Progress and Digressions

This post was written a year ago, but never published...

It is high time to do that now, in anticipation of more good stuff to come, I trust.

I see it has been quite a while since I put anything up.  In January I looked forward to playing Aspern-Essling by May (everything was ready, including printing of the army counters), but for one reason and another we have not had a public battle at the club since then.  The delay has dragged on so long, in fact, that I decided in the end to take a step that I always meant to take eventually.  I have ordered troops from Baccus, initially enough for Aspern-Essling, then in following orders for a replay of Friedland and, with the addition of Bavarians, for 1805 and Austerlitz.  That will keep us for a while, and then a small number of Prussians will enable us to do 1807, and a large number to do 1806.

Nevertheless, things have not been entirely static.  Mini-playtests have allowed the Throne & Altar rules to be refined further and they are now close, I think, to a final form.  Meantime, in anticipation of the promised 1805 campaign next year I have been at work on three parallel projects.

Campaign Rules (Pour la Gloire)

Although these rules are inspired somewhat (far more loosely than T&A is inspired by AoF) by Greg Wagman's two ACW campaigns, I did not want to go the route of writing a set of rules just for one campaign.  I set out to make it generic, at least to any Napoleonic campaign, and I believe the rules could be used for a much wider range of periods - certainly back to 1700 or so and forward to the advent of railroads - in both cases probably further.  The result is Pour la Gloire - a campaign companion to Throne & Altar.  I shared a version of it with several club members a few months back.  I have polished it a little further, but 1805 will be its first big outing.  I hope to run some truncated campaigns between now and then (truncated by being restricted to just the strategic or operational level) to confirm and calibrate a few things.

1805 Campaign Scenario

Since the rules are not campaign-specific, the campaign-specific stuff must be elsewhere, and this is where it is.  A great deal of the work has been in researching orders of battle.  It is easy enough to find out who was at Austerlitz, but who wasn't?  And where were they instead?  Between Chandler, Petre and Nafziger (alright, I looked at Wikipedia, too, but I washed my hands afterwards, OK?) I think I have something workable.  It is not fit for scholarly publication by a long stretch, but will do the job for us.

What is the job?  This strikes close to the heart of what historical wargaming, for me, is all about.  I don't want to just play a game or while away an enjoyable few hours with friends.  I do want those things, of course, but I want there to be more to it.  I want to have learned something from the experience.  This is why I am not so keen on skirmish games, I suppose, and the same for fictitious battle scenarios.  The situation is generally "a tactical problem", or worse a random encounter, with meaningless terrain, meaningless forces and no context.  Win or lose, what does it matter?  What is the connection with reality more than, say, a game of bridge? 

A campaign context, even one that is itself fictional, can make that situation a good deal better, but a historical campaign is best.  Even though the individual battles within it may be fictional, they are occuring within a real historical situation with real things at stake.  As Tolkein said, "I much prefer history, real or feigned..."

As a result of doing the research for this campaign I already have a much better understanding of it than I did before, and that produces some features much more interesting that I was initially anticipating (I am thinking in particular of the delicate diplomatic position of Bavaria).  I hope that I will have a better one again having overseen a playthrough of it, and I hope the participants will, too.

But I digress.  To return to orders of battle, I have ended up doing OOBs not only for the French, Bavarian, Austrian and Russian armies in Germany, but also for those in northern Italy.  The Italian front is generally abstracted, but historically Charles did (reluctantly) release some troops from Italy for service in Germany, and a situation could even arise in which major forces could move to the north side of the Alps.  So, complete OOBs.

GeoComb Mapping System

Naturally, the campaign needs a map.  I have always loved maps, and one of my early realisations about wargames as a teenager was how much they can teach you about geography.  When you fight over a terrain, you get to know it.  This knowledge is limited, of course, by the accuracy and resolution of the representation, but that's life.

For a couple of decades now, when I wanted to learn a new skill set in my professional world of software development, I used as my hobby project a mapping system.  One or two versions got to be fairly complete before being abandoned.  Collectively, I called these efforts "GeoComb", because they put the earth into a honeycomb (hex) grid.  Naturally, I turned to Geocomb for my campaign map. 

The need for operational charts that would map down to tabletops, after the fashion of the maps in "Gibraltar of the West" and "A Formidable Invasion", meant that I needed something a good deal more detailed than previous versions.  Those had been top-down, data-driven, and using a patchwork of thousands of images to represent the description of terrain.  Anyway, I no longer had any working software.  So I started afresh, leaving out for the time being the programming aspect of it and concentrating on the maps, this time bottom-up and graphics-based.  One of the problems I always wrestled with earlier was that that faces all attempts to represent a curved surface on a flat map.  It is not a matter of avoiding distortion but of deciding what kind of distortion you can live with.  My previous efforts were always somewhat unsatisfactory in this regard, for there was a good deal of guesswork as to where things should go, and I was never really sure just how much and what sort of distortion there was.

That is now changed.  I will post a separate article in due course on how the mapping system works, but for now I will just say that the map for 1805  is complete and ready to go (endless tweaking aside).  This is what the strategic map looks like:

It covers the area from the valley of the Rhine (the French jump-off line) to that of the Morava (for those weak on central European geography, this is the river that flows south through eastern Moravia/Slovakia to join the Danube somewhat east of Vienna). Its southern boundary is the Alps - Innsbruck is just on the map - and its northern just short of the edge of the north German plain - Jena is barely on the map, Dresden barely off it.  The map exists at two resolutions - a strategic version with a hex grid (over 300 hexes, each about eighteen miles across), and an operational version with a staggered-square grid.  Each of the strategic hexes is a separate map, so that an operational map can be assembled by sticking together whatever hexes are required.  

More to follow, when I have time...