Battle of Bailen 1808 and Et Sans Resultat

That's got to hurt - you'd have thought!

Finally got Bailen on the table. This is the 1808 battle where the Spanish managed to beat the French under Dupont. For this game I decided to try out the Et Sans Resultat rules. I'd heard good things from them on the Meeples and Miniatures podcast and elsewhere, so was looking forward to it. As usual I'll do the battle report first, then a rules review and finish with some overall comments.

As an experiment I set the terrain up in 10cm Hexon, but then laid in 4cm hex cloth over it, worked pretty well.

Battle Report

STARTEX: French coming from left., Bailen off to right.

Chabert's Brigade was first on, and, as in 1808, swung SE to climb the slope and attack Coupigny (bottom of picture above). The first round was undecisive, both sides taking casualties, but by the second the French had the upper hand. Coupigny fell back broken, but Chabert retired as no longer effective.

Chabert's assault on Coupigny

The baggage train delayed Schramm's arrival buy a turn or tow, but they were sent stright up just to the S of the road to hit Reding. Again it took a couple of turn,s but this time Reding broke with minimal casualties to Schramm. Just as well as although Pannetier had arrived his orders got lost and he hadn't moved before the game was over! Dupre and Prive's cavalry faired better though and were thrown forward N of the road to join Schramm in a two pronged attack on Venegas (top of the main picture). Again two turns was all it took to send Venegas packing with minimal French losses.

Schramm on Reding - you'd have thought that Spanish gun would hurt!

So without even committing the rear-guard of the Marines, but with Chabert looking a bit the worse for wear the French totally over-turned the historical outcome.

The final fight on Venegas' position, with Reding himself almost surrounded

Rules Review

Well this was a bit up and down. I had good expectations, and the production values are really high, but  my heart sank when I read that deployed infantry moved 1125 yards - which at a 1" = 100yd scale means we're expected to measure to 1/4". As soon as I got the rules on the table I hit the next big negative, infantry move 1125 yards, but artillery only fire 900 yards. So you can move form out of range to melee in one go! The rules say that units "in contact" are still targettable as they are initially assumed to be at musket range, but may be out of arc - but after the first turn I always allowed one shot on the way in. What I did quite like though was that the fire is effectively "formation" (i.e Brigade) fire, with skirmish battalions and artillery combining against the approaching targets.

The initial melees seemed lacklustre, with few casualties (fatigues), but the after battle assessment saw more damage and was where the formation really suffered. At first it seemed to disconnect the damage from the actual combat - but again its reflects the focus on the "formation" not the Bn ( I should have watched the video tutorials first!).

Coming back the next day I realised I'd read the combat table wrongly. I though you just looked up the difference once (for the winner - which is what I do with SLS), whereas in fact you look up for both sides - but even so it was still the assessment that caused the real damage. I was now getting more into the flavour of the game, and you do need to think of it as formation level, even though you have Bn MUs.

I used the orders a bit, Pannetier's delay being the result of that, and I could see in a bigger game and more forcibly applied they might work pretty well.

Another big downer though came when look up troop types. There is page after page of stats for named commanders of the period, but units are only given in some representative OOBs, none of which had Cuirassiers (or some other key troop types!) so I've no idea what stat they should have. There was also no sense of formation (which could be allowable at this scale), but also no sense of cavalry wreaking havoc amongst unprepared infantry, or infantry being penalised for taking defensive measures. Gunners also appeared to be able to melee just as well as an irregular battalion - even against cavalry!

Overall

So overall, I think there is actually a very good set of rules in there, but its struggling to get out. It's got one of the nicest "higher level" takes on Napoleonic gaming I've seen, and I can see that the command, firing, melee and assessment sections could all work well with just a bit of tweaking, and as long as you stay in the formation mindset. But I think if I played again (as I may do - which is saying something!), then I'd certainly halve or third all movement to give the guns a fair crack of the whip (the French guns never stopped to fire a shot!) and give more of that sense of advance to contact.

Project Artemis

Actually ties in with my last post, but also indicative of the fact that I will (as the blog banner text declares) start to do more non-wargaming blog posts here, particularly as the space activity hots up over the next few years.

If you want to view just the wargaming post then just follow (or bookmark) the "just wargames post" link at left.

So first up is the proposed Project Artemis timeline for the USA's proposed return to the moon in 2024, and yearly moon-landings thereafter, with a very simple moonbase in 2028.

The Ordnance Survey has just done a moon map of the Apollo 11 landing site, at 1:1,470,000, but to support my moon gaming I really need something like a 1:25,000 of the south polar regions. The area around Amundsen and Shackleton sounds a possibility, here's a 150km map of part of Schrodinger crater from Google Earth/Moon - the real polar area around Amundsen is too distorted to see well.

Most views of the moon seem pretty fractal though - see the recent Chinese landing, with just more and smaller craters appearing as you zoom in, so UFO-style, if you haven't got a frame of reference you can't tell what size area you are looking at.

15mm Moongrunts - US

Finished the US troops of the GZG 15mm Moongrunts I picked up at Salute. Also finished the domes from Brigade (but form some reason forgot to photograph).

Had a bit of an issue as my intention was for these to be Chinese in tactical grey with the US in Apollo white, but a misreading of a Google caption meant I painted up the US figures, not the Chinese ones. So now it's the USA in tactical garb, and the Taikonauts in white.

I needed some scenery so I made up 3 or 4 craters from plastic bottle rims and grout-filler. The biggets one came out really nicely (photo to come), the others passable. For a bit more cover I also did some rocks, picking up suitable candidates on a walk through Moseley Bog. I also spent a couple of hours watching the Applo 16 and 17 documentaries on YouTube which are a great way to see the Moon's terrain, and the size (and scarcity!) of the bigger boulders - but otherwise it's going to be a turkey shoot! The missile defence turret is the spare weapon from one of the domes put on top of a kids watercolour pot.

Medieval/WOTR Spring Cohort

Completed my Spring cohort of WOTR 20mm from Tumbling Dice that I picked up a Salute. really nice figures, not a duff one amongst the set. First up Currours - wasn't expecting some to have lances but they look pretty nice. Closest I've seen to mounted sergeants-at-arms.

Then some levy bowmen. These are actually from his C12/13 range but I swopped the odd Norman helmet for a bareheaded ECW Covenanter's head!

Finally, some lovely handgunners in Burgundian livery.

Should be fun on the table!

Salute Scatter Terrain #3

Some more bits of scatter (and small) terrain have finally made it from Salute to a finished state. Above are a couple of rabbit warrens (OK, pre-date Salute) and some dead cows! All 20mm.

Some nice wicker fascines from The Square. Lots more of their stuff to come, greater supplier. Again 20mm.

Nice 28mm smallish skip from Blotz. Will get some bigger ones next time.

Not really scatter but some 6mm "barracks" from Blotz. In fact I'm treating them as semi-industrial/farm buildings as Estonia seems scattered with them. When I get some more I might cover up the windows and go for a grey/asbestos or possibly beige colour, but these metal ones are a good start.

Sabresquadron Playtest

As mentioned in the last of the CWO posts I decided to use the second half of the scenario to test Sabresquadron which I picked up at Salute, and which has been on my list for a while.

In the scenario there was a Brit platoon and supporting Chieftain in each of the central village and the southern wood. The village was attacked first by the T64s which took out the Chieftain for no loss, and then assaulted by the BMP platoon, the troops dismounting about 300m out. One section got wiped out on the way in, and the Brits kept the second one suppressed. But with no real A/T it reached the stage where the Soviets could just stand-off and blast the village with HE from the BMPs, or call in the 2S1s.

Against the wood it was a similar story. BMP Saggers took out the FV438 Swingfire team in an outlying farm, but then a BMP copped it from the Chieftain. Several misses on both sides til a T64 spared from the assault on the village drove across and took the Chieftain out. Remaining BMP sections deployed and went into the attack, and after a couple of rounds the facing Brit section was toast and I called game over.

It's odd, originally from what I'd seen I thought that Sabresquadron was going to be too complex (those huge data lists at the back?), but the core rules are very simple - possibly too simple for me. Now there are lots of rules for lots of special cases, special weapons, special scenarios and situations and so on, but it does strike me that the core rule set is missing some real essentials - decent spotting (a unit is visible as long as within a range and/or dependent on basic cover and if moved/fired, no roll), any form of suppression, and some impact of cover on to-hit (cover only comes in as a DM on whether a soft target is KO'd). The ranges seem over long for smaller weapons (e.g. SMG 4" vs SLR 12", x3 difference whereas its more like 25/50m vs 300m to my recollection), but movement distances seem huge (and complicated with the inches-per-step and steps-per-move calculation) . Add to that it's strict IGO-UGO (not even any overwatch) so you can motor your troops across the ground and fire before any enemy gets the chance to respond.

Oh, and not sure about the rules for tactical nukes as pretty much game over if they start to fly, quite apart from the ethical/moral side of including WMDs.

All-in-all then not a ruleset for me. There might be some nice colour bits lurking in there (drones and EW covered, but not sure well, and didn't try the pathfinder bit) but will have a better read in slow time.

Anyway only one quick play, but back to CWO for me.