Portable Ligny

 I thought I'd try out another Napoleonic rules experiment, this time with the Portable Napoleonic Wargame. I'm really not interested in hypothetical battles, I don't find them a good use of my gaming time. I fancied giving my Prussians an outing, and although I've done Wavre, Quatre Bras and Waterloo many times, I've never actually done Ligny as a figures game.

This meant I went down a bit of a rabbit hole designing a Ligny scenario, whereas I could have just dragged out Quatre Bras or Waterloo again. Anyway, I tried to come up with some OBs which aligned with the unit types in the PW. I fiddled around with various ways of modelling things and in the end went with a variable figure ratio - infantry bases were around 3000 French, 4000 Prussians (their Corps are HUGE and had a lot of Landwehr) and 2000 Imperial Guard. Cavalry were half that, and each gun represented around 50-80 pieces. We will see how that turned out.

I slung together a rough approximation of the Ligny battlefield. I ignored most of the streams except the main one which Bluchers position was lined up with. This was surrounded by marshes and a significant obstacle so I put it in the hexes rather than along the hex sides, this in turn meant some of the villages (like Ligny) were also in the hexes. The stream was only fordable to infantry, cavalry and guns had to use bridges in the numerous villages.

Fleurus is in the foreground, Ligny and Sombreffe in the centre. The road to Gembloux leads off to the top right and the road to Quatre Bras is the top left.

The deployed armies. The Imperial Guard concentrated at Fleurus, Vandamme and Gerard poised to crush Ziethens exposed I Corps while the two Cavalry Corps screen Thielemanns III Corps on the right. Pirchs II Corps is in reserve along the Quatre Bras road.

At one base to 3000, Vandamme ended up with five Infantry, one Light cavalry (the Corps cavalry division) and one gun. I decided to treat this as two 'divisions' in PW parlance, with the lone cavalry unit attached to one of them. For combat I was going to use the rules as written, with the caveat that the maximum support bonus was two bases (to align with DBA) . Historically they were deployed in line opposite St Amand, the light cavalry screening the left.

The Imperial Guard. I'd originally given them four infantry with 3SP ea, but it doesn't actually reflect their combat power, so instead they got six bases with 2SP, two bases for each of the Old, Middle and Young Guard. These were treated as two 'divisions' of three bases each. Similarly the 4500 Guard cavalry were allocated four bases (two of Cuirassiers) grouped as a 'division' under Milhaud. The 122 Guard artillery pieces were represented by two guns, massed in Fleurus and supervised by Napoleon himself! Historically these guns pounded Ligny and St Amand.

Lobaus VI Corp rolled up later in the battle too, that was the weakest Corps with only a few thousand infantry and no integral cavalry. One 'division' of three bases. 

Exelmanns and Pajols Cavalry Corps only had around 3000 men each, so they formed two weak 'divisions' of two bases each - a mix of dragoons and lancers. Gerards Corps was quite weak with only 13000 infantry so only warranted four bases, plus its Corps light cavalry division and Corps artillery. Historically the Cavalry Corps screened the French right, while Gerard put on division and the cavalry to \cover his right while everyone else massed to attack Ligny. 

Ziethens I Corps had 27,000 infantry (!), at one base to 4000, that gave them seven infantry. They also had a couple of thousand cavalry (one base) and the Corps artillery. I split their infantry into two 'divisions', one with four infantry, the other of three infantry and the light cavalry. Historically they were scattered along the marshy stream with garrisons in the villages and reserves northwest of Ligny. This is a ridiculous front to try and hold with 30,000 men. As Wellington observed 'he will be damnably mauled if he fights here'.   I did my best to replicate the historical deployment, spreading elements of the two 'divisions' out with cavalry covering the river crossing in the far west.

To their rear, Pirch's II Corps (24,000 infantry) had six infantry bases, their Corps artillery but rather cavalry (3,500) enough to form a seperate cavalry 'division' of two bases. I just split the infantry into two divisions of three bases each.  These were deployed along the road to Quatre Bras, waiting for Wellington to turn up.

Unfortuately this is a bit blurry, but III Corps was also large (seven infantry in two 'divisions' plus two cavalry in a seperate 'division'), but like I Corps, scattered along the line of the river from Sombreffe over to south bend in the stream which was covered by the cavalry. irl the villages across the stream were occupied by skirmishers, but that would have put them right adjacent to the French cavalry. One of the constraints of the hex grid unfortunately.

That all took a fair bit of setting up, but I enjoy fiddling around with unit OBs, maps and deployments. It also meant I had to keep changing the SP values for each side (and their respective break points) as well as trying to work out what constituted a 'unit' for activation purposes. I didn't want to use the order chits as I had an eye to remote play, but instead used the 'half units plus/minus one' activation system, with the French getting a +1 bonus for Napoleon. Dividing the Corps up into subunits generated a reasonable number of units (nine for the French, ten including Lobau, eight for the Prussians).

Having got that lot all sorted out, time to play. The French won the initiative and opened with artillery bombardments of Ligny and St Amand. Naturally I completely forgot that artillery fire is simultaneous...

Anyway, the guns were surprisingly ineffective, despite all being directed by leaders etc. They did score a hit on one of the Prussian units in Ligny who lost an SP (I'd also rated all the Prussians as 'poor' for loss purposes). At this point I used the old Strategos concept of a 'lead unit' to determine who got hit in each hex (and who led attacks etc).

This was followed up by Gerard assaulting Ligny, again, one unit was designated as 'lead' and I had to decide whether to use the leader to accompany it. This combat was completely ineffective as with the lengthy lists of pluses and minuses both sides needed very low scores to get hit. I found getting my head around the mods applying to your own unit quite challenging and had to keep referring to the rules to resolve each and every combat, which tbh took forever. I'm sure that can be streamlined.  

Vandamme assaulted St Amand and managed to push a single base of Prussians back. I should probably have bombarded the villages for another turn to benefit from the +1 for a continuing bombardment. This manouvre very cleverly masked the Corps artillery, which was a bit stupid of me. It takes a very long time to move guns in  these rules (a full turn to limber, another to move, then another full turn to unlimber). At Corps/Army level I'd be inclined to say they can either move or fire, like Neil Thomas. 

Over on the right both French cavalry Corps occupied the villages. There is no apparent penalty to cavalry in towns and in fact they get a bonus for fighting infantry which negated the stream crossing penalty. As both Corps had their leaders with them I attacked the Prussian infantry on the far bank at +1, although both attacks were ineffective.

The Prussian artillery drove back Gerards 'lead unit' and as per the rules, the Leader had to go with them. This left two French bases facing Ligny so Zeithen decided to move up some reserves and counterattack. I wasn't quite sure how to count the mods for this one, the Prussians penalised for crossing the stream, but the French got penalised for them being in a town (maybe that doesn't apply if they are attacking out?). It didn't matter in any case as neither side suffered any hits.

At this point my camera battery gave out, which isn't hugely helpful.

The action essentially continued with repeated assaults and counterattacks on St Amand and Ligny. Most of the casualties were inflicted by the artillery, particularly flanking fire on Gerard from III Corps and the massed Imperial Guard artillery directed by Napoleon(!). Many of the infantry/cavalry combats were ineffective, but losses steadily mounted albeit roughly equal. The French had a higher breakpoint thanks to the Imperial Guard (a whopping 24SP) and their plethora of subordinate commanders, so it was fairly clear that the Prussians would reach their breakpoint first.

I stopped before that point though as I was still struggling with the close combat modifiers which seemed very counterintuitive  and largely resulted in ineffective combats, particularly once the Prussians concentrated against the various French assaults. I'm not a big fan of 'no result' combats, there is a reason Avalon Hill dropped NE from its CRTs.

There was lots of stuff which worked well. I liked the eventual model of the various Corps, although I probably overdid the number of activations - neither side was ever short of units to activate. The distribution of elements looked fine and the table actually looked like a Napoleonic battle with groups of units in various formations, and I also like the role that leaders have to play. In some ways the issues I had were the same as those with the 3x3 Portable Wargame - that the various combat modifiers just don't represent the historical capabilities of the units, and the SPs don't translate into significant increments of combat power. irl the Imperial Guard went through the Prussians like a knife through butter at Ligny, but in the game they just rolled endless 'no effect' results. 

For the 3x3 game I ended up borrowing the units mods from DBA and essentially using DBA opposed dice rolls to resolve combat, and that may work for this. Horse Foot and Guns has sensible combat and terrain mods for the various unit types, in particular, cavalry are invariably weaker than infantry but if they win they quick kill, so the trick is to disrupt enemy infantry formations, and assault them with cavalry supported by cavalry. Cavalry in broken terrain is almost useless however.

So, all is not lost and I'll have another go at some point. I've also got a few other rules options to try out, Neil Thomas, Brown Bess and even the ancient Leipzig Lite, but they all need some tweaking to fit in with my particular prejudices.