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@Grey Hunter, can we get horse artillery? Signing up as a staff officer/replacement. Mixed brigades probably aren't a good idea. The Big Man himself certainly wasn't a fan. Napleon posted:"The practice of mixing small bodies of infantry and cavalry together is a bad one, and attended with many inconveniences. The cavalry loses its power of action. It becomes fettered in all its movements. Its energy is destroyed; even the infantry itself is compromised, for on the first movement of the cavalry its left without support. The best mode of protecting cavalry is to cover its flank." I do think we should also consider our posture and our tactics. Are we going to strive for an offensive battle where we take the fight to the enemy? Or are we going to hunker down and make them come to us? Are we going to go for a Frederician linear battle? Grandes bandes skirmisher swarms? Fuckoff huge Emory Upton-style attack columns? Each approach is going to lend itself to different force compositions. Linear tactics lend themselves to veteran troops with decent weapons. Skirmishing favors troops with long-ranged rifles. Columnar attacks are a numbers game, with some lower-quality chaff to absorb enemy fire and some higher-quality troops to seal the deal (the French put their elite troops at the back of their battalion columns partly for this reason). I would suggest having a handful of elite skirmishers with very un-French rifles (maybe even breechloaders) and the massed artillery battery Phi230 proposed to pick apart their infantry before unleashing a massed assault in columns.
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Jul 1, 2020 03:59
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 03:16 |
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Phi230 posted:Also do not forget special rules. An elite infantry battalion may have marginally better stats but one or two special rules turn them into a fearsome force to be reckoned with on the tabletop. Are we playing with special rules? If Red Force gets something like Steady Line, attacks in column get a bit dicier and defending in line gets a lot more appealing. Shoeless posted:As for posture, I was going to go for aggressive scouting while artillery takes advantageous positions early on to pound the enemy as soon as they're found. What's the infantry going to do in the decisive phase of the battle? I'm not opposed to a certain amount of "wait and see" at the start of the battle wherevwe probe for weak spots and grab key terrain. On the flip side, Napoleonic fighting really punishes indecision and demands full commitment to a plan of action once it's in motion. And our force structure will determine what courses of action we can pursue. Would a force structure like this make sense? 1x Shock cavalry brigade(-) (koolkevz666's Mac n' Cheeses?) 1x Light cavalry brigade (El Spamo?) 2x Line infantry brigade(+) and 1x Guard infantry brigade(-) or 3x Infantry brigade(+) with additional light infantry, grenadiers, etc. 1x Artillery brigade Alternatively, we could just cheese everything and go for a small corps of riflemen with breech and bolt/action rifles and re-enact Königgrätz.
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Jul 1, 2020 06:48
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A few resources that may be of interest! The guy who runs the Napoleonic Wargaming channel had a video on infantry defense that cover the mechanics of an infantry column colliding with a line of infantry. French infantry unit composition and tactics are covered in this video. The British are discussed here. He also has a long retrospective on the Greatest Game firefight of Waterloo. It's a long video, but the most salient lessons are about aggression, the efficacy of French columnar attacks, and the "cavalry slingshot". The game's designer, Rick Priestly has a tutorial for Black Powder 2, which is very similar to the Black Powder 1 ruleset we are using. Some grog has compiled a list of the differences between the two rulesets here. They're pretty drat similar. Shoeless posted:Because iirc the rules say you need to shoot at the closest unit (except artillery), infantry would be a blocking force to keep enemy infantry from double-timing it up to our artillery, as well as threatening enemy cavalry. Once the battle is well and truly joined, they'd advance under cover of cannon fire to further disrupt enemy infantry, force the enemy line to deal with them instead of focusing on our harassing cavalry. So we're going with a defensive, firepower-heavy gameplan? Works for me. If that's our plan, I might cut us down to just one cavalry brigade for scouting and screening. That'll free up points for infantry rifles and some bigger guns for counter-battery. Hippocrass posted:Any thoughts from those more familiar with how the system works, or how batteries were actually set up in period? The norm was usually to have the battery be all one type of gun or a mix of guns and howitzers. For example, many armies in the Napoleonic Wars had 6 identical guns and 2 howitzers in a battery. So you might have six 12-pounders and two 6-inch howitzers in a heavy hitting corps reserve battery. Bacarruda fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Jul 1, 2020 |
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Jul 1, 2020 12:50
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Both of our infantry brigades so far (Phi230's 120th Brigade d'Infanterie BadgerRat's Definitely-Not-English Brigade) are mostly armed with smoothbore muskets. That's not in any way a problem, by the way. However, it will make it harder to adopt the defensive strategy Shoeless is going for. If the other side has a decent number of rifles (which isn't unreasonable), they'll outrange us (24" vs. 18"), which will let them plink away at us and force us to advance, retreat, or get whittled away. Rifles also have defensive advantages. Infantry can move a max of 12" per move (assuming good dice rolls) and cavalry can move 18", so the 24" rifle range gives rifle-armed defenders more chances to whittle down the oncoming attackers and disorder or shake them. If an enemy gets disordered, they stop dead in their attacks, effictively preventing them from charging until they rally. I don't think we need to give everyone a rifle, but something like a 1:1 or 2:1 rifle-smoothbore ratio would help us defensively.
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Jul 2, 2020 04:44
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Our division assembles!
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Jul 6, 2020 03:08
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I wonder if it might make sense to pool all our horse artillery into one brigade and our longer-ranged artillery into another. That way we can keep the horse artillery as a massed, super-mobile force for infantry and cavalry support at close range, while our longer-ranged artillery stays in a Grand Battery for counter-battery fire.
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Jul 6, 2020 03:40
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 03:16 |
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Grey Hunter posted:Sorry! Scale map is here. Grey, can I suggest we halve or even quarter the map scale? Our infantry's max one-turn (three move) movement speed is 54", assuming everyone passes their command rolls. It's gonna be a long time before we start to see any action and I'm worried goon interest will burn out before we get much of a fight.
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Jul 7, 2020 13:45
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