Chris Harding and I finished our game of the free NBS Montebello on Thursday. We had played it using my freshly arrived NBS 3.0 rulebook from the MMP Talavera/Vimeiro box. NBS, or Napoleonic Battle Series, is, as people will generally know, the Napoleonic descendant of the Gamers' Civil War Brigade (CWB) series, and is like the CWB likewise distinguished by the fact that it has an explicit order system - if you want a corps or division to move, you have to order it around. My 19th century tactical gaming experience was fundamentally altered when I encountered these systems, and I nowadays find it hard to accept games as good history that endeavour to show lots of detail but do not have rules that permit them to show similar dynamics. Montebello is a very good avenue to get into the system, and there is another free game, Espinosa, on the MMP "Gamers Archive" webpage for download. (You can also download the rules so both Montebello and Espinosa are really for free.) The actual game went down to the wire, with the French, hobbled by very long order acceptance times in the middle of the day, having to assault into the teeth of a rather strong Austrian gun line. They did not get into Montebello after several very bad close combat dierolls and fizzled cavalry charges, but a couple of successful assaults brought the Austrian losses to within one step of the boundary that would have enabled the French to claim a draw. Montebello is a really nice little game, and there is no doubt that the new NBS rules are a great step forward in historicity compared to the old ones. But we were both a bit surprised that it took us 3 (though short) evenings to actually finish. I would consider the 3.0 rules to convey much better history, and they would retain their status as my favourite Napoleonic tactical system. (As opposed to grand tactical systems such as Eagles of the Empire or Napoleon's Triumph or Napoleon's Last Battles, which are IMO in a different category. MMP now markets NBS as "grand tactical" which is a bit odd in a system that has a lot of formation detail, the effects of limbering and unlimbering artillery, and so on.) The design notes also explain many of the changes in detail and I would agree with most of them (although these notes are sometimes written in a slightly patronising style - come on, folks, many people have been playing other rules than NBS and will know much of this stuff. But it's nice to see it reflected in the game). The only negative aspect is that I would not say that any really great streamlining has taken place, despite the fact that I heard a number of claims to that effect, so let me harp on this a bit. For example, combat used to be a fairly involved affair: you fire, then you check morale and stragglers, or you used close combat. OK, the morale and straggler rolls have disappeared, and the decision of assault or fire combat has (IMO rightly for a game at this scale) been removed. What happens is that *every* combat starts out as an attempt to go for close combat and leads to a "check to stand dieroll", possibly for both sides, and who checks first depends on the situation. Fine so far. But, depending on that dieroll, one then checks for losses on three different sets of tables (Firefight, Attacker wins, Defender wins - in the latter two cases there are different tables for the attacker versus the defender). That does make for a bit of searching around on the chart every time. Even if one uses the old "roll everything at once" method again, the effort now comes not from the dierolling but from tracing the actual sequence of actions triggered by the rolls and that remained rather fiddly. I could see the argument that this will become second nature at some point but if I'm still looking around the third evening I play with the system, then I think it could become second nature faster. Overall I must say these are some of the most carefully constructed tables I've seen in a game; they are almost a work of art. But the labeling of the tables is also not always helpful. In the old system, it was clear who fired at whom - in the new firefight table, even after ten firefights, we still had to carefully check every time we rolled that we were applying the result to the right force, and with the modifiers for the right force. Morale checks are now quite simple - 1d6 is rolled against the unit's numeric rating. But that rating is given by table based on the unit's morale letter (A to E), and there are three tables that give subtly different numeric values to the same morale rating depending on what one is checking for, which again means we go back to the tables every time to make sure we got it right. As far as playing it goes, I like the system, and I would agree it provides the results in a more (historically) natural fashion than before, although there is a certain artificiality to the combats. The simplicity of the Check to Stand table (1d6) means that in many cases, it's clear that the attacker has no chance of driving out the defender. Seems slightly overdeterministic, and takes some of the thunder out of the subsequent loss dierolls. I have played every NBS game since Marengo and I'll buy whatever's down the pipeline. In the past, NBS was always a bit hobbled by the fact that its ACW heritage was clear to see and the new rules really make this a truly Napoleonic system. They're easily retrofitted to the older games so I am now thinking of getting my copy of Aspern-Essling out of storage, although probably for solo play. The overall distribution of losses seemed in the ballpark to us, so I would recommend the new system for those who want more detail than Eagles of the Empire has to offer. The system feels much more Napoleonic and the rules are much less obfuscatory than either Triumph & Glory or Battles of Waterloo. I'm doing my next 3D map now (for Espinosa) and intend to go on to Vimeiro and Talavera after that. But the claims of promised major speedups over the old rules are not quite true for us and a quick "on the side" system this ain't; be prepared to spend a number of evenings on the bigger battles. Markus Last 3 games played: Battle for Germany, Montebello, Reichshoffen --------------- 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