From: Markus Stumptner Subject: [Consim-l] Abensberg/Eckmuehl (S&T 113/114), my view This system (which runs under the overarching title of "Napoleon and the Archduke Charles" and has a third game on Aspern-Essling I believe) was a delightful surprise. I had not really been playing attention to that series in the past, although I always admired the maps. Chris Harding and I finally played Eckmuehl a fair bit last year and may return to the battle or even the campaign at some point in the future. The game certainly serves as a reminder to those who consider 3W games as automatic duds, giving reasonable detail without a lot of mechanical complexity. To be sure, its command control rules (the area where I normally look first) are fairly conventional. Command control is transmitted over a certain range of hexes downwards from the army commander to the corps commanders, who then transmit it out to division commanders, who convey it to their units. Corps commanders out of range can roll a die if they are not in range, but division commanders need to have at least a corps commander above them. The division commander's range varies individually and is also equal to the number of units that they can move into an enemy ZOC and can order to melee in one turn. Of course most Austrian commander ratings values are abysmal compared to the French ones; you really need Charles looking over their shoulder to get any sort of decent offensive going. Overall, the system does a credible job in slowing down attacks to a historical pace. The terrain the battles were fought over is mostly wooded and hilly, requiring constant formation checks. The only good cavalry country is on the northern part of the Eckmuehl map (and will probably only come into play when things are already going pretty bad for the Austrians). Combat in the "NaTAC" series distinguishes between fire and melee (a unit can only attack with one of these in a turn) and leads nicely to historical tactics, with one exception. Normally, only the top unit stacked in a hex can fire, but if the top unit is artillery, it can fire as well as an infantry unit beneath it. Unfortunately that exception does not hold for targets, so the typical outcome of firefights is that the artillery withers away quickly, soaking up the hits that historically would have gone into the infantry and protecting the infantry from harm. That does not make sense for musketry or artillery bombardment, and I think a houserule is needed here. The other aspect is that the game makes the terrain appear fairly horrible with lots of disruptions going on at all times, yet most of the hills in this area are fairly gentle (to those who haven't been there I suggest the Osprey book on the battles which is a lot of contemporary photos from the area). There are a couple of amusing bits in the OOB - we have a division commander "Prince Royal" on the French side - this is Crown Prince Ludwig of Bayern, while his Austrian counterpart, Crown Prince Ludwig (Louis) of Austria was the commander of the Austrian V Corps. In this game, he ends up separated into two counters, the army commander persona (labeled "Louis") and the corps commander, labeled "Hoheit" ("Highness"). Surely the ability to split himself into two halves that could be three km apart and still in command would have merited more use of this Austrian secret weapon in later wars... The system fits in the category of Napoleonic games that take up a middle range between the battalion level stuff (La Bataille or Ney vs Wellington) and the one-hour per turn grand tactical games such as Eagles of the Empire, the stone age NLB series, Thunder at Luetzen, and my own NLB variant rules. The main representants from that category that I'm familiar with are the Gamers/MMP's NBS and Berg's Battles of Waterloo. These games typically have roughly half hour turns (or impulses), and keep a fairly detailed track of step losses. (They normally have a smaller map scale, the scale here, 600m/hex is larger than standard NLB with 480m/hex.) Like the NBS, the NaTAC system uses roster sheets to keep track of losses. I love the NBS for its command rules, but its old versions were faily cumbersome and slow to play, and in terms of ease of play this series beats it handsomely. (I note that there is a new set of rules, NBS 3.0, due out with the next release in the series, on Talavera, that is supposed to be much faster to play. Preorder early and often!) To be sure, the "NatAC" series rules organisation does leave a bit to be desired. We once spent the better part of an hour searching for the rule that says that units that fail a morale check after taking two hits in fire combat are disrupted. It was there, but not where one was led to expect it. Still, the rules are far easier to digest and follow than the Berg Waterloo opus which is an exercise in convolution. And by a combination of two simple effects (the player needs to move all his divisions in sequence, and units moving *through* friendly units have a high chance of being disrupted), we get at least the traffic jam part of the effects of a chitpull system without any mechanical hassle. Overall, a reminder that they did good games in the old days, often achieving good things with surprisingly little complexity. Impressive and good for quite a few evenings of fun. Markus Last 3 games played: The Chaco War, The 1815 Campaign, Abensberg --------------- http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/ --------------- "Bakayaro! Bakayaro!" ("Stupid Bastards! Stupid Bastards!") -- Admiral Aritomo Goto's last words to his staff, October 11, 1942 _______________________________________________ Consim-l mailing list Consim-l@mailman.halisp.net http://mailman.halisp.net/mailman/listinfo/consim-l