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.
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