Battle of Wavre 1815 refought

As Dave B. is an excellent sounding board ideas for developing the ongoing Napoleonic rules, a foisted upon him another Napoleonic game.

The Battle of Wavre was fought at the same time as Waterloo so gets little of the same treatment as it was considered a side show to Waterloo's main event.  Even the Prussians themselves knew this to be true and so left General Thielemann with less than his full corps to delay Marshal Grouchy ('Grew-she') while the rest of the Prussian army left to beat up on the Wellington's forces.

My "Marshal Grouchy"stand.  He is eating his strawberries as Gerard berates him to march to Napoleon's aid.

The Prussian defensive line was the difficult to cross Dyle River, so once again we are dealing with Napoleonic town fighting across the bridges at those points.

Looking from the south-east toward the direction of Waterloo, this photo shows the Dyle River.  Dave's initial French forces of Vandamme's infantry are assaulting both Bierge(center) and Wavre on the right while Exelmann's Dragoons look toward Limale on the left. Only the Prussian artillery are showing themselves on the far bank of the river near the villages.

I took the Prussians as they were pretty well stationary giving Dave the more decision making French command.  Historically, Grouchy followed what he believed to be the proper course of action from Napoleon's rather cloudy directives.  After the Battle of Ligny Napoleon gave Crouchy who previously led only a corps of cavalry, command over the infantry corps of General Gerard and Vandamme both of whom were heavily engaged at Ligny, along with the cavalry of Exelmann and Pajol.  Napoleon seemed to want to have Grouchy keep his sword in the back of the retreating Prussians while Gerard pressed for him to march to Napoleon's aid once the cannon fire from the direction of Waterloo was heard.  These two different actions formed the options - by secret die roll - which the French under Dave B. could take unknown to me, as the Prussians.  Thus I could not commit my reserves accordingly.

Dave moving an element between Limale(right) and Bierge(center) .  Note the large blank bases which form my potential hidden reserves.  These bases I kept from their previous use as our artillery bases, which are now considerably smaller.

Now to be honest I did not have much choice in my reserves deployment, nor did Thielemann,  as he was seriously outnumbered and most of his forces were already committed to the defence of each of the towns forming the crossing points and so placed them historically.  Again, historically, the French had little idea of the forces ranged against them, so I felt justified in the scenario to have many potential hidden forces for the Prussians keeping their numbers unknown to the French.

As it was only a medium sized game, we ended up playing one and half-ish games rewinding the clock several times as we came to grip with different ways of handling the town fighting rules.  In the past we had town fighting a function of the normal open field element combat with an addition of overwhelming modifier for the defenders. Lucky dice aside, the only way to defeat any defender was to attrition them and so a "conga-line" would enviably form with a long line of attacking elements cycling through until the defender was worn down enough to evict. While simple, I felt it did not feel right nor was it satisfying play for the commanders.

So the scenario was kinda set aside as Dave B and I myself tried various options.  In the end, while it still needs to be tested, we came up with combat much in the same vein as cavalry combat with squares as in the defenders stay put until voluntarily removed or eliminated (not literally but as a cohesive body of troops).  Combat itself is simply a die roll-off without modifiers.  Elites only have more staying power.  A bit more to it of course but it follows the rules approach we continue to strive for in simple "convention game" procedures. The effect works however.

The French of Vandamme's Corps assault the town led by the 2nd Foreign Regiment ("the Swiss") representing Habert's brigade

With much of the game in intellectual discussion, the scenario was not played out to any extent. I was worried about reinforcement timing as for the rules now more streamlined, can cause historical timing of forces entering the table to be difficult to establish.  This proved again to be the case and is but another item to be looked at, but the new town fighting rules might work now. Hopefully.

Hmm, I think I will have to re-roll that one!