David Fox - 11:55am Oct 22, 1998 PST (#3477 of 3529)

This is the game description that appeared in the past issue of
PERFIDIOUS ALBION:

La Grande Armee: Austerlitz 1805 is a tactical game, infantry
battalion/cavalry regiment/artillery battery level, 150 yards/hex,
with 20-minute turns. Squarely in La Bataille's backyard, you might say.

I'm basing the command mechanics on the LIM system found in Richard
Berg's A FAMOUS VICTORY, although with
certain crucial differences (which I will explore in a minute). I think
LIM's are the best method of handling battlefield command
chaos, although the AFV system has two flaws-- first, even though you
don't know when a command will get to move, you can
be sure they will activate sometime during the turn, no matter how dense
the commander; secondly, you can completely recycle
the LIM's from one turn to the next, allowing you to turn on a dime the
axis of your army's advance from one flank to another.
Napoleonic armies as Barry Sanders, as it where.

But I have fixed both problems, thus: 1. When a leader's LIM is drawn
from the Command Pool, you still must roll to activate
him. All division commanders have activation ratings, ranging from the
7's (on a d10) of Vandamme and Kellerman to the 4's of
Carneville and Monakhtin (and with these guys a 4 is being kind). The
French division commanders are generally 2 points
higher than their more sluggish Allied enemies.

Successfully activating allows a division to move and fight at full
capacity; failure can result in all sorts of things, determined by a
roll against the commander's personality rating (Aggressive, Normal, or
Cautious) on the Command Breakdown Chart. The
most common result of failure is a limited activation (half move but no
attacking), but you can be frozen, or forced to retreat,
deliver a headlong charge, or even give your opponent a chance to
activate one of his divisions.

2. To prevent LIM recycling, I only allow players to add a limited
number of LIM's to the Command Pool at the start of a turn.
When its LIM is drawn, a division gains fatigue; after six turns of
fatigue (about 1 « hours of game time) the nasty effects start to
kick in. To "rest" a division, its LIM can be withdrawn from the Pool
voluntarily. However, putting it back in ain't so easy.

To add LIM's to the Pool, players must roll on the Command Change Table,
which may only allow them to drop one or two
LIM's (or maybe none) back into the cup. Again, the French do better
here than the Allies. What I'm trying to do with this is
create the atmosphere of an orders system without the record-keeping
burdens of tracking orders-- adding a LIM is an order
given to a division commander, removing it means that the order has been
completed or the division has been broken down by
combat, and the difficulty of putting the LIM back in again represents a
division waiting for new orders to be delivered.

From SIMTAC I've borrowed their excellent paradigm of Napoleonic
infantry melee; i.e. it almost never happened. Infantry
vs. infantry in the open was inevitably a case of the attacker stumping
forward until about 50 yards away from the defender,
when the defender either cut and ran or the attackers lost their nerve,
halted, and exchanged close-range volleys until one or the
other melted away. So in my game the attacker and defender compare
morale checks, and if nobody breaks, nothing happens.
However, if defending infantry is in Defensive Terrain (buildings or
behind a wall), then we use the Assault procedure, with the
familiar morale check/defensive fire/melee table process. In BATTLE
TACTICS OF NAPOLEON AND HIS ENEMIES,
Nosworthy confirms that while melee in open ground was unknown, the
psychological effect of defending behind a wall or
inside a building gave the defender an incentive to stand his ground and
the attackers a definite objective to overthrow.

Not to worry, though, cavalry charges are still full-tilt, hell bent for
leather, do or die-type adventures.

I've also added piles of chrome. The Russian Cossacks appear, in an
almost useless battlefield role (stealing horses and burning
farms was their preferred line of work, not charging a wall of bayonets,
sensible fellows). The two French elite Tirailleur
regiments- the Tirailleurs Corse and Tirailleurs du Po- can break down
into independent skirmish companies. The French
player can use Napoleon or Songis to create a Grand Battery, or detach
Rapp with a task force of independent units. And of
course there's the Fog, covering the Allied flanking move but burning
off just in time to reveal St. Hilaire and Vandamme
climbing the Pratzen.

David