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.