Stardate 20011002.1035 (On Screen): More than one person has remarked on how much I have studied military science. Anyone care to hear how I got interested in it? (If not, skip to the next log entry!) Just after I got out of college, I took a job at Tektronix and was living in the Beaverton area. I used to spend a lot of time in taverns (the standard recreation for twenty-something single men, you know) and at one pizza place I used to go to I got to know one of the guys who worked there. He was a member of
Western Oregon Wargamers, a rather informal club down in Portland (at the time, about 1978), and he invited me to come. His thing was WWII tanks, but I tried it a couple of times and found it dull (and unrealistic, since they never seemed to include infantry in any of their battles). But there were other things going on there, and I got hooked on Napoleonics. This was a club which played with miniatures, tiny painted lead figures on stands, moved around on large tables, playing out battles according to published rules which simulated the style of battle in various eras. About the time I joined, the club's Napoleonic gamers were just switching over to a rule set called "Fire and Steel", which was designed for 15mm figures (i.e. the scale was 15 millimeters == 6 feet for the figure sizes). We had to do a little fiddling to make it work reasonably (there was a bug in the standing rules for cavalry, for instance, which would have made light cavalry more powerful than heavy cavalry) but for the most part it was excellent, and I played it steadily for more than three years. To play a game like this, you obviously have to have painted figures, and when there's a good core group of people what happens is that individuals will select a single army and try to paint up a representative group. Ideally, all the major nationalities will be represented. So people were picking nationalities; there were several people who were going to do French (which is fine; you need a lot of those) and two guys doing Russians, one Swede, one Austrian, one British, some Confederation of the Rhine, one guy even did Spain (boy, did they suck), but no-one was doing the Prussians, so I did. That fateful decision was what set me on the road I've followed since.
We didn't refight historical battles; oddly enough, those are rarely very interesting. Usually the forces involved were uneven and one side has little chance. Rather, we created a point-system valuing the various units, and then each side would have a budget to buy units with. The point system was pretty well tuned, so that two armies with the same point value were pretty competitive on the battle field. We played a lot of other eras, too; I remember a fascinating naval battle with Greek triremes, for instance, and we did some messing around with a table-top version of "Wooden Ships and Iron Men" (from the age of fighting sail). Civil War was pretty popular but my problem with it as that it always seemed to be the same. Of all the eras we played, I liked Napoleonics the best. First was the sheer variety of armies involved; and second was that this was an era of great experimentation, and different nations used different tactics. The Austrians emphasized fighting in column, the British emphasized line. The French used more cavalry. After the defeat of 1806, the Prussian army was completely redesigned from the ground up; my Prussians were from 1813, not from 1805. (The 1805 army was wussy and no fun to play.) One distinction in the Prussian army was that the units tended to be overstrength and larger than average. Swedish units, on the other hand, averaged smaller. The differences between two-rank and three-rank troops, and different marching speeds -- all of these things permitted enormous variety. The other big reason I liked Napoleonics was that in this time the three classic branches (infantry, cavalry, artillery) were more closely matched in battlefield power than at any other time in the history of warfare. In the Thirty Years War or Seven Years War, cavalry dominates the battlefield; by the Civil war cavalry was useless and infantry dominates. In Napoleonics the cavalry is somewhat weaker than the other two branches but not yet useless the way it is in the Civil War. By the Civil War, battlefield cavalry was effectively mounted infantry; they would use their horses to move but fight dismounted. (Cavalry were essential but for strategic rather than for tactical reasons: scouting and screening. That's why all of their cavalry was light.) The only actual cavalry battles as such I'm aware of were versus other cavalry (such as the one in which Jeb Stuart was finally killed). If light cavalry had tried a sabre-charge against infantry they would have gotten butchered by rifle fire and the charge would not have gone home. As a result, no-one in the Civil War ever formed square; the way to meet a cavalry charge was in line.
Which may seem gibberish: another thing that's interesting about older forms of battlefield combat was the use of specialized formations. In the Napoleonic era there were five main ones: skirmish order, where the men are spread out in a cloud which minimized vulnerability to enemy fire (the only one still used); march column, a loose formation which gave maximum speed but minimum fighting power, which was used to move from one place to another as rapidly as possible; battlefield column, a tight disciplined formation used primarily when charging an enemy which maxim
