Tribulations of a Gentleman of Quality

As the photos show, Infantry Regiment Furstenberg has finally achieved the proper number of rank and file. It is, however, entirely missing the proper complement of officers and musicians that should accompany them. The obvious solution here would be to buy Stadden figures to fill this gap, but - for vanities sake - I'd prefer to make the entire regiment from my own figures alone, and so the regiment must wait upon my slow and erratic sculpting.

In the meantime, General Lentulus has been temporarily appointed the regiment's Inhaber: one lonely Suren figure amongst a homecast rabble. He has so far remained amiable and, indeed, remarkably tolerant of the situation, running through the regiment directly through the regimental agent and its NCOs. As this has occasioned frequent travel away from his comfortable Viennese town house during the harshest of winters, his zeal might be applauded. But enquiries have found that not only is Lentulus profiting handsomely from the salaries of the missing men, but he has been able to dine out every night owing to the attentions of families anxious to secure a place for their sons in the Imperial Army.

It would appear likely that, regardless of its state, the regiment will be pressed into action this next campaigning season. The current financial crisis has hit the economies of both Hessian states hard, but while Rheinfels struggles to meet its debts, and its army has gone unpaid for some months now, Marburg appears to have obtained money from an unknown source. It is rumoured that British agents have arranged a secret treaty and that, in return for a generous subsidy, the Prince of Marburg will break with the Empire at an opportune moment. If this is the case then loyalist Rheinfels, with its unpaid and mutinous troops, will be vulnerable.

Hmm... Looking at the photos, I think the figures look best when viewed from the rear. I hope this isn't some kind of evil omen: an indication of the view the enemy will most often see due to a tendency, on the regiment's part, to flee in the heat of battle.

I have cast, and am currently cleaning up, the figures for the first company of a second imperial regiment. My current plan is to paint this as IR Wildenstein (Kurmainz) unless some particularly attractive uniform from another Reichsarmee regiment takes my fancy before I start painting.

Officers And Tables

The Gendarmerie officer is complete and sits proudly at the head of his squadron as the accompanying photo shows. I liked the photo so much I didn't reduce it in size as I usually do. Painting single figures like this is terrible for productivity, but scores highly for pure enjoyment. So the remaining officers for this regiment will be allowed to join at their leisure: the CO has been absent on his country estate for years now and the regiment has not missed him.

I suspect the availability of a decent sized wargames table is a problem that vexes many a wargamer. In my case I have had a solution mapped out for this for some time: but it has been placed 'on hold' as it has depended on the necessary materials appearing in some nearby skip.

The ideal wargames table needs to be reasonably light (stories of ceilings bowing under the weight of a sandtable come to mind here) while possessing dimensions normally associated with the banquet tables of reigning monarchs. Even if such an article was entirely homemade, the materials, if shop bought, would represent a considerable sum. However, it occurs to me that there is an unappreciated item of domestic architecture that is admirably suited to the purpose.

This is the cheap wooden domestic door. Round my neck of the woods these are often discarded in skips due to the belief of local womenfolk that a fancier article is necessary to their peace of mind. It is relatively robust and yet light, being constructed of thin wood stretched over a wooden frame, and is generally 28" wide and 80" in length. As a neighbour has just thrown three of these out, I at last have the materials to make a 7' x 6'8" table: not quite up to the size of Charles Grant's table as shown in 'The Wargame', but as large as I can fit in my house.

Making the thing will have to wait until Winter: the garden is taking up most of my energy for now.

A Company, An Old Acquaintance, and a New Artillery Table

Progress has been slow: this is the time of year when warfare is mostly being carried out in the garden, against invading hordes of slugs, aphids and caterpillars. However, the first company of the Imperial Army's Furstenberg regiment is, at last, complete. The second company is already started and I ought to be knocking companies out at a fair old rate. But there is a monotony here that prevents me doing this at a faster pace. I find myself distracted by other, more fiddly but fun projects.

Lentulus Wonders Where the Rest Are.

In my pile of unpainted figures (more a metal molehill than a mountain) I have a couple of Suren cuirassier officers waiting their turn to be introduced to their squadrons. This figure has always been a problem for me: it's nicely proportioned, but the right arm is waving about in mid air, in a manner that leaves me baffled as to what to do with it. I am led to believe that it is intended to hold its sword aloft, in which case its not going to be holding a sword at all after a few wargames.

The one officer painted up until now had his hand dropped to the pistol holders, resting there in a rather unmilitary fashion that might have prompted Old Fritz to make a few unkind remarks. I decided this time I'd try for a better pose, drawing the sword from its scabbard. This should place the sword in a safe position where other parts of the figure protect it from damage.

Suren Cuirassier Officers on Stadden Horses.

There is one small detail that has me concerned. As usual I have replaced the saddlecloth with one made of paper: this makes it easier to fit the Suren figure to a Stadden horse as well as having a better scaled thickness. But the cuirassier troopers all use a saddlecloth that has a rounded shape whereas some - but perhaps not all - officers seem to use squared off ones. At least, this is how I interpret the illustrations in Dorn and Engelmann, but as I can't read the accompanying German text I haven't a clue what the proper distinctions are here. I think I shall mount the Colonel on a squared saddlecloth and the squadron commanders on rounded ones, administering the necessary quantity of lame excuses - as is every wargamer's prerogative - should I be in error.

Prussian Infantry Under Fire From The Old Artillery Table

This refers to the artillery rules here.

My new artillery table is another attempt to recast the powerful artillery of the Charge! rules into something a little more game-friendly. Using a two dice roll to hit gives a Gaussian probability distribution, so the decrease in accuracy at extreme range becomes much more realistically pronounced, while at closer ranges where artillery can be expected to become destructive, there is little change from the original rules. I added an 'mischance' table consulted when a double one is thrown: this adds a little colour but should rarely need consulting as it has only a 1 in 36 chance of occurring. There is a 1 in 6 chance on this table (1 in 216 when the odds are combined with the 'to hit' roll) of killing one of your own gunners. I based this on an incident from Captain Mercer's Waterloo diary:

"He had just finished ramming down the shot, and was stepping back outside the wheel, when his foot stuck in the miry soil, pulling him forward at the moment when the gun was fired. As a man naturally does when falling, he threw out both his arms before him, and they were blown off at the elbows."

Movement and Curses

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) html editors are hard to find and rarely successful. Sadly, the blogger 'compose' mode editor conforms to type and can best be described as a What You See Is Not What You Wanted editor. So, after much bad language, I have reverted to editing in pure html mode and have switched off the 'compose' mode so that accidentally invoking it does not allow it to work its evil deeds on my efforts.

This post refers to the movement table at the end of this section of rules.

There is one rules mechanism in Charge! that I am eager to be rid of. Charge! instructs us that moving within a set distance of other companies (rule 7c page 56) reduces a company's movement rate: this is the method by which the rules prevent a battalion deployed in line moving at the same rate as a battalion deployed in coulumn of companies. There is good reasoning behing this idea: if a column has room to its flanks then it can navigate around terrain features that would throw it into disorder were the unit compelled to march through them.

But it matters very little to the individual infantryman whether he has thirty or a hundred men to his right and left: he is still expected to advance at the regulation pace of so many strides of regulation length to the minute. If a battalion in line advances across ideal terrain that happily resembles a parade ground then it will advance as rapidly as a single company in line. But if the same battalion advances in line across a battlefield which has all the typical features of a rural landscape, it will find its advance slowed as its various companies encounter obstacles.

If we can model the problem of terrain in our wargame, then we will see that the rate of movement of a line will be dictated by the frequency with which parts of it become entangled in obstacles. So we can replace a somewhat awkward rule with a more pleasing simulation of the problems of manouevre that were associated with linear tactics. This is made easy because we have hexagonal terrain, and so we are able to define unambiguously which terrain areas have the potential to impose these kinds of delay on a formation. We have only to scatter hexes that represent this terrain around the battlefield judiciously. Movement rates for the company in line and in column are therefore all that are needed.

I can therefore use a hex-based variant of the movement table (page 59) with the reduced movement rate for infantry in battalion line removed. I have reduced movement distances so as to favour a smaller table than the original authors of Charge! envisaged, using 1 hex as equivalent to 6 inches even though my terrain hexes are actually 4 inches across. For consistency the same system will be used when determining firing ranges.

Organisations, Formations And Movements

This post discusses the rules linked here.

I am going to try following the list of chapters that is used by Charge! So the first chapter discusses the organisation of units, their formations, and how this determines their movement rates.  This part is uncomplicated: the organisations used by both Charge! and The Wargame require little alteration.

The biggest change from Charge! rules is to use four twelve man companies instead of three sixteen man.  On aesthetic grounds alone, I prefer the 'square' organisation, and I suspect that Charge! adopted sixteen men per company solely because it uses firing groups of eight men.  But my musketry will use a system based on The Wargame and that uses six man firing groups, so the twelve man company will work well enough.

Light infantry are organised as per Charge! The use of open order formation is one instance where hexes are beneficial: it is easier to denote use of open order by limiting deployment to four figures per hex rather than having to carefully maintain proper spacing between every figure.

The cavalry squadron organisation of eight troopers plus an officer is nominally as per Charge! but in reality represents a slightly weaker unit as my officers are nothing but eye candy whereas in Charge! officers would fight along with the rest of the squadron. Cavalry don't fit so well into hexes.  A squadron must be able to opt between deploying in a single line or a double line: in the former case the space required dictates that the squadron can use two adjacent hexes.

The next step will be to lay down the various movement rates.  There are some problems here, but also some benefits from using hexes: but this will be covered in the next post.

I put a lot of photos into the section: they aren't particularly informative, but do give some feel for what the units will look like when conforming to hexagonal terrain.  The formations in column do not look pretty: the half hex offset between hex rows is aesthetically unpleasing.  So the photos in this case do serve to warn about how the look of the wargame suffers in this manner.

Hexed

When I first started this blog I wrote that I was interested in developing hexagon-based rules for fighting my battles. Since then, although I have used traditional 'measurement by ruler' based rules, the goal of using hexes has remained fixed in my mind. My unit organisations have all been ordered to fit within 4 inch hexes, and my terrain has been constructed upon these hexes.




Using hexes has significant advantages. The speed with which a game can be played is speeded up because there is no measuring to be done: ranges can be assessed at a glance, movement distances are immediately apparent. More importantly for a competitive game, there are no ambiguities; no borderline cases where a distance might be 'in' or 'out' depending on how the ruler is held or on the prejudiced eye of the observer. Movement orders - defined by destination hex and facing - are made precise.



I have reached the stage where it is time to start setting down my ideas for the rules themselves. This is where the technology that is now available to us all comes into its own. My idea is to set out my rationale (if that's not too kind a description) for a particular section of rules in an entry on this blog, and to write out the rules themselves in an accompanying blog that contains the rules without any of the associated blurb.



There is sufficient precedent to show it is possible to create hex based rules, but whether it is possible to do so while retaining what represents to me the essential look and feel of old school rulesets is another matter. There are some obvious problems. The imposition of hexes removes all chances of making small adustments to position or facing: a battalion in line cannot face just where it wants. There is no move distance smaller than one hex, so penalties like 'half move up hill' cannot always work. Using a rules blog for the exercise will, hopefully, help a lot with trying to develop mechanisms that cope with all this: it represents an easily editable medium in html that I can update as the rules develop (or flounder). If I set the layout of the blog correctly it should be printable.



Inevitably, the rules are intended to suit only my personal taste, but anyone interested will be able to make suggestions (or point out shortcomings) in the comments section of the blog. All such help is gratefully received. And at the worst, the rules blog can be deleted without any great sorrow if - as is only too likely - the effort does not prove fruitful.

More on Multiple Basing

I have rebased a complete infantry battalion so it is now possible to judge whether the method gives the visual effect that I want. The photos show my Grenadiere-Garde battalion deployed with various august personages inspecting. Just laying out the battlion for a photo would have taken some time with single basing, whereas this shot was prepared in a few minutes and the figures, constrained by card and milliput, are arrayed with a precision that the Erbprinz regiment would approve.

I decided to retain officers and musicians on single bases. They do not represent the same time problem as there far fewer of them, and there is no need for the precision in placement that is required when drawing the rank and file up in formation. So I am happy, for now at least, that I have obtained the compromise between practicality and looks that I was seeking.

As the photos show, the unfortunate 'Oick on a yellow horse' has been found a position. My artillery battery was lacking a CO and this happy coincidence allows me to find a use for the Oick while observing 18th Century prejudices against the lower classes. It is yet to be discovered whether the fellow's understanding of ballistics is any better than his knowledge of horseflesh.

Modern architects like to use the description 'honest' to describe many of their most hideous productions. My basing system uses the opposing philosophy. I no longer have figures that are individuals, they are now mere components of six-man blocks, irrevocably linked together until the end of their days. As this is something I don't like, I'm happy to use a basing method that disguises the fact; that lies about it. I am reminded of something Michael Flanders' description of his revue 'At the Drop of a Hat':

The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth. And our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.

Once figures are mounted on multi-figure bases, there are numerous modifications that need to be made to the Charge! rules. The following amendments are intended to cover these.

1. Casualty Removal. Casualties are always removed from the flanks of the unit, the unit gradually shrinking in upon it's centre. If only one base is removed then this is taken from one flank and the remaining bases are shifted half a base's width in the direction of the flank the base was taken from.

We lose the appealing spectacle of gaps opening in the ranks as casualties are taken, but this is not necessarily any less realistic. It would be natural for the men to close in upon the centre as their losses mounted: in bad regiments the officers struggled to keep their men spread out in line rather than breaking ranks and ending up in a formation best described as a huddle.

2. Melee Resolution. The number of figures in contact on each side are counted up. If there are X figures on the side with the highest count and Y figures on the other then we have:

X minus Y = Z combats at 2:1
Y minus Z combats at 1:1

So if twelve figures are fighting ten, we have 12-10 = 2 combats at 2:1 and 10-2 = 8 combats at 1:1.  This isn't difficult maths to do in one's head.  Anyone playing Little Wars will have become accustomed to such calculations.  I find it's a lot easier than working one's way along the figures keeping a careful eye on where we have gotten to in a confused melee.