Napoleonics and Battletech Destiny

The Austrian cavalry take the heights north of Aspern, while simultaneously the Grenzers advance towards the orchard west of the town.

Desperate fight for the heights.

Mecha mayhem!

Yesterday Rick brought along the 15mm Austrians that he had bought literally ten years ago for their first game ever. While we own a French, an Anglo-Allied, and an Austrian army between us, we have seldom played Napoleonics as all the rules we have tried before we too labourious to prep for and play; systems like Age of Eagles required special labels for the command base of every unit on the table, the application of which already take up a chunk of time.

When Rick mooted the idea of playing a game, I revisited the To the Last Gaiter Button rules for FPW, and decided to give them another go. Looking at the distances and ground scales, I realised that the game could easily translate to Napoleonics by halving the scale and making one unit a battalion; better yet, by seeing the number of bases as a representation of the Combat Effectiveness of the unit and not the number of troops in the unit, it made it easier to translate historical orders of battle to game.

At this scale we could only play games with one or two divisions aside, for the our scenario I decided to depict only one part of a larger battle, in this case the Austrian attack on Aspern, pitting 11 battalions of infantry, four double-squadrons of light cavalry, and three foot batteries (each of 2 bases) against seven battalions of infantry, three double-squadrons of light cavalry, and one foot battery of the French. Unbeknownst (but suspected) by the Austrian players, the French would be reinforced in the middle of the battle by two double-squadrons of heavy cavalry.

The game uses a grid-based movement, and the players were initially a little surprised by the short movement and "shooting" ranges for infantry, but they pretty soon warmed up to it and realised that the limited movement meant that once a formation is committed to a particular axis of attack, it would be difficult to change one's plans. This was made worse by the fact that the game had a running clock: the Austrian had to capture the whole of Aspen (represented as two grids in our scenario) by 30 on the clock for a victory, and to capture the road leading from the south into Aspern for a major victory. At the start of each turn each side rolled a d6, with the side rolling higher choosing whether to move first but let the other side choose which of the scores to add to the game clock, or letting the opponent move first and choosing which score to add instead.

In our game the battle centred on two actions: an artillery bombardment followed by an infantry assault from the west and the north of Aspern, and a fight for the heights north of Aspern. Our game actually ended more or less as the historical battle did at the end of day 1, with the Austrians controlling half of Aspern and the French still keeping the road south open.

For our second game we played Battletech Destiny, which as I understand it is not a set of wargame rules, but a mash-up of the combat rules from the Mechwarrior: Destiny RPG and Battletech Alpha Strike rules.

I enjoyed the more streamlined combat resolution of the game, but perversely I would have preferred to keep the fiddly hex movement and facing of Battletech Classic.

Our group will be trying out the Alpha Strike rules in the future too, so stay tuned.