KF 1757: Supporting Mechanisms

Models of Austrian military wagons and limbered gun, Wagram Museum (http://ultimaratioregis.com)

Attrition

Attrition is a fairly simple mechanism in Kleiner Feldzug. Jolly simple, but jolly deadly.

From a different war...

Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead : [Adendorff has explained the classic Zulu 'buffalo' battle formation]  It looks er... jolly simple, doesn't it?

Adendorff : It's, er, jolly deadly, old boy.

In Kleiner Feldzug, troops have to take attrition checks when they take actions that may cause substantial non-battle losses. These include force marches, marching when out of supply, marching during the winter, marching through hostile terrain (primarily in Europe marching through mountain passes, though extensive swamps or other dense, unpopulated terrain would count). Simply sitting still, if in a fortress under siege, will cause an attrition check, though sitting still while otherwise out of supply will not (some amount of foraging will supply basic needs, though it cannot replenish military supplies).

Attrition checks happen for each instance so, for example, if one force-marched two points, one of them over a mountain pass, while out of supply, one would take four checks.

Attrition checks are fairly brutal. One rolls a die per attrited unit; two-thirds of die rolls will result in one or two SPs of losses. Most units have 4-9 SPs, with average units possessing 6 or 7. So that rash command in the example just mentioned that takes four attrition checks will suffer from 0 to 8 SP losses PER UNIT, with an average loss of around 3 SPs per unit. Needless to say, for a force composed of mediocre to average troops (4 to 6 SP per unit), this would be crippling; even for a force composed of good troops (7, 8, or 9 SP per unit), this would be a severe blow.

The lesson? Don't undergo attrition checks if you can avoid it!

Dispatches

Beautifully painted Minden jäger zu pferde delivering a dispatch (altefritz.blogspot.com)

This subject is not addressed directly in the original Kleiner Feldzug rules. Since we're playing this online by email, I thought it would make life ...interesting...for players if they could not communicate immediately and directly with each other unless the officers they were playing were loacted at the same point.

Thus players wanting to send messages to other players (friendly or, I suppose, enemy) have to send them to the umpire. The umpire then determines if the messages get through, get lost or delayed, or get captured/intercepted. Since commanders were likely to send dispatches via multiple couriers, these results are not exclusive of each other--one copy of a message might get delayed, while another got through and another was intercepted.

For the moment, I'll leave it at that.