Carnage & Glory: Officers and Cavalry and Developing a Scenario

 

The Battle of Leipzig by Vladimir Moshkov

Onward To Battle!

OK, having hit the high points of the rules, the next thing we need is a scenario to try them out. I have all the different modules, but I also know that the player who suggested the game, Scott "La Salle" B. is goofy about the French First Empire, so a Napoleonic scenario seemed warranted. I looked through the figures I had ready to hand, and a late-war (1813+) battle between French and Prussians seemed to be suitable. 

A historical battle or a hypothetical or imaginary one? A historical scenario, using a historical order of battle (OB) has the appeal of seeming more "real" and allowing players to match their wits against those of their historical counterparts. But history also has all kinds of funny angles, rough edges, and pointy bits that interfere with smoothness and simplicity. So for this test case, I'm going to make up a small engagement that might have been fought, drawing on historical OBs for inspiration, but also smoothed and simplified to make things easier and less distracting. Since in 1813 it was surely fought in Germany somewhere, I'll call it Die Schlacht bei Verbreitnet. I had a clever idea of naming it after the German word for example or test case, or sample, but I seem to have goofed somewhere, as this seems to mean "spreads", but I'm stuck with it now, so let's move on.

What size of battle? Something the battle of Leipzig (pictured above) is probably beyond the scope of C&G even with a whole club's resources. But since at least one of our players will be a C&G novice, the size of the battle should be constrained. I want to keep the number of troop units per player manageable, since a beginning player will be new to thinking out what all the options are for using their troops.

Another reason to keep the OB on the smaller side is the table I can easily set up for video gaming, a tabletop measuring 4' x 6'. Even when using 15mm figures and C&G's 1 inch = 50 paces, a table that size should not be overloaded with troops. So I thought maybe a division of infantry and a brigade of cavalry on each side. 

Napoleon Conferring With Desaix at Marengo by Keith Rocco

Officers

Command in C&G is mostly about being able to rally and encourage troops. Orders exist and do constrain action, but they're limited part of the game. Also, officers are "used" on a unit-by-unit basis; if an officer succeeds in supporting a unit (encouraging it in combat, rallying it afterwards), he's usually done for that turn. So even having good officers, a force can be handicapped if they don't have enough officers. So the number of officers has to scale to the number of units. If one side has a division of two brigades, getting a divisional commander and two brigadiers is going to be almost useless if each of the brigades has 4-6 units; three officers for ten or more units is too few.

Officers have to be rated for command level, leadership ability, and tactical ability. Command level determines what the range of their effectiveness will be once battle begins--the more senior the command, the larger his zone of influence. Leadership ability determines how well the officer issues and receives orders, but more importantly how they help units deal with adversity--it helps keep units in line when the enemy attack and it helps rally them to the standard when morale is faltering. And leadership contributes to the army's initiative. Tactical ability also contributes to initiative; it also guides the leader's eye when planning an attack and helps when units are seeking to charge.

1807, Friedland by Ernest Meissonier

Cavalry

How to represent cavalry units on the tabletop? Each regiment was composed of a number of squadrons, each squadron of a number of companies or troops, and each troop had a certain number of officers, NCOs, and common soldiers. When creating an OB, what should our tabletop units represent--regiments, squadrons, or troops? The designer has remarked that he tends to vary cavalry representation by how much flexibility he wants to give a commander. Very flexible? Each unit is a squadron. Less flexible? Each unit represents several squadrons. Least flexible? Each unit is a regiment. Of course, this varies too by the size of the unit; a 200-man 1814 cavalry regiment is like a large squadron, while a full-strength Russian light cavalry unit of 1,000+ men would be impossibly huge to represent as a single unit. One also has to think again about manageability; if one side has a division of infantry, that may be eight or more infantry battalions (single units in C&G). But a division of cavalry represented as individual squadrons might be sixteen or more squadrons. If each of those is a unit the player has to maneuver, fight, and rally, the player will run out of focus (and officers) far too quickly. For larger battles with more units, it's best to make cavalry units represent larger formations--groups of squadrons or (especially if the regiments are low in manpower) entire regiments.

In addition to how to represent cavalry units, each unit has its characteristics, like those of leaders, that have to be determined. Most important is its type (heavy, light, lancer) and its strength in numbers. Other factors include how many subunits it consists of (which will determine how nimble it is in executing evolutions), what sort of firearm it carries (if any: almost all cavalry carried some sort of musketoon or carbine for skirmishing and dismounted use, though many never used them in full-scale battles), and whether it carries colors (very important in the morale result of combats, if unit should lose a color or capture one of the enemy's), and who it reports to (what its chain of command is). Is the unit trained in skirmishing? And most important of all are its ratings for shooting and for combat (excellent, good, average, poor, contemptible), its class (guard, elite, line, militia, irregular), and experience (crack, veteran, trained, conscript). All units are rated on these characteristics, and the interaction of these (which do not change in the course of a battle) with a unit's actions and those of its opponents help to determine its fatigue and morale state (which generally start a battle at a high state, unless otherwise dictated by a campaign or historic battle circumstance).

Next Time: Infantry, Artillery, and Terrain!