Post by deraltefritz on May 27, 2020 20:37:56 GMT
The Age of Battles
I thought I would give you all an update on my project because since I started it about a month ago, it has changed quite a lot. The original idea that caught my eye was the Wagram scenario and I simply thought I could do something similar only with Napoleonic Prussians.
However I have done quite a lot of reading of other 2 and 3 mm wargamers blogs for a whole variety of periods and it quickly became clear that 2 mm wargaming is not like other scales and so perhaps a different approach might be used. So I tried to list the advantages and disadvantages of these Tiny Troops to borrow ideas from other periods such as I found in this guide:
Tiny Troops Guide
Disadvantages: Undoubtedly the biggest loss of 2mm troops is a visual one as wargamers love the uniforms and all the detail associated with researching the different regiments and portraying them in their miniatures. However a different viewpoint was put forward by Sidney Roundwood and his 30YW Lutzen games (
Battle of Lutzen) where he saw the recreation of the battle art of Sebastian Vrancx and his pupil, Pieter Snayers where you concentrate not so much on the uniforms of the individual soldier but on the overall look of the game, the soldiers within a landscape.
I had also noted other players had used flags and even over sized flags both as a way of identifying units more easily but also as a means of restoring that visual appeal and unit identify while other had added labels, various status recording devices and other items onto the bases. One has to be careful here not to spoil the effect of the landscape by too much clutter, over thick MDF bases filled with markers. A good balance seemed to be achieved by some German gamers
muenster-wargaming
Advantages: On the other hand 2mm offers a number of clear advantages over virtually every other figure scale simply by virtue of its size being that much closer to the 'real' ground scale.
1) Scale 2mm makes 1;1 ground to figure scale possible since at 1:1,000 scale 1mm = 1 meter and since a 800 man battalion in three ranks in line allowing 2' for each man and officers, supernumeraries behind, means that the battalion occupies about 500' or 150 yards which in 2mm translates to a mere 15cm or 6".
2) This small ground scale allows even small figure scales to have a big effect, which allows even the largest battle to be played on a practical table as per Zach's Wagram project.
3) But this figure scale could be used in other ways to create an "operational level" of gaming that sits between the map based strategic level and the tactical tabletop. The idea came from Sidney Roundwoods blog about the 2018 Portsmouth mini campaign (Portsmouth Campaign) with the recreation of a 10km square map of the small town of Portsmouth on Portsea Island. Yet this offered a solution to a problem I had looked at a few years back concerning the battle of Rossbach where the actual battle was quite small and over with in under an hour, yet the important bit was the approach march and deployment. Now most wargamers ignore these important manoeuvres and just get on with lining the armies up in their battle formations at the end of the deployment. Now Rossbach started at 11am in the morning when the French in their camp about 8 km away from the Prussian camp started marching southwards. The Prussians thought that they were just moving to a new location and ignored them but when the French turned east towards the Prussian camp and outflanking it, they marched out and the Prussian cavalry skirted round a hill and first defeated the French cavalry screen and then routed the French army in its column of march before it could deploy, The whole action took place in a box about 10 km square and only covered about 6 hours. So perhaps we have the germ of an idea of a pre-battle march and deployment phase which determines your position on the final battlefield. Really important for SYW Prussians and crucial for Napoleonics especially for Jena- Austerstadt, Leipzig, Katsbach, etc. The other opportunity that this opens up is the kind of mini-campaign of a war of outposts and small commands that struggle for supremacy in the fields between the two camps.
4) The anonymity of 2 mm troops could be used to advantage, as Ancients players do for DBA, by creating units of "types of troops" as opposed to actual units (Tiny Troops Ancients) which immediately gives your great flexibility to create whatever army you like on the day. This has a second advantage in that it no longer limits you to a particular war, you can recreate entire timescales just by changing the mix of the units in your army or change the geography of your army, say the Spanish Army in Flanders to Spanish forces in the New World.
So having thought about all these things where has happened to my Napoleonic Prussians? Well the first idea was to change to SYW since the armies were smaller (50,000 men rather than 100,000 men) and could more easily be accommodate on a small table so then I started the hunt for a set of rules. My original Wargames Research Group 1685-1845 rules use figure removal and so were not suitable but I had heard about some SYW payers who were using WRGs De Bellis Renationis (DBR) (Wargames Research Group) or there was the newer set of Horse Foot Guns (HFG) (Wargames Research Group Rules) suitable for large scale games. The difference between the rules is really quite small as the mechanism behind them both is very similar, they differ principally in scale (DBR uses 1mm = 2.5 metres while HFG uses 1mm = 7.5 metres or maybe 1mm = 10 metres) and in the unit types they use as DBR covers 1494 to 1700 and HFG covers 1701-1914. The ground scale means that bases are different as DBR uses a 30 x 10 mm infantry base to represent 400 men while HFG uses 40 x 10 mm infantry bases to represent 1,500-2,500 men. What is really useful is that DBR comes with three books of Army lists with around 100 different armies to choose from range across the whole period and across the whole world, Turkish and Eastern armies, African ones, South American ones and since this is the period of the birth of colonialism Europeans could literally end up facing any foe or you could recreate the formation of the Mughal Empire and have Indian armies fighting it out and then next week French colonial troops arrive.
So where have I actually got to in concrete terms? Well the map terrain is made and I am working hard on the terrain features, gathering woods, hedges, etc. I have decided to base my ideas on a book called "The Age of Battles - The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo" by Russell F. Weigley (The Age of Battles) and starting in Renaissance to build up a force of troop types to cover armies from the whole period and to add in regional variations such as Indian troops. As time goes on I will add in eighteenth century troops and modify the DBR rules to suit the period. I am going to work on the operational level of war with HFG and incorporate this into the battlefield games as an approach march and deployment phase and see how that works and then use the HFG rules for the larger battles where the DBR no longer fits onto my limited table size. To make this work I am sticking to a 30mm base and today I was working on making very thin, invisible bases from thin sheets of acetate and seeing if I could glue the troops to them and also add in a flag pole so that I can change unit identifiers by changing the flags on the pole. The order is going in for my first print run of houses to be followed by two 30YW armies to form the basis of the collection.
I thought I would give you all an update on my project because since I started it about a month ago, it has changed quite a lot. The original idea that caught my eye was the Wagram scenario and I simply thought I could do something similar only with Napoleonic Prussians.
However I have done quite a lot of reading of other 2 and 3 mm wargamers blogs for a whole variety of periods and it quickly became clear that 2 mm wargaming is not like other scales and so perhaps a different approach might be used. So I tried to list the advantages and disadvantages of these Tiny Troops to borrow ideas from other periods such as I found in this guide:
Tiny Troops Guide
Disadvantages: Undoubtedly the biggest loss of 2mm troops is a visual one as wargamers love the uniforms and all the detail associated with researching the different regiments and portraying them in their miniatures. However a different viewpoint was put forward by Sidney Roundwood and his 30YW Lutzen games (
Battle of Lutzen) where he saw the recreation of the battle art of Sebastian Vrancx and his pupil, Pieter Snayers where you concentrate not so much on the uniforms of the individual soldier but on the overall look of the game, the soldiers within a landscape.
I had also noted other players had used flags and even over sized flags both as a way of identifying units more easily but also as a means of restoring that visual appeal and unit identify while other had added labels, various status recording devices and other items onto the bases. One has to be careful here not to spoil the effect of the landscape by too much clutter, over thick MDF bases filled with markers. A good balance seemed to be achieved by some German gamers
muenster-wargaming
Advantages: On the other hand 2mm offers a number of clear advantages over virtually every other figure scale simply by virtue of its size being that much closer to the 'real' ground scale.
1) Scale 2mm makes 1;1 ground to figure scale possible since at 1:1,000 scale 1mm = 1 meter and since a 800 man battalion in three ranks in line allowing 2' for each man and officers, supernumeraries behind, means that the battalion occupies about 500' or 150 yards which in 2mm translates to a mere 15cm or 6".
2) This small ground scale allows even small figure scales to have a big effect, which allows even the largest battle to be played on a practical table as per Zach's Wagram project.
3) But this figure scale could be used in other ways to create an "operational level" of gaming that sits between the map based strategic level and the tactical tabletop. The idea came from Sidney Roundwoods blog about the 2018 Portsmouth mini campaign (Portsmouth Campaign) with the recreation of a 10km square map of the small town of Portsmouth on Portsea Island. Yet this offered a solution to a problem I had looked at a few years back concerning the battle of Rossbach where the actual battle was quite small and over with in under an hour, yet the important bit was the approach march and deployment. Now most wargamers ignore these important manoeuvres and just get on with lining the armies up in their battle formations at the end of the deployment. Now Rossbach started at 11am in the morning when the French in their camp about 8 km away from the Prussian camp started marching southwards. The Prussians thought that they were just moving to a new location and ignored them but when the French turned east towards the Prussian camp and outflanking it, they marched out and the Prussian cavalry skirted round a hill and first defeated the French cavalry screen and then routed the French army in its column of march before it could deploy, The whole action took place in a box about 10 km square and only covered about 6 hours. So perhaps we have the germ of an idea of a pre-battle march and deployment phase which determines your position on the final battlefield. Really important for SYW Prussians and crucial for Napoleonics especially for Jena- Austerstadt, Leipzig, Katsbach, etc. The other opportunity that this opens up is the kind of mini-campaign of a war of outposts and small commands that struggle for supremacy in the fields between the two camps.
4) The anonymity of 2 mm troops could be used to advantage, as Ancients players do for DBA, by creating units of "types of troops" as opposed to actual units (Tiny Troops Ancients) which immediately gives your great flexibility to create whatever army you like on the day. This has a second advantage in that it no longer limits you to a particular war, you can recreate entire timescales just by changing the mix of the units in your army or change the geography of your army, say the Spanish Army in Flanders to Spanish forces in the New World.
So having thought about all these things where has happened to my Napoleonic Prussians? Well the first idea was to change to SYW since the armies were smaller (50,000 men rather than 100,000 men) and could more easily be accommodate on a small table so then I started the hunt for a set of rules. My original Wargames Research Group 1685-1845 rules use figure removal and so were not suitable but I had heard about some SYW payers who were using WRGs De Bellis Renationis (DBR) (Wargames Research Group) or there was the newer set of Horse Foot Guns (HFG) (Wargames Research Group Rules) suitable for large scale games. The difference between the rules is really quite small as the mechanism behind them both is very similar, they differ principally in scale (DBR uses 1mm = 2.5 metres while HFG uses 1mm = 7.5 metres or maybe 1mm = 10 metres) and in the unit types they use as DBR covers 1494 to 1700 and HFG covers 1701-1914. The ground scale means that bases are different as DBR uses a 30 x 10 mm infantry base to represent 400 men while HFG uses 40 x 10 mm infantry bases to represent 1,500-2,500 men. What is really useful is that DBR comes with three books of Army lists with around 100 different armies to choose from range across the whole period and across the whole world, Turkish and Eastern armies, African ones, South American ones and since this is the period of the birth of colonialism Europeans could literally end up facing any foe or you could recreate the formation of the Mughal Empire and have Indian armies fighting it out and then next week French colonial troops arrive.
So where have I actually got to in concrete terms? Well the map terrain is made and I am working hard on the terrain features, gathering woods, hedges, etc. I have decided to base my ideas on a book called "The Age of Battles - The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo" by Russell F. Weigley (The Age of Battles) and starting in Renaissance to build up a force of troop types to cover armies from the whole period and to add in regional variations such as Indian troops. As time goes on I will add in eighteenth century troops and modify the DBR rules to suit the period. I am going to work on the operational level of war with HFG and incorporate this into the battlefield games as an approach march and deployment phase and see how that works and then use the HFG rules for the larger battles where the DBR no longer fits onto my limited table size. To make this work I am sticking to a 30mm base and today I was working on making very thin, invisible bases from thin sheets of acetate and seeing if I could glue the troops to them and also add in a flag pole so that I can change unit identifiers by changing the flags on the pole. The order is going in for my first print run of houses to be followed by two 30YW armies to form the basis of the collection.
