05. Battle of Ordal Cross - 5th July 1808

Diggers wrote:

Martin - you would be surprised. The Spanish volunteer units were huge, many topping 800 men, but they quickly reduced in size after a couple of battles. Likewise when Wellesley landed he had some ginormous battalions as well, some over 1,000 strong. I suppose I could split these into left and right wings.

I think that might be a good idea.  And hopefully not too much work   

As things stand (because of the way the game works) the worst infantry seem immune from a charge by anything other than a fullish-strength squadron.  In reality, it was probably the old and perhaps understrength regular battalions that would have stood the best chance.

Martin (J)

You can always force cavalry to charge by clicking the ground beyond the enemy and when the cavalry get close they'll auto-charge.

I am noticing already that average French cavalry fighting crap Spanish infantry are doing much better than crap Spanish cavalry fighting average French infantry.

A separate issue is that the campaign is chewing through squadrons at a scary rate. This is because when a squadron fights a square it suffers immense casualties. In reality of course, neither square nor squadron would suffer many casualties at all because no melee is taking place. I do not know if there is much we can do about this and even massaging numbers after the battles is difficult because its not always obvious where the cavalry casualties came from.

At this rate by 1809 we'll have a horse-less ACW battlefield.

Or, you could converge the grenadier and light flank companies.

That's already done with the Spanish. The French have yet to meet many of them but there are a stackload of converged grenadier battalions out there and they pack quite a punch, even though they're small. Spanish musketeer regts didn't have light companies at all. The volunteer battalions didn't have flank companies of any sort. Its normal practice now for me to strip the French voltigeur/carabinier and British light companies out to make separate brigade-level skirmish units but the British kept their grenadiers with the battalions. The French didn't always remove their grenadier companies but it was done. In fact last year I offered on this very forum to the whole French team for anyone who wanted this process done in their orbats and no-one took me up on the idea, probably because it would cause many of the fusilier units to drop a morale level (even though the converged grenadier battalions would go up a level).

I think there's 2 issues, one is the fact that cavalry seem to take losses higher than they should in the average battle. I could probably fix that by weighting their returns figures higher. The other is the monster battalion problem and I should probably split in two any battalion over 800 men.

If players are okay with these two courses of action I will try both though I won't do it just yet - I think we need more Nap games under our belts before the trend could be said to definitely be a problem. Its only been an issue in one campaign game so far and that was only because one side had a critically small force anyway.

That sounds like a good solution to me, Mr. D. See how it goes and if necessary those two steps ought to work. Or not ...

Digby wrote:I do not know if there is much we can do about this and even massaging numbers after the battles is difficult because its not always obvious where the cavalry casualties came from.

The outcome calculator I wrote a while ago will tell you exactly how many cavalry casualties were caused in the enemy arty, cav. and inf. It will also give you stats on how many casualties in each arm the cavalry causes.

For instance in the last game, Bessieres' cavalry suffered 7 casualties from Spanish arty, 16 from their cavalry and 190 from the infantry. They captured 1 cav and inf unit and routed 1 cav and 2 inf units. One squadron of frogs hopped off the field in disarray. They inflicted 842 casualties overall, 130 on the Spanish cavalry and 712 on the infantry. Those All in all, not a bad showing. I hate the soup tureens.   

Is there a link to this fabled Outcome Calculator, o wise one?

Here is a dropbox link: SOW Outcome Calculator
Put the scenario.csv and the dump file, Sowgb_gamedb.csv into the same folder as the two calculator files. Note, you have to remove the date and time from the Sowgb_gamedb filename.

I get this error:

That looks like a net framework error. What version of net framework is installed on your computer? You can find it in the registry. Use regedit and go here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP. I think I built this with version 4.

I don't have the /setup/NDP directories you mention but this looks like v4 to me.

It may be that your version of net framework has been corrupted or didn't install properly. You might try re-installing it and see if that helps.