Napoleonic Wargame Club (NWC)

Mssrs.,

With all due respect, I do believe it is possible to mount effective defenses, but there is no single, magic "key." Rather, a succesful defender must balance several factors:

* First, if you are faced with overwhelming odds (2/1+) RUN AWAY[:p]. It's better to trade space for time while you bring up reinforcements. Even better, by retiring you are getting closer to your reinforcements while the enemy is advancing away from his supports.

* Maintain a local reserve for c-attacks. Any line can be broken, but if you have a ready c-attack force you can inflict greater damage on your opponent with your riposte than s/he did with his initial attack. Your c-attack force will hit the enemy at the moment his forces are disordered and defending at only 2/3 strength. Moreover, units that advanced too far, such as cav executing multiple melees, can be cut off and eliminated altogether.

* Preserve your chain-of-command at all costs. It won't affect the first turn of an engagement, but over time units with an intact command structure will be less likely to disorder/rout in the first place AND will rally 2/3 of the time. On the other hand, "detached" units remain disordered almost indefinitely.

* The corollary of this is that you should treat DIVISIONS as your basic maneuver element so that you can preserve the chain of command. Sending rgts, or even bgs, willy-nilly across the battlefield will leave you with a bunch of disordered units that cannot possibly hold off anyone. On the other hand, by preserving the integrity of your divs, a numerically inferior force can hold off twice its number. For instance, in a Waterloo Campaign game I am currently playing, a French cav div of 3 rgts and a horse arty btty fought 7 A/A cav rgts and a bn of infantry to a stand still for two hours until help arrived[8D]. The majority of my sqds kept rallying each turn while the A/A cav, all of which was essentially "detached", were good for only 1 melee and then remained disordered and/or routed for 3-4 turns at a time.

Regards,

Paco

<i>Maréchal</i> M. Francisco Palomo
<i>Grande Duc d'Abrantes
Comte de Marseille
Commandant - Division de Cavalerie de la Vieille Garde </i>

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="3" face="book antiqua" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Bill Peters</i>
I also would like to see:

1. Full defender fire. Enough is enough. Why are muskets and cannon balls suddenly lowered in ability to hit targets. Especially on the defense! We already have the attacker halved when he has moved and THEN fires so we dont need to halve the attacker and there would be a backlash on this if we did.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Bill,

I would remind you that during the run-up to Eckmuhl's release defensive fire was consciously reduced in effectiveness precisely because, with ADF activated, a defender would be firing multiple times. The idea was that the effect of 2-3 defensive fires should only equal one, full fire. At present, a defending inf unit can fire a) whenever any enemy advances within musket range, AND b) when a melee is initiated. If a defending unit is allowed to fire at full effect 3-5 times, the balance would be radically tipped in the other direction.

IMO, what generally leads to the sudden collapse of a defensive line is an attacker's ability, with the single-phase system, to punch a hole in the defensive line, exploit the gap to block retreat routes, and then initiate a devastating series of ZOC kills, all in one turn. The "embedded melee" house rules go a long way to address this disparity. A conversion to 10 minute turns, with their attendant, reduced movement, should likewise increase the power of the defense. The reduced stacking limits we are experimenting with should likewise prevent pile-driver assaults. Finally, a revision of the retreat routine is badly needed. At present a ZOC kill can be achieved simply by blocking the two "rear" hexes with formed units and the "front" two hexes with either skirmishers or ZOCs. Allowing defeated units to retreat "sideways," as skirmishers and squares already do, would dramatically reduce the number of ZOC kills.

Regards,

Paco

<i>Maréchal</i> M. Francisco Palomo
<i>Grande Duc d'Abrantes
Comte de Marseille
Commandant - Division de Cavalerie de la Vieille Garde </i>