Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Age of the Big Battalions => Topic started by: Forwardmarchstudio on May 09, 2018, 07:48:38 AM
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I mean a game in which all the battalions from all the armies were represented, whether they were on single bases or on multiple bases allowing different formations. I'd imagine that if this has ever been done, it was done on multiple tables... On my calculations, if an average, ~500 man battalion model is 30mm in frontage, this battle would take up a 15' square table.
Just kicking around some project ideas...
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Never Leipzig in 28mm, but when we gamed a reduced OOB version of Bautzen (a similar but smaller scale battle) in 2012, there were 6 x 6'x8' tables, as below:
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Peter Gilder did a massive 25mm Leipzig game at the WHC which was "bathtubbed" to an overall 1:66 figure:man ratio but featured the entire battlefield in an enormous 'U' shaped table set up.
Also there was a 6mm version done with Heroics/Ros figures a few years later but I think that was regiment/brigade bases.
There was a great series of articles in one of the old wargame magazines about sculpting the 3d table and the game itself. Early Wargames Illustrated I think, ageing memory may be letting me down but I think it was Peter Dennis.
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Peter Heath, who used to have a company called 'Anschluss Publishing', selling wargames rules and scenario books, did Leipzig at 1:20 ratio using 6mm figures. It was something to behold! Was photographed extensively in Wargames Illustrated at the time and we had the pleasure of having our game next to his at 'Warcon' in 1992ish.
The board was about 16 feet square and in order to reach the middle you had to walk on the scenery. The scenery was carved out of six-inch-thick blocks of polystyrene and was made 'seamless' using masking tape, glue and flock. It looked incredible.
The rules were EXTREMELY fast-play - called 'The Ebb & Flow of Battle', they didn't use dice. Instead, each unit delivered a set amount of firepower/combat strength based on its current strength and troop quality. Not to everyone's cup of tea, but it worked for these colossal games.
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Peter Heath.....that's who I was trying to remember. The terrain for that game was a work of art.
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Peter Heath, who used to have a company called 'Anschluss Publishing', selling wargames rules and scenario books, did Leipzig at 1:20 ratio using 6mm figures. It was something to behold! Was photographed extensively in Wargames Illustrated at the time and we had the pleasure of having our game next to his at 'Warcon' in 1992ish.
That takes me back. I spent a very pleasant evening at the show with Peter, discussing, over several pints, rules with no random factor.
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Oh so did we... More than a few... Peter and I always managed to get our games positioned in the bar at Warcon, so we could carry on playing after the rest of the show had been locked up... We drank the student's union bar dry each time... :D
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Those Ebb and Flow of Battle rules sound very interesting. I’ve always thought there was too much randomness in combat resolution in Napoleonic games, especially as the scale goes up.
I’m asking because I’m thinking of doing a mega-game using my orignal 3d printed stuff along with my plastic-card battalions, which can be seen here:
http://forwardmarchminiatures.blogspot.com/2017/08/hack-for-forward-march-studios-infantry.html?m=1
For this game, French battalions would be on 30mm bases, as described above. The table will probably be a huge map placed under glass, but with buildings and bridges placed on top as models, using my 2mm terrain. It will probably look like this:
(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YCBlO4w7nRo/WdWi7oK88AI/AAAAAAAACN0/1P7FOL5JZqUvNMIp5ngXeTLTbZynIhm7ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/new%2Bstyle%2Bbattlefield.jpg)
This way, all the models can be slid around with croups, which will allow for playing on a larger than normal sized board. It will also be cheap and portable; this is basically going to be the ultimate proof of concept for my 2mm army system: cheap, portable, and no flock required. Its interesting that the prior game of Leipzig memtion above was a 16 foot square; that’s almost exactly what my plan comes out to. The difficult problem here will be organizing everything. A game like this will require a lot of labels to keep track of. I did hand drawn labels for Wagram, which really looked nice, but those were a lot of work, and this bigger than Wagram. I’ll have to figure out some other labelling method...
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Out of interest, what rules would you veterans recommend for 6mm big Napoleonic battles?
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Out of interest, what rules would you veterans recommend for 6mm big Napoleonic battles?
Volley and Bayonet, or Grand Armee if you want to retain a "figure game" feel or Blucher if you are OK with more boardgame in 3d.
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Not sure why you think V&B and Grand Armee are more figure games than Blucher.
They are all figure games if you use figures, and all of them work well for large battles. Blucher certainly plays fastest of the three.
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That is the impression that Blucher gave me, partly with the look of the bases (although I accept you could remove or hide the obtrusive stat section) but also the way the game played. I am in no way criticising them, they are a good set of rules and I happily recommend them.
I think Sam is one of the most innovative designers in the wargaming hobby.
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Blucher are a very well thought out and innovative st of rules for 'fast play, large battle' games. Sam M. is a clever man.
It is also my opinion that Blucher games have a 'board game' feel, rather than a 'miniatures game' feel. However, there is nothing wrong with playing board games with miniatures - we do it all the time with Command and Colors (ancients and Napoleonic), and I've even done ancient naval games with board game (GMT War Galley) rules to some good effect. Sometimes, the 'board game' approach is the way to go. For something as big as Leipzig I think Blucher would be a very appropriate set to use.
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I'm sure someone must have done Leipzig using 'Empire' back in the day.
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Ok- here's what I'm working on for Leipzig.
From my blog, http://forwardmarchminiatures.blogspot.com/2018/05/summer-is-here-and-2mm-leipzig-test.html (http://forwardmarchminiatures.blogspot.com/2018/05/summer-is-here-and-2mm-leipzig-test.html).
(click the link and then click the pictures for giant hi-res versions)
This is a large corps of French infantry in 2mm hybrid-krieglspiel style. Each battalion is 30mm wide, and represents about 450 infantry in three ranks on a 100m frontage. This is an easy "snap-to" groundscale that lets me plan battles at 1' = 1km. It should let me do the battle without abstracting the groundscale, as long as I'm using croups....
(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dNvihJPq444/Wvj5W4gdPLI/AAAAAAAACd8/6qqYbcsQOYw3_-U-P00WFSvc1N_f4B-bgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5025.jpg)
Everything in the picture above (aside from the buildings) cost under $20 and would take about half a day to assemble and pain from scratch. It is essentially Davout’s complete corps at Wagram (sans some arty...)
Using a mass-production technique I came up with I was able to make about 230 of these battalions in one sitting. The most time consuming part is gluing the blocks to the bases. The flags were actually quite easy to make, and much faster to apply that printed flags.
Here's a close-up of the cavalry:
(https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QH23vYQEhOM/Wvj5PDjXZcI/AAAAAAAACdw/amYAT0uIK_I-yP8pG3-4GEIpms6wnmMHQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5023.jpg)
Each squadron will have its own flag, but the bases will be regimental.
Here's another panorama of the entire corps with my ex-roommates huge television in the background:
(https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OwOk0SDkCAU/Wvj5Sh0cbMI/AAAAAAAACd4/YEtBNOntRIQyX6DYMtavuvCzCR0wQTmWACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5031.jpg)
The artillery is a bit light in this picture, but I have plenty to paint up. For this project I’m going 2:1 guns, with one caisson per gun to mark the impedimentia of the battery train (this has the dual traits of being accurate and cheaper . . .)
Although I still need to touch up the bases and paint the sides of the battalion blocks blue, this came out exactly how I wanted it to, so I'm pretty pleased. I'm happy to have found a way to use my original 2mm stuff. If you click on the link to my blog, you'll find some information about my future plans for these guys (and a lot more like them).
I will also soon be making a package available for sale of all of the original non-infantry 2mm codes, which print fine but which Shapeways won't let me sell anymore due entirely to the size of the sprues, which in turn requires that I use a huge 2mm thick base (don't even get me started...). The files will be available on a download site for one price, and after you buy them you can print off as many as you need. By using them you can create an army exactly like the one in the pictures above, for an extremely reasonable price (which was the idea the entire time).
I'll be supporting the range with some how-to's, possible videos on youtube, that will show how to mass produce the battalions, how to print off the figures, and how to paint them, as well as some tips and information on the 2mm scale in general, such as, how large a model should be to represent "x" number of men.
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I remember playing the early versions of ebb and Flow of battle at Peter heaths club in Norwich, god back in the late eighties in guessing.
Looked awesome, rules didn't work really, predictable outcomes made it more an exercise is simulation.
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Looked awesome, rules didn't work really, predictable outcomes made it more an exercise is simulation.
Yes, that was my experience as well.
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For you who actually played Ebb and Flow of Battle, was command at all randomized? Or was the entire game dice-less? I'm guessing that this game doesn't exist in print?
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It was entirely diceless. I've still got my copies somewhere, so I'll try to find them. There were several editions, with each being a self-contained campaign, including all the orbats.
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Our group has put on Wagram below, Borodino, Eylau, Austerlitz, Ligny and Waterloo using Shako 2 rules. Wagram was on a 36' table with just under 7000 25/28mm miniatures.
We have talked about Leipzig, but would have to do it by each day. Probably also in sections.
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/550x367q90/921/sFbBQl.jpg)
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Is Shako 2 the one that lets you use divisions or battalions at the maneuver element? Or was that Shako 1?
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Shako I had a 'large battle' variant where the units were divisions (and your skirmish rating depended on your frontage).
It gave a pretty good game, but for some reason they took it out of the v2 rules (along with the Seven Years War variant which was also part of v1).
They also made it easier to rally, which I don't think improved the game either. I think the only thing which was better was the divisional/army morale.
The Quatre Bras scenario is also good.
Shako is one set of rules where I think version 1 is better than version 2.
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In our large games we use divisions as a maneuver element. We included every battalion and cavalry regiment in our games. Artillery batteries are reduced by 3 to 1, for game purposes.
Actually I prefer Shako 2 as the rules were cleaned up and some rules changed for better flow.
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To be clear, I'm going to show all the battalions, regiments and batteries in my big battle games. In three rather short sittings I've completed almost 230 French battalions already, and I only need another 100 for all the battalions at Leipzig. I have about 50 or so regiments of cavalry, and 50 batteries- I need about 24 or 25 batteries. Then on to the Allies. But I digress.
This project is really about the visual appeal; the game needs to be fast and sort of simple to run well (since there will be upwards of a thousand units on the maps, and a lot of players pushing them around with croupier's sticks). So, although the units might be moved around individually, the combat resolution is going to have to be abstract.
I have an idea for quickly resolving large level division combats in a game of the scale I'm thinking about. The first idea is that the turn is one hour. Each division represents a "power pool," from which each turn (an hour) the player can deploy a certain number of "power points" for an attack. Each battalion model represents a certain number of power points. The division commander can choose what percentage of his unit to attack with and risk each turn (alternatively, he may be constrained by a dice roll of the maximum amount of units he may risk, as determined by conditions and psychological factors of the commander). Attacking is done by scooting the chosen battalions forward towards the enemy position to be attacked. The combat is resolved, and either the position is taken, the attackers route back to their parent division, or the combat bogs down into a stalemate (that can be easily broken by whichever side is quickest at hurrying in reserves). This is all designed to be rather loose on the table, and t require no exact measuring, which won't be feasible in a game this big if anything is going to be accomplished.