Hello FW!

If you send me an email I'll send you a rough copy of your order of battle for both sides in a NAW Polemos format. It's only my limited concept based on your listing above with no knowledge of any Spanish. So you would have to make any corrections and updates as your knowledge of the battle improves.

It basically doubles your number of bases that you have listed for GdD. So you can have every commander and every unit on the table. Which means you also get to paint every unit as a base or multiples of.

Playing at this expanded level gives you a better feel for small battles like this and easily lets you include more players if you want.

Best regards,

Glenn

Hello FW!

Great, looking forward to hearing from you.

GdD and NAW are slightly different but both are reasonably sorted out without too much difficuly.

You must first draw up an order of battle which is what were working on. That shows everything that you will need to know during the game. There is no need to mark any units. You will paint your figures to represent a certain unit so a lot of them will look different. All of your commanders will be on the table and your o/b will tell you what the breakdown is of every type for every commander. The rules encourage you to keep your commands together although your free to break them up whenever you want. If you do your still obligated to keep track of where they came from.

For the British infantry for example I would paint every base as a different specific regiment. For your game two or more of them could be considered as part of the same unit. You paint them differently so in the future you can play bigger battles and use them as they look, different regiments. Your Argentine regiments can be painted anyway you want as you will probably only use them again for this or other SA games.

For shaken levels in most Polemos games you simply use casualty figures placed beside the unit. You can buy these from Baccus.

NAW does not use orders, only tempo points and they are tracked by using single mounted figures. You can do the same with GdD, just use different coloured horses.

The entire Polemos system of rules requires very little paperwork and very few labels. We play games with 150-200 or more bases on the table and have no problems establishing who belongs to who. After you play your first game it will all fall into place.

Best regards,

Glenn 

"A couple of other questions: 

How do you visually mark which battalion belongs to which division and how do you identify individual battalions during a battle?"

- This tends not to come up in practice (i.e. it is usually obvious), but I typically have a unit name written on the base in case I get confused.  I often have little distinguishing features to do this kind of work.  So facings, flags, drummers colours etc. will indicate the quality of the unit and which formation it belongs to.

"How can you keep track of "shaken levels"?"

- Markers or casualty figures, typically.

"How do you keep track of "tempo points" and their conversion into orders?"

-Markers or ADC figures for tempo points.  For order points, I tend to just work it out in my head.

"Imagine you have 50 units on the table. That could quickly become a lot of paperwork if you don't have a good system in place."

-The only markers that go with units are shaken levels.  You tend not to need *that* many at any one time.  Tempo points go with formations (divisions or independent brigades) - it is a very big battle  if you go over 5 per side.

I hope that helps a little

All the best

John

I can't exactly recommend them, since I prefer Polemos - if you need a hand then just let me know, or potentially I can go through a full game and write it up, if that would help; but here are a few options:

There is a nice set of Napoleonic rules published in Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy 058.  These are meant for relatively big battles mind.

There are a very nice set of simple generic horse and musket rules in Battlegames 23 called Simplicity in Practice.  If you search the net a little there are a couple of suggestions to make it more specifically Napoleonic.

Also designed for big battles are the Blucher rules by Sam Mustafa.  I'm not sure that they are more accessible than Polemos, but you might find Sam's more expansive writing style easier to follow.

The only single base game available as an ebook I know at the same scale (1 base = 1 battalion) is in Charlie Wesencraft's Practical Wargaming.

But there are other options, if you are prepared to do a little work, you can make something like Black Powder work without too much difficulty.

I hope that helps

All the best

John

Hello FW!

Sorry for the mix up, for NAW I'm refering to North American Wars the rule set that I have written and Baccus plans to release sometime this year.

GdD Polemos Napoleonics is aimed towards experinced players. Regardless there is a bit of a learning curve for everyone, so your not alone when you find yourself trying to fill in the missing bits. Thats normal. You, however, have a great advantage as John is the most experienced player with GdD except perhaps beyond the author. So your in great hands.

Almost all rules today will work with any base, some as is and others with a few simple amendments.

Like John I can't really recommend another rule set as frankly they all fall short of my expectations. Rules pretty much are a personal choice and only with experience will you be able to tell if a rule set works for you or not. Here at least you know you have a lot of support.

Hope this helps clear up your concerns, if not fire away.

Best regards,

Glenn

I think you want p377 of Fortescue's History of the British Army

https://archive.org/stream/historyofbritis05fort#page/376/mode/2up

This gives the strengths of all units except the Light Battalion in Craufurd's brigade. This could be because it was made up from this light companies of the other battalions. In which case I could wonder if your classification of those battalions as SK1 is correct or whether SK0 would be more correct?

See also p119/120 of

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=LUMUAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA157&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false

This gives the strength of the "battery" attached two Craufurd's brigade as only two 3pdrs

@Friedrich_Wilhelm, Yes you are right, just p377 doesn't give the strength of all units, but it looks like the whole chapter does.

With the one exception that I couldn't find a strength for the Light Battalion. This leads me to wonder if it could be because it was made up from the light companies of the other battalions and the strengths of these companies were included in the states of their parent battalions. In which case I could wonder if the GdD classification of those battalions as SK1 is correct or whether SK0 would be more correct for a battalion without its light company? Also you would need to reduce the strength of each battalion by 10% when is looses one of its companies. Does this sound reasonable?

@Keithabarker,

Creating a brigade light battalion from the light companies plus attached riflemen was pretty standard procedure throughout the entire Peninsular War.  The infantry battalions would then happily throw out more centre companies to skirmish if they needed them. 

@Whirlwind, yes I agree. Creating a light battalion WITHIN THE BRIGADE from the light companies plus attached riflemen was pretty standard procedure throughout the entire Peninsular War. Even reinforcing the skirmish screen from the centre companies when needed was standard practice. This gave the British brigades a heavy skirmish screen which the French were hard pressed to penetrate.

But in this case, we are talking about removing the light companies from their battalions AND from the brigade and forming a seperate light battalion in a seperate light brigade. This leaves the "heavy" brigades without any trained skirmishers at all, and they would be forced to always use centre companies as light troops. This is why I was considering classing them as SK0 (no trained light troops).

IIRC the Spanish line are classed as SK0, because they had only 32 trained skirmishers per battalion (according to the 1802 infantry regulations).

@Keith,

Yes, I see what you mean - very like what was done at Maida, for example.  I do think that your idea is a good one in these circumstances- to create the SK2 battalion at the expense of making the other battalions SK0. 

All the best