are coloured by the fact that I both boardgame and figure game and each complements the other so that I can cover a wider spectrum of complexity and scale with less strain on any part of the collection. So for example, I have no need to worry how my figure game at home will cover Gettysburg because I have several boardgames that do that and that situation satisfies me. Rather I can use my figure collection for their sheer joy  and I want to try and get back to an earlier mindset that I had decades ago of more enjoyment that certainly sat on a certain naiveness, the game was the thing.

Over the years of bringing complexity and exactitude to my game, has made play more sophisticated, demanding and rewarding ..... but, it has certainly lost some of its early qualities along the way.

I am just dipping my toe into napoleonics (again) and starting from scratch with armies and have decided to go with 2 x 80mm bases per unit. It strikes me that in pairs, all of the essential formations can be represented, with the advantage of fewer bases to manage across the table - an advantaged linked with persistent back ache.

I would disagree with John that decades ago rules were not overly concerned with scales and ratios - my recall is that they were riven with them. The rule writers of the day, ex-army and National Service men, went to great lengths to cover such things, even worry about and trying to explain away the problem with vertical scale! The 1:33 and 1:20 scales dominated and movement was strictly tied to march rates to create the 'bound', which all worked well as a maths formula, but in reality the elephant in the room was that a major battle could be over in 20 minutes and reinforcements would arrive minutes apart instead of hours, if we are being 'exact' that is. Breaking away from 'exactness' has been the one major development in rule writing. 

In Grant's Napoleonic Book, he even has his flanking companies allowed to move a little faster so that each base could measure out their movement to reach their position in the new formation. Today you just generally keep one base in position and just move all the others to accord with the new formation - a seemingly small thing but a very good example of the then and now aspects of rule approach.

We all sit on a different line when it comes to how much precision we want in our rules and at what cost in complexity, none being any more 'the right way' than the other. The important thing seems to be to find that rules that suit you best and then perhaps just sticking with them and getting to know them and their nuances well.