The Loose Association of Wargamers

In my gaming, the preferred organisation is where a sub-commander has a number of units under his command as the lowest level of command. I'll call this a "brigade" - a term which works well for Horse & Musket but less well for, say, Ancients, though the concept is the same.

Different rule sets give this commander ("Brigadier"), different roles & powers- a Command radius, ability to add to a unit's power in Close Combat, morale duties etc. Rules usually indicate the ideal number of units in the brigade. I understand that the more units, the more difficult is the brigadier's job but I usually think he is given too many. in most rule sets.

For example, a brigade with 4 cavalry regiments or more means that a brigade might contain two thirds or greater of the cavalry complement of the army. The 4 or more units have a marvellous combined power, a marshalling of considerable force but because of command radii, much of the rest of the army is largely without cavalry support. The same holds true for "brigades" of phalangites, or of light troops or elite formations etc - all common brigade groupings.

I prefer brigade groupings of o more than 4 infantry & 2 cavalry units . If, for instance, you want to use *some* of the masses of French Imperial Guard you've painted but in the interests of something like an even game can't use, a two battalion brigade of Guard Grenadiers gives you something you can add to your French Napoleonic army of French regular & conscript infantry without over-egging the pudding.

This usually flies in the face of both history & the rule set. Your thoughts?

donald

The British tended to stick with three regiments (cavalry) or battalions (infantry) as the optimum number for one man to command. Depending on force size and/or mission, you might occasionally find brigades of two or four units, but three was the norm. The French, certainly in the Ancien Regime, preferred to pair units off - hence an infantry brigade would normally contain two regiments (four battalions) and a cavalry brigade similar (but again usually with a total of four squadrons). Looking at other 18C European armies, two-regiment infantry brigades were usually the norm, although I think the Prussians used to group their grenadier battalions in threes (might be wrong on that).

I wonder if the problem here is that rules writers tend to get hung up on "regiments" - especially when it comes to cavalry - and forget that the basic tactical unit was the squadron? The only H&M-era ruleset I can think of that acknowledges this is Dave Brown's General de Brigade (his more recent General D'Armee might as well, but I don't have those), which discusses cavalry as squadron-sized units and, more importantly, allows them to be deployed/manoeuvred/fought as such. As I said above, the French used to operate as four-squadron brigades, which has a pleasing symmetry without overloading the poor old horse general's brain (he is a cavalry officer, after all!). Unless a ruleset forces you to deploy your armies in ahistorically sized higher formations, I would make your brigade sizes whatever you want them to be - unless there was a dire shortage of generals (and presumably also senior regimental officers, as it was quite normal to temporarily/locally promote the senior CO) an army commander would not normally "overload" his subordinates, as it would hinder their ability to carry out his orders.

Interesting.

I do understand that games like Field of Glory don't want you to have too many "get out of jail free" generals, so restrict you to make the game more challenging. But as I indicated, it curtails your tactical opportunities.

My home-grown SYW rule set allowed you to deploy cavalry in squadrons but this undoubtedly contributed to the overly complex nature of the rules. I need to think of a simple way of doing this in the new set, Tricorne.


donald

BTW I think historically, the French SYW armies had generals coming out of their fundaments as every two-bit aristocrat just about qualified. The Russians would hire job-lots of foreigners for the job & had a surfeit. The other countries, not so much.

My SYW armies get through a lot of generals! That actually has an effect on command status etc using the rules we do (Carnage and Glory). Still it gives all those aide's de camp something to do beyond looking pretty...

I think the issue is Rules. A lot of a brigadiers tasks under rule sets are actually the under unit commanders job not theirs.

His job was to get them into the right place at the right time, keep them there and then irder them firward when his biss waves him on, or pull them out.

We get hung up on labels. In the 4 battalion set up, a brigadier directly controls 5 people, his 4 battalion colonels and his adc to spread changes of orders.

By the Seven Years War cavalry were almost always operating as regimental tactical groups. They were still listed as squadrons on orders of battle, but in most cases regiments would be committed to battle as a coherent whole and the brigadiers were dealing with Colonels, not Chefs d'Escadron.

Similarly, a lot of armies (such as the Austrian and Imperial armies) still listed grenadier companies separately, but then tactically they would either be attached directly to an infantry battalion, would be massed into a grenadier battalion, or would be left out of the battle completely to guard the baggage. There weren't individual grenadier companies running about the battlefield.

French cavalry regiments of the period usually consisted of two squadrons (with some oddities such as the Colonel-General Regiment with three, the Royal-Carabiniers with five and the Gendarmerie de France with eight), but were expanded to four squadrons during the period 1761-62. French cavalry brigades typically had three cavalry regiments, though could have as many as four regiments or as few as two (particularly late in the war), or just a single regiment in the case of the Carabiniers and Gendarmerie.