Genius on the tabletop

Last Saturday the usual gang of reprobates played a Rossbach scenario. Historically a rapid, crushing, fortune-reversing, Prussian victory and pursuit that became legendary, in our game they won by the skin of their teeth, barely holding on with heavy casualties.

The Franco-Imperials debouching onto the plain...

...and advancing to outflank the Prussian deployment.
Rossbach and Luenstadt are in the foreground.

The Prussians confidently waiting for their enemies.

The Prussian center.

Heavy fighting for the town objectives decided the game.

The Prussian right, the only part of the army that
held on to its positions.
(More Rossbach game photos in Dinos Antoniadis' album)

A few months ago we had played Auerstedt. A battle from 1806 where Marshall Davout's Corps, outnumbered two to one, thoroughly defeated their Prussian opponents, effectively ending the war. In our game, Davout was crushed, and soundly routed.

Initial French deployment.

The first engagement goes against the Prussians.

But they have reserves coming!

They begin to overwhelm the outnumbered Frenchmen.

So....what's going on here? Why is it so hard to replicate such amazing feats of generalship in a wargame?

The first explanation that's usually offered up in such discussions is that the generals involved were facing idiots. Dunces. Brainless simpletons. What an old  strategy computer game phrased as "Ivan may not be much of a leader but he has a great sense of humour". But as attractive as that idea is, it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Saxe-Hilburghausen, defeated at Rossbach, had years of mostly reliable service behind him. Braunschweig, who lost both the battle and his life at Auerstedt, had a mixed record in the wars of the French revolution but one that included several notable successes. Conversely, the gap in ability between him and Davout was no greater than that between Hohenlohe and Napoleon, who were squaring off at Jena on the same day, and yet there the Prussians suffered a defeat no more catastrophic despite being badly outnumbered.

Another reason might be hindsight. The folks playing the French generals in our Rossbach game knew that Frederick the Great was waiting for them behind Janus ridge, the Prussian players marching their little toy soldiers towards Davout knew he commanded troops better, stronger and faster than theirs, and all involved knew how things went down on the actual battle centuries ago. So they all could avoid the mistakes their historical counterparts commited, and were condemned by. But that works both ways: Frederick and Davout knew much less about their opponents than the folks playing them in our games, and the latter also had the benefit of knowing what worked and what didn't all those years ago, and could anticipate specific actions their opponents would try and avoid.

I think that Frank Chadwick and Freg Novak got close while discussing the Austerlitz scenario in the first edition of Volley&Bayonet:

"Napoleon was the greatest general of his time, and Austerlitz was his greatest triumph, his most brilliant battle. What are the chances that you will be able to duplicate his feat when refighting the battle? Somewhere between slim and none. Why? Because the rules don't allow it? No. BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT NAPOLEON.
...Napoleon was an outstanding battlefiled commander and, more to the point, a spectacular strategic commander, and the victory at Austerlitz was as much the result of the strategic mapaign Napolon had fought as the actual battlefield maneuvers. If you are the French refighting this battle, there is no way your opponent will believe that you only have 30,000 to 40,000 troops present, is there? There is no way he will believe that the morale of your troops is near the breaking point, or that a quick drive to Sokolnitz and Telnitz will sever the French communication. These are impressions which Napoleon carefully cultivated in the mind of his enemies, and we cannot duplicate them in the mind of your game opponent."

This is spot on for Austerlitz, but, more importantly, it touches on a wider issue. Just as a battle is the result of the campaign that preceded it, and embodies it in a way that cannot be completely captured in a game scenario, the armies and their commanders are the result of the wars they have fought and the societies they belong to, and shaped by them in ways that we cannot transfer whole onto the tabletop. A good player has honed his game playing others, but this is not comparable to someone rising through the ranks and learning how to command while risking his life in dozens of engagements. And the real, successfull, generals knew their armies in a way we gamers do not. We know more or less what Morale 6 troops can do and what Morale 4 troops shouldn't try to, but this cannot compare to Davout's mastery of his III Corps' abilities, built up over a years of daily, hard training and getting to know officers and men.

And, I believe, it is in those things, that we cannot introduce in our games without having actually lived another life, that history's distance from our recreation resides.

First game of the '18 Season!

Well, 2018 is underway, New Years Resolutions have already been trampled into the dust, and gaming has started.

Even though -like many gamers- I'll play just about anything, from Science Fiction-themed skirmishes to RPGs to quirky boardgames, it's historicals that I feel are what it is all about. For that reason it didn't really click that the new gaming season had started until a few days ago, when we played the first historical wargame of the new year.

The battle chosen was Batyn, from 1810.
No, I hadn't heard of it either.

However one of our usual gang of malcontents has a beautifully painted Ottoman army he wanted to put on the table, and the only way to make that happen was to sit down and develop a scenario himself, and....Batyn it was.
Or Batin.
Or Vatyn.
Good luck transcribing 19th century cyrillic script.
The rules obviously were Volley&Bayonet, and here they showed one of their strengths: even though there's only sketchy information on the Ottoman army that fought the actual battle, V&B's coarse-grain approach allows one to put together a reasonable order of battle for gaming purposes. The Russian order of battle was a little easier to put together, apparently.

The setup was simple (here's the wiki entry for the battle, with a short account: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Batin ) . The Ottomans are deployed to defend the approaches to Batyn and the city itself, and the Russians aim to drive through those defenses. Historically the Ottomans were routed rather quickly, and the scenario was designed accordingly, with victory not being judged on if the Russians plow through them but how fast they do so. The battlefield had a river running through the middle of the table (I think this was a tributary of the Danube, but hey, it wasn't my scenario), Batyn and its city walls on one corner of the table, and assorted woods, hills and villages.

I held joint command of the Ottomans, and we deployed to defend the three locations that controlled access to the city, with a battery of artillery as the main strongpoint in each.
On the left, the bridge in front of Batyn:

In the center, where a ford allowed units to cross the river:

And on the right, around a cluster of fields and villages that (we hoped) provided some sort of defensible position:

The orders were, in effect, "hold on to your hats!" (turbans?) since the troops were generally of mediocre quality and fighting prowess.

The Russians, commanded by a triumvirate of experienced players, had a simple plan: attack everywhere, and exploit where you punch through.
They fared somewhat poorly on their right, where terrain chanelled them into frontal assault after frontal assault, which they kept up with grim determination.

They threw most of their light troops into the woods in the center, where they slowly overcame the Ottoman skirmishers after a fair bit of chasing them around in the undergrowth.

But they put a big effort into a left hook, throwing well-organised attacks forward and pushing back the Ottoman defenders.


The only thing we could do -besides praying to the dice gods- was to make use of our cavalry reinforcements, which certainly were an impressive sight.
 

Throwing them against the advancing Russians did slow down their advance, and we got a moment of glory when the cavalry swarmed over the Grenadiers leading the assault and wiped them out.

However that turned out to be a brief interlude. Mounting casualties exhausted the Ottoman units defending the right flank, and the Russians pressed on relentlessly, rolling up the center as well, and reaching the walls of Batyn.


At the end of the game only one of the Ottoman commands was in any sort of fighting shape, the rest had completely dissolved, but we were consoled somewhat by the fact we had done better than our historical counterparts.

The game was eye-opening in some respects. It was the first time we had units on "brigade" (3"x3", the Russians) and "regiment" (3"x1.5", the Ottomans) bases fighting eachother, and they do make for a very different feel to each army. Kind of shows how the game system is flexible enought to accommodate widely different militaries with the same framework, too.

I guess we'll be seeing those turbaned figures more often in the future.

Putting Physics into your Gaming, Part 2

Recapping from Part 1:

We defined our Wavre scenario by its Initial and its Boundary conditions.

Our Initial Conditions are

Time	French Army	Prussian Army
3pm	Grouchy's Wing	Thielmann's III Korps
	On Table	Behind the Dyle

The Boundary Conditions are

Time	Early afternoon 18th June to mid-morning 19th June
Game Map	the Dyle and the terrain Northwest of it
Victory	French decisively beating the Prussians

As discussed in Pt.1, this did not promise the game we wanted for our 200th anniversary refight. The players' mindset would not reflect that of the actual commanders, the action would have suspense but would be somewhat static, and we'd have the pause in the game that represents the night of the 18th-19th. So the idea was to explore what tweaking the Initial and Boundary conditions would change in the scenario.

The first thing to start playing with was the Inital Condition in time. The "literature review" had included some rather detailed accounts of the campaign, both recent (like Hofschroer's Wavre, Plancenoit and the Race to Paris, or Pierre de Wit's waterloo-campaign.nl ) and older ones like 19th century German studies on military history which have been digitized and are available online, so a rough timeline of where everyone was on the 18th and 19th June was easy to work out. Looking at the Prussian units' positions earlier and earlier in the day showed a more vulnerable deployment, with II Korps still Southeast of the Dyle and moving  through the III Korps, a move that had been completed by the time the Napoleon Returns scenario starts. That looked like a more interesting situation, the Prussian player would have to choose between fighting south of the river or withdrawing across it, and when. This is much closer to the dilemma Thielmann, the commander of III Korps, faced on the actual day when he saw the French appearing on his heels as he was preparing to march to Waterloo with the rest of the Prussian army. The only problem with the idea of using an earlier deployment was that the French would be off map!

Therefore it was time to tweak the Boundary Conditions as well. The question was simple, where would we have to move the borders of the game map for the French to arrive on it while the Prussians still had a significant part of their forces deployed on both sides of the river? The first French unit to make contact with the Prussians was Excelmans' II Cavalry Corps, acting as scouts and vanguard for Grouchy, so their position was going to be the guide. Working with Volley&Bayonet's one hour turn interval on a larger map, what emerged was a new setup, with a starting time of 12:00 and a board containing roughly equal stretches of both banks of the Dyle.
Here's the new map:

It still contains the most important geography of the battle, Wavre and Limalle and their bridges across the river, the high ground behind the town and the woods opposite and on the other bank. We've exchanged the wide stretch of ground beyond the town in the Prussian rear from the Napoleon Returns map for a large area to the southeast of the Dyle. The length of the river to be fought over is roughly the same, but now it's placed centrally on the table.
What changes significantly is the forces deployed on the map:

The Prussians have some additional troops (7th and 8th Brigades, the rearguard of the II Korps), but they're on the far bank with the river to their backs. The III Korps is not yet deployed to defend all the river crossings, and one of its brigades is actually marching away from the battlefield- on the actual day, a confusion in orders saw them marching with the II Korps to Waterloo. And the French are....nowhere to be seen! Excelmans' cavalry is on table, but the rest of Grouchy's troops will be arriving in the next few rounds in the enlarged area southeast of the Dyle. The early arrival of the French and the more mobile nature that the new setup leads to mean that there's plenty of action before nightfall, so we can limit the duration to the 18th June.

The only change to the Victory Conditions (the final Boundary Condition) was to define it more sharply. Since V&B includes a measure of "division exhaustion" to show units no longer being able to function offensively, the side that would exhaust more enemy units would be the winner.

Our game has been redefined!

The new Initial Conditions are

Time	French Army	Prussian Army
12am	Excelmans' Corps	Thielmann's III Korps
	On Table	Northwest of the Dyle
	Grouchy's Wing	II Korps Rearguard
	arriving as reinforcements after 1pm	Southeast of the Dyle

The new Boundary Conditions are

Time	12am to 8pm of the 18th June
Game Map	the terain Northwest and Southeast of Wavre
Victory	Exhaust more of the enemy divisions

And the changes seem to have worked. The game (actually played on the 20th June 2015!) saw the Prussian II Korps rearguard quickly legging it across the river, their compatriots in the III Korps rushing to properly set up to defend it, and the French racing forward to benefit from the confusion and trying to choose where to throw their main effort while still on the march. It was a fluid, intense game, and great fun.

So....yeah for Physics, I guess. Or, given that it was a close French victory, Vive la Physique!