The LONG Awaited Turn 5

I don't blog too often apparently. Time to finish this game up.

Turn 5

The Austrian left and middle were basically static. The French are very strong around the woods (especially with their cuirassiers redeployed to that area), so the Austrians are not moving forward. I do send some cuirassiers from the middle toward the town on the right.

The Austrian right, however, is going to be much more interesting. I write orders to give the hussars in the rear more room to charge. (The results are not very satisfactory, but better than nothing.) The building will get some reinforcements. It is fairly obvious the elite legere and hussars will be charging home on my extreme right. I decide the best course of action will be to stand and fire. The infantry change to line facing the flank. The calvary do a formation change into a column facing the flank. I put the front squadron of cuirassiers on Charge if Charged orders to support the infantry. The second squadron is put on Charge if Charge Breakthrough orders in case I get my rear end handed to me.

The artillery phase goes to the French by a bit. The legere and hussars do charge in. My Dad forgot about my calvary. I was expecting he would see the formation change move and charge the area the front of the column would be in. Instead, my first squadron charges forward and wheels into his flank. The surprise for me is that the building gets charged; I was expecting only fire on it.

I have forgotten all the details since it has been awhile.... But here is what happened in a nutshell. The legere and hussars take fire casualties on the way in. My cuirassiers hit his calvary in the flank and force a withdrawal to back behind the French infantry. They hit the legere and get forced back to their original position due to moral failure! The legere bounce off my infantry (elective withdrawal I believe) as they no longer had the numbers to prevail in melee. Close to a stalemate... but the Austrian flank held! My position doesn't get rolled up!

The two front French infantry battalions advance and charge the house! (The third one only moves forward). One of the front two is destroyed by fire. The other charges in. I should have destroyed it completely in melee. Instead, the dice are not kind to me. I take a great deal of loses. Finally, the moral of the infantry in the ground floor fails completely and they end up bolting out the side door and running toward the Austrian right side of the board. The French infantry electively withdraw from the melee. The building ends up being held (barely) by a handful of sappers in the second story.

The turn ends and we call the game. It is an Austrian victory (minor). The town on my left was never seriously threatened, but it was only a secondary victory location. My right is pretty weak, but I haven't lost a building (the last turn was rather hit or miss with that). The French could probably take the large building on the right this coming turn, but they don't have enough troops in position to take a second building right now. My redeployment speed will be faster than the French, and we conclude I would hold the town through the rest of the game if we played it out (CLS is 8 turns to the day). It is not completely clear if the French would be in position to attack it again during turn 8, it may have required an additional turn or two to redeploy from the woods.

It could have gone the other way during turn 5. If the French had seized the building and crushed my flank, I would not have been able to stop them from rolling up the position. On the other hand, with a few more moral rolls going my way, they would have been stopped completely cold.

The General de Brigade scenarios translate to CLS fairly well. Artillery is the biggest thing that needs tweaking. And we are still working on getting the force balance and victory conditions exactly right.

Here are some pictures showing things as they stood at the end of turn 5 (Austrian right to left flanks):

Turn 3

Again one of the two batteries are ordered to hold canister. The right flank is ordered to fall back behind the town as the fairly solid line of troops advancing could easily take the two cavalry units. And I would be facing combined arms (infantry backed up with French cavalry). The hussars will remain in skirmish order to form a line. The cuirassiers are ordered to redeploy in a column and march to the road. I was thinking ahead to a possible column charge right down the road in a few turns. The cuirassiers in the middle are ordered to advance just a bit to be in line with the back of the Austrian line infantry; they are getting ready for the counter attack.

The turn opens and artillery fire begins. Nothing too exciting as we both loose some infantry. The French left flank attack continues to move forward towards the town. It ends as roughly three lines of troops. The first is two legere units. The second consists of two French line units with some hussars. The third is the French cuirassiers and a line infantry unit.

On the French right, about half migrates through the forest. The other half deploys into line opposing my center. There are some skirmishers across from my cuirassiers. It looks like a tempting target for a charge, but the French commander would have to do something stupid for me to take advantage of it at this range. A very unlikely possibility.

Only a little bit of fire on my right flank. I take a few casualties in the large building. The legere unit closest loses a few stands in turn. Otherwise, no one is in range.

Here are the pictures, moving from the Austrian left flank to the right.

Turn 4

Things promise to be much more interesting.

In the center, all three Austrian line infantry units are ordered to move forward; I expect they will end up in range. My cuirassiers are ordered to charge forward. With CLS rules, you can abort the charge after 6 inches if nothing is looking promising. However, if the French advance without caution... It isn't the grand sweeping counter attack out of the village I had envisioned, but the French just haven't left me a good opening. I'll have to take what I can get, and it is time to remind the French colonels in the center they can't dictate the pace of battle all by themselves.

I again intend to order one battery to hold canister, but forget to write the order! This could end up being very bad indeed. We have found most fog of war rules are not really necessary; you make enough mistakes on your own. Which usually leads to at least one battalion a game standing in place for a turn.

The hussars redeploy behind the guns to give them support. The cuirassiers form line behind the town centered on the road. I am not sure where I will need them next. Forming line gives me the maximum amount of flexibility for future redeployment. Men are detached to replace casualties in the large building (detachments can move 9 inches a turn in towns to do this; during the game I was misremembering it as 6 inches and began really worrying about being able to keep the buildings defended). The unit of grenadiers that had been behind the two story building is ordered to go from single line to double line, which gives me a free change of face. I'll still get to fire two of the four stands.

The turn begins. The French gun damaged in turn 1 is finally able to fire again. There is a little bit of a drift to the right. Instead of hitting the house, the French gain their revenge and damage one of my guns. Nuts. Better than having it destroyed outright. I return fire to take down a few more French line infantry. Not a fair trade, and the Austrian commander's morale takes a hit.

Movement begins. The deployments on my right go smoothly. This is a bit of a relief as things are starting to get crowded back there. If you misjudge a distance or two units start running into each other and can really mess things up. Another reason no fog of war rules are needed. You can't see it in any of the pictures, but the French place the two story house in a really nice L shaped fire trap. The two line units form the long part of the L, and the legere unit that was closest to the building forms the short part. More on what happens to them in a minute. The other legere unit (the elite one) continues to advance forward. The hussars move up even with them and are now the unit on the extreme French left flank. Meanwhile, the French cuirassiers redeploy towards their center. The guns escape as no one moves toward them; my forgotten hold canister order does not equal disaster this day.

My center infantry lumbar forward. The cuirassiers begin the charge at the trot. It becomes obvious to the cuirassier commander that the French are forming a large firing line essentially in place to blast him from the saddle. They halt the charge at the ridge line.

Fire this turn is absolutely brutal. Essentially both French and Austrians only roll 5's and 6's. As fire casualties are (number of men on stand)*(die roll)/10, I am killing 5-6 men per stand of Austrians. The French casualties in the center are limited by the fact that fire is stand to stand and the legere are stands of three (so the extra 2-3 casualties just disappear). However, the Austrian line in the center make the front line of troops opposing them disappear. In turn my battalion wing in the center right is simply hammered below CE (combat effectiveness) in one turn. This usually takes 2 turns to happen once infantry close range. On my right flank, the two story house takes tremendous amounts of casualties. But units in buildings ignore CE. In turn, they concentrate fire on the close legere unit missing from the pictures. It drops below CE.

CE is at 50% (from firepower not melee). CE checks are simple and brutal. 1 or 2, the unit stands and continues to fight on. 3 or 4 means they retire back 2 moves (basically to the army's base line). You can form provisional units from 2 or more of these failed CE units, but I have never seen it make a big difference. 5 or 6 the unit routs off the field causing morale checks in friendlies within 6 inches of the path. If any of those fail, they cause morale checks in turn. One or two bad rolls can quickly lead to an entire flank collapsing.

My Austrians in the center decide that they are going to fight to the last man today and pass. The French legere on their left flank rout like the cowards they are (which is way you can't see them in any of the pictures). Unfortunately no other French units fail their morale checks. The French attack continues.

Again, pictures are from Austrian left to the right flank. Apparently, I did not take a good overview picture of the action in the center this turn.

AAR #1 Part 2 CLS

CLS has a rather simple turn order. You map mark your orders. This is followed by artillery fire, simultaneous movement, melee, and finally morale phases. Of course, when you add in the "sub phases" things can start to look rather complicated, but it really isn't that bad.

Turn 1

My map marking for turn 1 was very easy. The three stands of Hussars on the extreme right moved forward off the ridge in skirmish order to "make a demonstration" and see what havoc they could possibly cause. Cavalry on the flank can very easily turn an entire army if handled correctly, just like in real life. Not that I am that great of a cavalry commander, but sometimes the threat is all one really needs to get into the opponents head. I don't really expect much to come of it, considering my Dad has played CLS longer than I have been around, but one never knows. The rest of the force sits in place. "Nothing to see here boys. Nope. No one is getting ready to charge into a open flank. We're just gonna sit behind this here building all game long." I do also order sappers in all the buildings to cut fire holes as we were playing the buildings as cast.

Artillery phase. I either won high die or "volunteered" to go first. Artillery is my specialty. Been very good at it from my first game in Sword and Flame since about the age of 6 (which is a story for another post). This game seems to start out no different. My favorite way to use artillery in CLS is to find a nice, big, fat formation of line or militia infantry and pick one unit in it to concentrate on. It will usually be the one in the middle due to the Combat Effectiveness rules, but sometimes it can be one that the commander forgot to get out of column. CE rules in CLS are rather brutal. Automatic check at 50% of unit strength with fire casualties. Roll 1d6. For most units (Russians have a special rule with Mother Russia IIRC): 1-2 stand, 3-4 fall back, 5-6 rout off the table causing morale checks in the surrounding units. So a 1/3 chance of causing lots of morale checks in line units leads to havoc in the opposing army pretty quickly. This will be my artillery strategy this game.

For the shot, you pick your aim point and roll a 1d6. A 3 or 4 means the wind gods were with you. 2 or 5 means 1.5 inches to the left or right (at the end of the artillery stick) respectively. 1 or 6 is 3 inches either way. Good artillerists will pick there shot such that high value targets are on both the left or right as much as they can. The range is a little long for my small 3 pounders, but there is not going to be any advantage this game to not taking it. I pick a column of infantry with some guns to my left and more columns to the right with my first battery. The roll comes up a 2. It turns out the dice gods were smiling down upon the Austrians. The infantry are just beyond the artillery stick, but after drifting to the left, it squares *just* hits a French 6 lb smooth bore. Ha! Now for another 1d6. 1-3 is a miss. 4-5 is damage (out for 2x turns with one gunner killed). A 6 means the gun is outright destroyed with all men killed. (My best CLS shot of all time was at the Jacksonville, FL Rapier 2009 convention. I had a 6 lb gun supporting my attack on a French held hill with a 12 lb Guard gun in support. That first turn did not present any good targets other than the Guard gun which had just caused about 3 casualties in 3 units each! Well, too bad for them my guys had been practicing. A 3 was quickly followed by a 6. Boom! No more Guard gun. Nothing was left on the hill that had a chance of stopping me. The scenario was a what you see is what you play with. But about 2 turns later I noticed the GM seemed to have forgotten to give my opponent 3 battalions of line.... =)). I come up with a 5. These artillerists won't be bothering me again until turn 4! The second shot is also directed at the guns, as I now know the infantry is out of range, but it drifts into open fields. At this point, my Dad decides to point out that he forgot to prolonge his gun to his right. Which would have negated my shots. We decide to move the gun before his return fire, but keep the damage in place. His shot drifts and misses as well. So far so good for the Austrians!

As an aside, we are coming around to the conclusion that counter battery fire is a little too powerful in CLS rules as written. Assuming you have the range and don't miss your opposing battery with a white part of the stick (signifying a bounce), you have a 1/3*1/6=1/18 or 5.6% (3 or 4 followed by a 6) chance of total destruction. Including damage as a result, it is 1/3*1/2=1/6 or 16.7% ( 3 or 4 followed by a 4, 5, or 6) of a good result. Odds get even better when your opponent forgets or doesn't know how to properly space his batteries.

Movement goes quickly on my side. The hussars sally forth off the ridge line looking for a chance of glory and riches (to be spent on women)! Things take a little longer on the French side of the table. Two of the French line battalions march forward and deploy into lines; the colonels misjudge the distances. Instead of side by side, one has to deploy behind the other (we find that there is no need for rules to introduce friction into the game, you misjudge distances or simply forget to order units as it is). The third marches forward in column and deploys into square on my right. (In general each unit gets 2 out of 3 actions a turn: move, change formation, or fire. Musket range is 12 inches, so these battalions are well beyond the Austrian small arms range and are safe to move and change formation). The second square you see is a battalion of elite French legere. These gentlemen spell trouble for the Austrian right flank. They can move up to 12" as skirmishers and end the move in a close order formation (as long as each stand doesn't move more than 12"). That's only one operation, which means they can still shoot. In addition, the French elite legere voltigeurs do not pay penalties for terrain (not really that big of a deal in this game, but can be quite nasty if you were expecting a woods to slow someone down). My hussars notice this, they decide the glory, riches, and women can wait a little while... Assuming I had ordered them to charge this turn, they would not have made a dent against the line square (one melee cast before dicing to see which direction the squad bounces off in). Nine hussars would have not even made in to the legere square since it has yet to fire. Meanwhile, the second French brigade marches onto the board with it's artillery support.

The three pictures are all at the end of turn one. I need to remember to get some action shots of the artillery and some shots during the movement phase next game. The first picture shows the French lines looking out from their right flank. You can see the three stands of brave hussars in the middle of the table at the far end. The two French squares are on the left. Again, the super secret Austrian weapon of Plan Omega is in the background. The second shot gives a long view of the Austrian line from the left flank. The third is a closer picture of the Austrian right flank as it currently stands.

Turn 2

Orders only take slightly longer this time. The hussars pick discretion over valor and are ordered to retire to their original positions. A half battalion of Austrian line moves up flush with the left of the abbey. More interesting is the nasty surprise the Austrian gunners have in store. French voltigeur companies can detach as skirmishers and move up to 12" as one operation in a turn. They also get to fire 12", which means there is a 24" "danger" zone in front of French (or any other) skirmishers for artillery as a commander can often forget about this and not cover up his guns. One usually does this my moving one's own skirmishers over in front of the guns during the move portion of the turn. However, I have no infantry skirmish ability this game (a distinct disadvantage for many Austrian orders of battle if you are not careful or the scenario designers are mean). But I do have superior weapons fire. Fire is usually simultaneous, but longer range fire (like rifles or held canister) trumps shorter range. My 15" of canister will take effect before the piddling 12" of voltiguer muskets. Thus, one battery is to fire long ball. The other is ordered to hold canister. Rushing up 12 lights to silence my guns is just the sort of aggressive move my Dad (and especially my brother) love to do. At this point, I am mentally jumping up and down cackling with glee congratulating myself on extra special cleverness.

The guns boom out. I do some infantry damage to the infantry line in the opposing center, which happens to be directly across from my building. The average CLS artillery shot kills 3-4 men. That's about what I get this turn. Nothing special, but we will see how important this is later on. My second gun remains silent. This almost certainly gives away the hold canister order, but those lights have already been ordered to advance to their doom! The French cannon belch smoke and shot back in reply. Even from across the fields, the men can't help but notice they seem to be a lot louder than ours! On the bright side, only one gets to ply the trade till turn 4. It becomes obvious my father's strategy is to blow down the second house in town (building in the middle to the right of the abbey) and kill everyone inside. This will take 5x damage on the wood building. Since they are medium field guns that's 5x hits. A 12 lb gun does 2x damage a hit. A seige gun does 10x! Thank goodness this is the vanguard and not the seige train. No casualties in the building till hit number 2, so I escape the artillery round unscathed. (Though maybe the hit was turn 3, one of these turns either 2 or 3 was a drift into the open field between my two batteries. I'll need to take better notes).

The French second brigade begins to move through the woods to the left (their right) of the bridge head in force. The center advances in a series of lines. The French left flank is firmly held by the legere moving up in skirmish order to end in square with a good number of cavalry that came on this turn in support in the second and third rank. My hussars are telling each other what military geniuses they all are right about now. The gunners are rather disappointed; no one advanced into the trap this turn. Overall, the Austrian general (me) is starting to get a little nervous about that right flank. But that building is a very strong position, so it should hold. Meanwhile the Austrian left continues the charade of being fat, dumb, and happy. My memory states that no small arms fire occurred this turn.

Note to self: Take more pictures! Here we have two overview pictures followed by two focusing on the French left flank.

AAR #1 Part 1 CLS

This was a ping pong table sized fight of the Elchingen from the General de Brigade scenario books for Napoleonics, which my Dad owns. I don't have them in front of me, so much of the intro will be from memory. We played Sat April 3rd using the Column, Line, and Square rule set. I was the Austrian commander and my Dad took the part of Ney. He scaled the scenario down by about a third, so I was defending two towns across from the French bridge head with two brigades of Austrian line. Each brigade had two 60 man battalions, which I broke into 30 man wings for this scenario. These were backed with with 1x battalion each of grenadiers, 4x squads of cuirassiers, a unit of hussars, and a artillery battery. I took the option of taking 2x 3 pounders rather than a larger 6 pounder. My Dad had 3x (IIRC) brigades of French line backed up with some lights, cav, and 2x cannons. About a third of his force started on the table and the remainder came on turns 1 and 2 respectively.

CLS is a bit of an older ruleset, but is available for free via the CLS yahoo groups. It really is one of those easy to learn, difficult to master ones. I started playing about 6 years old and now, almost 25 years later, am still picking up on new things. (Mostly because a serious amount of college type stuff got in the way for a long time). The defining feature is simultaneous movement. You map mark what you want your units to do and then the turn goes artillery fire, movement, melee, morale phase. Turns are about an hour of real time, so a day long battle is about 8 turns. The family (me, my Dad, and my brother) play quite a bit; we can usually get a decisive result in 5-6 turns over the course of 2-3 hours if we are booking it. Up to 6 or more hours when various inlaws are around and learning (or relearning). I will have to do a more detailed review at some point; always trying to get folks to try simultaneous move games.

The scenario objectives were for the French to take the main town and Abbey; you can see the second town in the back right. A French glorious victory was to take both towns. The good guys would win if they held on. An Austrian glorious victory would have been to take the bridgehead (where the French troops are lined up to the right of the forest).

The plan:

Maybe, an Austrian glorious victory would be possible with the General de Brigade rules (we own them but have not played), but it would be suicide to try and take it under CLS, esp with my Dad as the French commander. Thus a more conservative approach will be adopted. I decide to support the right flank with the Hussars and half the Cuirassiers. Both cannon will go to the right of the abbey. The towns will have equal amounts of infantry with the grenadiers in the rear as reserves. The ridge line between the towns will be lightly held with two 30 man units of line with the rest of the Cuirassiers. The second town will serve as my left flank. (We decide to play CLS towns as written where one building is one building; that makes them very strong positions compaired to many other rulesets. I actually am coming around to preferring just abstracting BUA's, but this will likely be to my advantage).

The Austrians are ordered to hold the town and the abbey to the last man. The Hussars are going to make a feint forward to 1) hopefully slow the French advance down and 2) keep my position from being flanked (the two best options to take a town in CLS are level it with gun fire or firetrap each individual building. I tend to stay the heck away from towns or level them with big guns when attacking). The rest of the force is ordered to pretend they are going to stay in place for 2-3 turns and then aggressively attack to drive the French back to Paris when the opportunity presents itself. Ney will never know what hit him! And the unknown name of the Austrian commander (which I can't remember) shall go down in the history books!

Here are some more pictures of the setup before turn 1 starts. You can see the ultra secret weapon of the Austrian empire for Plan Omega looking over her domain in the background of the last shot. More to come in Part 2.

First Post

Hello world.

This is the first post of my first blog, so we shall see how this new project goes. I am starting as it seems a rather good way to do wargaming after action reports. I may also motivate myself to get some lead painted and bases finished off as these events would be cause to post pictures. It also seems like I should learn a little bit about blogging and all this new-fangled internet before I start talking about "In my day you thought 36.6 on a 56k was the height of speed....."