Verbreitnet: a brief AAR

French Light Infantry Attacking Through Woods by Victor Huen

So, I never had a chance to provide an AAR on our Carnage & Glory game, the battle of Verbreitnet. As readers may remember from the preview, the scenario was fictional 1813 encounter between a French force (an infantry division and cavalry brigade) and an Allied command consisting of a Prussian infantry "brigade" (basically a division equivalent) and a brigade of Prussian and Russian cavalry. The two sides' forces were evenly balanced.

The battlefield included some basic terrain, but nothing to provide too great an advantage to either side. A stream or creek wound among some low hills close to the Allied side of the table (which we called the west side). Patches of woods, a few more low hills, and some grain fields were scattered over the center of the battlefield. A road ran from the west, Allied, edge of the board to the east, or French, side, roughly perpendicular to the two sides' deployment areas, with another joining it at right angles running towards the north side of the battlefield. 

The mission was a fairly straightforward "defeat the enemy" one; the intent was just to give one player an introduction to the game and the others a brush-up/reminder of the rules.

The Allies deployed with their cavalry on their right and their infantry occupying their left and center, with the right hugging the table edge and their left fairly open. The French mirrored their deployment, infantry facing infantry and cavalry facing cavalry. 

The Allies advanced their cavalry slightly then formed a holding position, waiting to see what the enemy did. In the meantime, they moved their infantry forward slowly, throwing out some light troops to extend their left flank.

The French moved forward fairly aggressively in the center while refusing their right with a battalion of légère, which sheltered from view inside a wheat field. One battery of French artillery seized a small hill in their center while another moved up the east-west road toward the junction.

The leftmost Prussian infantry regiment crossed the stream and paused, waiting to see where the bulk of the French infantry would go; meanwhile the rightmost Prussian infantry regiment held position on the near side of the stream. The French moved their right-hand brigade to meet the Prussian advance and a battle developed between the stream and the wheatfield. The Prussian riflemen on their far left moved in to support the attack but were driven back by the French légère, who advanced to the edge of the wheatfield and began volleying.

The French cavalry had moved to claim much of the ground between them and the Allied horse, using fields and low hills to screen their advance from the Allies' horse artillery, which had unlimbered on the edge of a wheatfield beside the east-west road. The French horse artillery, however, had found a good position to bombard the Allied horse from and began firing away.

An attack on the French infantry's right-hand brigade by Prussian musketeers in column of divisions was defeated, giving the French the confidence to push forward their left-hand infantry brigade along the east-west road towards the center of the Allied line. 

At this point, two squadrons of French cavalry crested the hill they were sheltering behind and launched an attack on the Allied cavalry's right flank. One squadron of Russian uhlans came out to meet them while a squadron of Russian hussars, taken on the wrong foot, failed to act and received the charge at the halt. The uhlans defeated their opponents and threw them back. The other French lancers won their action against the hussars, but took such a beating in doing so that they also fell back.

Prussian Schuetzen by Richard Knoetel

The French tried to build on success by sending in a squadron of chasseurs against the Russian uhlans; they succeeded, driving off the Russians. A squadron of Prussian hussars decided to test the French infantry that were advancing in the center and launched a charge, forcing some of the French infantry into square. Both sides' cavalry were exhausted by this flurry of activity, however, and since the Allies had taken the harder pounding, their cavalry was forced to retire from the field, while the French cavalry that was not retiring (essentially their chasseurs) would still be able to advance if they were led by a general officer.

In the center, with the Prussian cavalry retiring, the French infantry pushed forward, infantry in lines preceded by battalions of légère in extended order. In the center of the infantry battle, French and Prussians were still engaged, but the leftmost Prussian regiment had taken enough pounding in its attacks that it had also fallen back, leaving its comrades with both flanks exposed. At this point, the Allies decided to withdraw from the field before they were forced to flee.

We were hoping for several more players than we got in the end. We had three active players, an umpire, and two umpire's assistants (to move troops and measure distances, since we were playing by Zoom). For reasons I don't recall (possibly just army preference), we put the two experienced players on the same side (French) and gave the novice the Allied command. In retrospect, obviously, we should have put one experienced player on each side and drafted the two umpire's assistants as players (one was a novice C&G player, one experienced); that way we could have had an experienced player and a novice on each side, with a spare experienced player. 

We used a moderate-sized table (4' x 6') for a divisional action, but we should perhaps have started both armies a little closer together to give them room to fall back. While it would have taken away a bit of maneuver option, it would have given them a little more "backfield", so defeated troops didn't run off the edge of the table so fast. Alternately, we could have fought the action on a narrower front and used the short edges for deployment and the long edges for engagement. It can be challenging, even using the 1" = 50 paces scale, to fit a combined-arms C&G game on the average gaming table. With deployed cavalry moving 15" to 18" per turn and maneuvering cavalry moving twice that, opposing cavalry units can move onto the table from offboard and be within charge reach of each other at the end of the first turn, even when operating in line.

C&G, like any game, is a product of its designer's theory of how combat works. Unlike any other tabletop miniatures game, however, that theory can only be learned by playing the game. The designer's notes explain some elements of morale and fatigue, but it's only by playing (or hanging out in online discussion groups for the game) that one learns crucial elements of play. Artillery should initially take ranging shots with very low percentages of its total strength before engaging with the whole battery. Infantry should not advance more than 75 paces in a turn in which it plans to issue fire. If you wish to charge with a unit in Turn 2, be sure to advance towards the enemy in Turn 1, as the momentum of having done so will make a successful charge attempt more likely. 

And those are elements that one might intuit from a very close reading of the screenshots included in the manual. Other things that are laid out nowhere are the way that all the factors of an instance of firing affect its effectiveness or how the system determines what morale result will come from a combination of terrain, fatigue, firing, and combat factors. One can expect that fire from close range will be more effective than at maximum range, or that artillery that has not fired will be more effective than artillery that has been firing for several turns, using up its ammunition and fatiguing its gunners. And it's certainly more realistic that players not have formulae to make those computations exactly, as in a boardgame one can count up combat factors and compute the perfect attack given a combat results table. But one feels that going to the opposite extreme is just as unrealistic.

Kleiner Feldzug: Afterthoughts

The Capture Of The Prussian Fortress of Kolberg On 16 December 1761 by Alexander Kotzebue

In commenting on the last post about our KF 1757 campaign, Keith from The Wargames Room asked:

"I have myself wondered about running this campaign, or something similar. Do you think any aspects worked particular well? With hindsight would there be things you would change?"

Overall, I'd say that Kleiner Feldzug (KFZ) is fun and a good simple tool for playing a campaign. Just be aware of its limitations.

Of course, it has the same limitations of most campaign games that one uses to generate miniature battles. Most especially, players may maneuver effectively and generate the sort of battles that real generals long for but wargamers seldom like--ones where one side has a definite advantage, anywhere from the "slight edge" to the "completely insuperable". Some battles that the defender intended from the start to be an "economy of force" engagement can be dealt with by the "Resolving Small Battles" rule, but one may end up with an engagement where the attacker outnumbers the defender by 2:1 or where the defender establishes the sort of position that will cost the attacker half his army to break. Campaigns don't usually produce the "each side gets an equal force" games.

KFZ is a very simple game, and some of the players wanted much more detail than it's designed to supply. For example, the raid and recon process is VERY abstract; light and irregular troops go out, do stuff, and you just get the end result in terms of information and/or SPs lost. Players often wanted to know how they could better guard against these events, and the short answer in game mechanics terms is, "you can't". Likewise, some players wanted to take these "small wars" troops and do other things with them, bring them to the battlefield, sabotage bridges, hold mountain passes. My bland answer was that they were able to do the abstract business of raids and recon and that was it, but if you want to create a whole additional game model that enumerates these forces and gives army commanders the ability to assign them more specific missions or detach them to work with specific force commanders, one has that option. The only limit is one's imagination.

Another arm that doesn't make a real appearance in KFZ are the engineers and sappers. Players wanted to specify that forces staying in one place would take the time to dig in (something that many SYW armies would do given even the least opportunity). One can certainly allow that, but one has to work out what that will cost players and what benefit they get from it.

Another issue I had to deal with in adapting the game as written is that it's designed for sequential moves. Prussia moves, then Austria, and so on. So each side has to wait for the other side to decide on its move and submit it, and for the umpire to resolve it and post the results. 

Not only that, but KFZ is built for one-on-one play; turn one player into one player per army, and now each player is waiting on the next (or you have to wait until one team can all agree on their joint move). That means loooong delays either way.

I know from experience that it's hard to hold email campaigns together, and if players have to wait for each other to get around to thinking about the game, make decisions, and write them up, the game will start haemorrhaging players rapidly as people get bored and drop out or take even longer to get their head back into the latest turn.

So I had to tweak the structure of the game to allow all players' moves to be resolved simultaneously. This wasn't too much of a challenge until the armies started sending off small cavalry forces that moved swiftly and made me resort to very careful sequencing and to make some additional calls on how the supply rules would work.

Likewise, one has to make some decisions about how to implement information gathering and dissemination. In the original game, with only two players, each knows where all the opponent's troops are at start and knows where all the enemy's armies are (if not their composition) at the end of each move. I decided to leave that more or less intact, but one could take the opportunity to introduce a bit more fog of war and restrict players' knowledge of the location and strength of friendly and enemy forces absent proximity or information sharing. The latter should be exceptionally difficult for Prussians within Austria, as Austrian irregular forces created almost impenetrable barriers around Prussian armies. To reflect this in our game, I gave the Austrians a second raid/recon option for any Prussian forces inside Austria, but I had to cut this back to an extra recon only--giving the Austrians two raid options was far too powerful.

The raid option uses the attrition mechanism, and this we found far too devastating. Yes, armies should be discouraged from force-marching, but the Prussians *have* to move through mountains if they're going to move into Bohemia somewhere other than Pirna and Zittau, and the cost (50% chance of losing a SP for every unit and a 16% chance of losing two) proved to be far too devastating. I gave those subjected to attrition a 50% saving throw for each SP indicated to be lost, and that gave result that still curbed over-ambitious marching while not being unreasonably crippling.

Speaking of crippling, probably the most contentious event in the campaign was the surrender of Prague and the loss of von Browne's army. I made it very clear to the Austrian commander what *might* happen, but he convinced himself it couldn't really take place. Then the D6 came up 1, and the fortress surrendered. I wasn't prepared to give the Austrians a do-over just because they had ignored a very clear warning, especially because they could have fought the besieging Prussian army in the field but didn't want to take the losses that the very canny Prussian commander was clearly going to inflict on them by clever management of terrain and deployment. But it's something to consider: what event is going to be too bitter a pill for players to swallow, even if warned of it ahead of time, and how should one deal with it? Just take that opportunity for disaster away from them? or make them face up to the possible risk as well as the perceived reward?