Dougfest 2022 - General du Corp

The battle was thissssss big

After a long COVID hiatus, Doug hosted another summer game. I had missed Enfilade this year so eagerly headed over for some gaming and socialization with the regulars. General du Corp is a ruleset created by Doug and Seth (and arguably approaching it's final status) for fast play (convention slot) napoleonic large battle play (bases are brigades, and a command is a corp).

As usual, the battle that Doug set up was historically based although not a napoleonic battle it was still horse and musket (he has taken everything from 7 years war to ACW). After finishing the big battle we had time to play so we went over the backup table (set up in case people were interested in a late Friday night game....which we weren't as most of us had done a long commute that day) and played out a fun little battle. 

Taken from the ACW the forces are wildly uneven (I've forgotten the battle but I'm sure Doug will comment below to enlighten us). Peter threw the low die, so he took command of the defenders, seriously hamstrung by having a single commander so would definitely be pip starved for movement. Luckily this was a fun times game and can be gauged in terms of how the historical fight went. 

The defenders (British/Rebels) are holding a series of defensible hills vs the dug in attackers (French/union). Apparently the centre troops took local initiative to test the Rebel lines and, finding them insufficient and under fire, continued to storm forward to drive them off.

I'm unclear if  the flanks were late arrivals or part of the probe in force operation. In game terms we had 3 commands (left/right/centre) with numerical and artillery superiority. Cake walk, right?

 

 

 

I snagged the centre command (Junot). Entrenched (Gabions in this case) they had some disruption inflicted when crossing. This meant it was much more expensive in terms of command pips to move them across the line, notably so for artillery. 

The french/union artillery was historically out of range and helped to very little effect. In our case there were some troops on the Rebel/British Right that were (unfortunately) in range and were sorely thumped. A replay would have us fix this oversight.

In the spirit of a fun game I said 'damn the consequences!' and ordered my troops forward in a mad dash for the enemy lines, challenging my wing commanders to keep up.

Pas de Charge or something!

 

 Peter was hoping to ravage the centre advance between his two flanking hill forces artillery. Unfortunately the artillery support in the centre rapidly thinned his force on one side, and the attackers rolled well for pips so were able to apply pressure almost immediately.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Mandatory crotch shot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The right wing of the french/union bloodied the hill on the right and extended their line to hammer them more. In GdC the moral checks are on a corp (commander) basis. It takes a while for the checks to start but they are fairly uncompromising. Small commands are, naturally, more brittle than large ones.

Peter wisely used his pips to try and extract his wings from destruction. I believe the french left wing took a bad morale check and halted their advance for a turn. 

 

A small cube can be seen on one of the british infantry stands. This denotes square (cube, square, get it?). As expected they are great vs cavalry but suffer greatly against infantry and cannon. 

My centre finally contaced, but faced a tough nut of defending infantry on the hill. In GdC each side takes attrition damage from every combat. So while winning is nice, it is very practiceable to grind the opponent down. Historically the defenders were of VERY uneven quality, so the defenders had variable strength. Peter rolled consistently horribly so they weren't much of a speed bump. The attackers had taken a fair amount of damage from cannons on the way up. Had the roll been better I would have faced some hard sledding. 

Shortly after contact a morale check had the defenders skeddaddle. This matched his decision that he would be pulling his troops anyway. 

It was a fun quick game (I ran off afterward to catch a ferry). A couple of minor improvements around starting site, as well as maybe bumping up the strength of the defenders to mitigate bad rolls.