CinC Lefebvre - Missing in Action

Campaign update
I suppose it's not all that unusual when a campaign falls apart after the first battle occurs. The meshing of a campaign system to a tabletop gaming really does attach two quite different games together and requires a fair amount of commitment from numerous people.

In any event, the game has been on pause for a few weeks now. I think the primary problem is so few people are set up to game out the battle themselves. This puts a high load on Gavin, who I understand is working a fairly new job with a much larger commute. It's hardly fair division of labour considering he has a family AND needs to debug the system.

Here is the writeups by Mike and Gavin.

At this junction we see another source of trouble for the campaign. The system wasn't explicitly built around the tabletop ruleset. This gives more flexibility by using #'s of troops and an ambiguous fatigue factor but it means that decision have to be made about which rules to use and how to port results back and forth. I think this has also stymied the campaign given that the result have not been re-inputted into the system.


Rules
This first/last battle was fought in 6mm with principles of war (which I managed to track down a copy for myself as I was interested by what I had found online HERE). One of the things that appeals to me about this system is the requirement for orders to be given to your formations. Between the orders, and the blinds, the variably amount of actions a given formation generates and the difficulty in changing orders for units you create a fair amount of friction in changing the battle plan on the fly. The use of blinds as either deployed or marching (basically is the rectangle lengthwise or width wise) seems very appropriate for the era. I'm hoping to get to a point where I can get in a game or three myself. I managed to find another example of play for a different era here.

Gavin/Mike noted (if not in their writeup then in the campaign forum) that the forces involved were a bit too large for this system. I know that Malcolm's campaign (the progenitor of this one) used napoleon's battles (the system I've been working towards for my own 15mm naps).

Figures
One of the nice results of the campaign is that I've been making progress on painting up my own napoleonic figs. It's a pretty steep cliff you need to ascend to start playing in terms of numbers though. I'm working towards playing a 'small' napoleon's battles scenario with a friend in town, Marengo. The requirements for the french player include: 200 infantry, 12 command stands (of between 1 and 3 figures), 1 artillery base (~4 figs), and 36 cavalry. This doesn't include the breakdown of cavalry and infantry into their different types (light, line, hussar, etc).

I intend to get some pictures of the progress up soonish.

CinC Lefebvre: First contact

March 10, 1809 
Well, it was not meant to be. Spanish troops have been encountered around Burgos, probably easily brushed away. Victor and Mortier (Red and Rust) have been delayed by the fortresses and are only at Pancorbo. Most troubling is that Portugese/British troops are rumoured at Braganca....on the 7th. This means that Vallodid is no longer possible to capture prior to the Brits arriving.

I have dashed off reports to the commanders to try and stage a trap.  A weak force of mortier will sit at burgos, with his remaining troops resting at Pancorbo. I (yellow) intend to move to Belarado via Longrono (2 days march), hopefully the spanish cavalry currently at belarado gets trapped and can't scout us properly. Victor till take his place at Aquillar de campo, and screen Casstrillo de villavega with his Cav. If all works out properly it will appear to be a corp in Burgos with some screen out.

Ney is moving to Navaleno for the post battle excitement.

When the enemy falls on them along the main road from Vallodid, all the forces on 'march to the sound of the guns' will reinforce from many directions. Hopefully we get a great matchup and can mop the floor with our opponent. It's a bit of worry time wise as it should *just* be possible to get into position if there are no major battles with the few spanish troops in the area. (hopefully they are set to retreating). More of a concern is all our troops are tired. It would be nice to have a day or two to rest prior to the battle.

Regardless of what happens, Ney will be able to resume a drive West on Vallodid, screening our move on Madrid, possibly cutting supply and/or hitting the Brits in the flank.

In other news a mystery force has appeared in Roncevalles. I'm pretty confident that the Spanish shouldn't have been able to sneak through our advance. Rumor has it that there are now Guerrillas spawning. Off goes another detachment....

March 12th

My forces dealing with the guerrilla problem

Well, plans change already. Yesterday we reacted to a bunch of guerrillas spawning and eating messengers. Today some messages then caught up with me, and Victor is already gallavanting down the road to Vallodid. He's one leg away. I'm a little concerned that he will hit the 16k of troops there with his 21k and suddenly find reinforcements pouring in. The other equally scary proposition is the British show up with a counter attack immediately after one battle.

I've instructed Mortier to try and get rid of an irritating Spanish cav division that's hanging out west of burgos, and occupy a position that will cover Victors flank. Hopefully if he gets rolled back the two of us (and Ney when he arrives) can arrest any dramatic problems.

March 13th

The system is on pause. A battle between Victor and Anglo-Portugese forces at Vallodid looms. Apparantly we hold a full corp vs approx 1/2 corp advantage...plus Victors troops hold a pretty decent mix of veteran's.

Mortier is ensconed at Burgos and I'm in close support at Belarado. I may have Mortier start moving west, although it would be nice to know the result of the battle first. If it's a loss, then we should hold tight.

In the Center, Ney has started to shake his forces out and cross the ebro, swing  west and move towards Vallodid. Him and I are both editing a supply line...I don't think he realizes it needs to supply Augereu as well. Speaking of which, it appears VII corp hasn't moved in almost a week. He's besieging Zaragoz instead of leaving some forces and moving on. I need to send him a messenger telling him to get his ass moving. *Sigh*

The battle *may* get played out this week. 

CinC Lefebvre: Phase 2

The campaign kicked off on Saturday morning. True to form for these things there were some initial hiccups as we found a variety of bugs. Troops not moving due to missing paragraph marks in the code, headquarter units able to start sieges by themselves, a failure to mention what the movement rates for different units actually were, etc.

It seems to be running somewhat smoothly. Already on day 2 my fellow commanders have failed to write me about where they are. I can only hope they are roughly where I think they are supposed to be *SIGH*. I've requested updates from them, and I've been sending 3 of them daily updates of my own, so hopefully it catches on.

There really isn't much to report, but I thought that I'd post up the PHASE 2 map I made. All of the preplanning was essentially done on a single, long, night. I needed to send out briefs to all 8 other french players with detailed lines of march, which supply line is theirs, who is allowed to edit that supply line, whom they should be in daily communication with, as well as specify towns to avoid (as their neighbour will be using it).

It was a bit of a whirlwind. Considering the plan never survives contact with the enemy it's probably a bit useless too. Currently it gives me a vague idea where everyone is though, which is handy. More importantly I think supply and traffic issues would have been a disaster for us. There are minor and major roads with limits on men travelling down them, already it's a tight fit and corp are strung out over a few nodes (towns/cities/fortresses). I imagine if there wasn't a good plan everyone would have piled up on each other. A nice feature is more priority that sets which unit will have access to road space before another. I've assigned default priorities to corp to help with the elbow rubbing phenomena.

Phase 2: (IN THEORY)
Red/Rust takes Vallodid and prepares for the arrival of the British from Portugal. It's likely a bit of a foot race so Vallodid may not be captured.

Yellow, the reserve/me, moves to Burgos to wait and be helpful

Light blue, Ney pivots west as zaragoz falls and moves West to hit Madrid from the North......or as more likely will face the Brits as well.

Medium Blue, Augereu, will continue a straight drive on madrid. The Roads totally suck here so he could be stopped cold on the march.

Dark Blue, Moncey, has a tough job to do; swing deep south through the mountains and emerge on the plain south of madrid. I'm hoping that I'm totally prescient and he gets to hit something in the flank as

Augereu pins it in his drive on madrid. Otherwise he has a wide latitude in operations. i suggested he capture the approaches to Ciudad Real to help control the center and East of spain.

Pink, Bessieries, has the widest latitude of all. I basically won't hear anything from him due to communication lags. He is to Capture Catalonia and move toward Valencia. I've instructed him and Moncey to be read to assist one another in case there is a field army West of Valencia (They would need to guard each others flanks in some way.

More updates as they happen....

CinC Lefebvre

Sweet god what have I done. In the spirit of continually taking on things until it's too much I've volunteered to be CinC of the french forces in Gavin's campaign. I spent the last couple of hours planning out which corp/player starts where and giving them detailed directions.

It's all front loaded of course, with the fog of war, numerous days for couriers to race back and forth and the caveat 'no plan survives contact with the enemy' I won't have too much influence after the game progresses. The front loading is a bit intense though....

Here is the map I made up to help my fellow marshals:

 We can see there are 4 depots and a fairly broad advance. There are discreet task forces though. Pink should have fun with an highly independent command. I'm yellow so the chance of communication are slim.... couriers only run along supply lines and can 'see' three legs away from them to find their target.

Blue is tasked with moving through zaragoz and pivoting to hit madrid (I'll do up a phase 2 map soon),. Red/rust need to take vallodid. They also can expect the british to show up around the time they arrive at vallodid. Whoo hoo. I (yellow/reserve) am going to stay close to red/rust. Light blue picots west and comes at madrid from the north so we can expect some help there.

I actually ended up with the weakest/lamest corp of them all. Smallest and with 50% Militia I'm a bit hooped. Luckily Red, Rust and light blue are the largest corp i have. I really do hope I'm right and the brits come racing onto the teeth of my marshals.

Here is the intelligence we've been given for the entire operation:

Marshals of France,
You have been given the task of conquering Spain and Portugal. In their defence, the enemy can muster over 70k men in field armies. Additionally, you can expect every Fortress and regional capital to be strongly held by Garrisons.
Our spies have reported that the British army landed in Lisbon some days ago obviously in response to news of our own preparations. It is highly unlikely that they have moved from that area, although not impossible. We have had no word that they have entered Spain however.
The Spanish Army is in a state of disarray, and is unlikely to provide a long lived resistance. Its field armies whereabouts are unknown but we are pretty certain that the border regions of Aragon and Catalonia are undefended except for troops already mentioned.

Gavin's Penninsular campaign - Marshal Lefebre

Very exciting news! I've been accepted into Gavin's napoleonics campaign. A number of years ago I had the fortune to participate in a game run by Malcom Mccallum War of the Fifth Coalition. He has programmed a web based campaign system that crunches all the boring parts for the GM and is largely used to set up interesting table top games. Gavin and I were fobbed off into Italy and faced each other (as neither of us were set up to play games on the table and were out of town (Malcolm in Victoria, I'm in Vancouver, and Gavin in the UK somewhere). Gavin liked it sufficiently that he was able to get a bunch of back end data from Malcolm, and used his maps/database to create his own variant of the system. Very ambitious, and I'm excited to see what he has done.

The system
First off, take a look at the beautiful maps that Malcolm created himself (MAPS!). A number of internet presences have discovered these maps as great things to use, including Murdoch, for their own naps campaigns.
The system is largely based around units being present at a given node. These nodes (towns, cities, fortresses) are linked by connections/roads that vary in their carrying capacity (minor +/- river crossing, major +/- river crossing). From the players hq (which is a unit as well) couriers are sent with orders to the units, the couriers move at a set speed (3 legs a day). Cavalry moves at 2, infantry at 1 (unless force marching).
The great thing about the system is the fog of war. Messages to your allies move at 3 legs per day. Reports from your troops regarding things they encounter also move at 3 per day. You orders will often take a day plus to reach the troops, who then begin to follow them the following day (typically). It becomes very tough to understand what is going on and we start to get real friction, and tough decisions.

Variations
So far it appears that Gavin has chosen to work with troop numbers (men) as the road carrying capacity. Malcolm used units instead. Also Gavin has made the operative unit a brigade, although it appears that numbers of troops are tracked by battalion. This is likely due to how he plans to do table top battles, but I will have to see.

Malcolms system was a point buy for each division, supply leg, depot, reinforcement, hq, spy, fleet, etc. Gavin seems to be based purely on numbers. Reinforcements occur based on proximity to a supply line and are opposed by attrition (with all it's various modifiers). Malcolm had columns of reinforcements that marched along the supply line to the front. Formations/divisions that encountered them would eat them if under strength.

Gavin has chosen to enact a garrison/guerilla value into areas (provinces perhaps? Maybe individual nodes?) which will affect the likelyhood of loosing a courier. As far as I know Malcolm's system had the courier get through unless blocked by troops. Also his insurgents/rebels were units raised by players that were uncontrolled (run by a computer algorithm) that couldn't be disbanded.

Campaign
The campaign itself is a french invasion of spain. Right now the fellow marshals and I are bashing heads together trying to come up with a plan and elect a CinC (oh the democratic traditions!). I am marshal Francois Joseph Lefebvre and have a pretty piss poor corp. 50% militia, no cavalry. I'm thinking pinning corp while someone does something exciting to save me. We shall see though....