One-half Napoleon's Battles

I am posting an e-mail sent to me from Dale E. Blay

"Hello Rafael,

I wanted to let you know that I have been playing the NBd rules as posted on the NB Yahoo Group. Over the last six months our group has been primarily playing the One-Half Scale and we have been using the standard infantry unit as representing a regiment instead of a battalion. Hence, we doubled the combat and command ranges. We have been able to easily complete a game with 3-4 corps total, in a day of gaming.

Cavalry ends up being a regiment or brigade, depending on actual strength. With artillery, we left an artillery base as still representing a battery. We do include brigade and divisional guns. We ended up leaving out the skirmishers entirely as their effect on the game was minimal compared to the time it took to resolve their activity. We accepted the fact that the firing ranges still represent skirmish ability of the regiment.

Rather than mess with a descending order of artillery casualties, we have just decided that artillery can only inflict one casualty regardless if it has a "doubling" die roll. It cuts down on the effectiveness of the guns and makes them really only vulnerable to close combat instead of lucky die rolling from counter-battery fire as it still requires 2 hits to give 1 hit to a battery. Since artillery can't inflict more than one hit, counter-battery is pretty ineffective, at least as far as the game is concerned.

Our last game was an 1812 Russian Campaign scenario with 4 corps total. We completed the game in about 6 hours. We have found that only a few simple modifications are necessary to play at the One-Half Scale.

Thank you for providing the framework for this option.

Dale E Bley "

According to Dale: "The cadre of the overall group (anywhere from 4-12 players) are middle-aged men in their mid 50's to early 60's with 25 to 30 years of wargaming experience. Most of us have been friends for 30+ years and we play a wide variety of historical periods. We are located in southern Wisconsin (north of Chicago) and usually play our games at our homes instead of a "club site"

This is the first external report about the actual use of one-half NB. It is remarkable that they did not used any skirmish fire procedure (to speed up the game), and used a new option for artillery fire: only one casualty is inflicted regardless if it has a "doubling" die roll or not.

I must to confess that skirmish and artillery fire were the main troubles I found, when adapting Napoleon's Battles to one-half/divisional scales. Using my rules (See the pdf file) in the Scenarios played until now, the skirmish fire was almost ineffectual and required an excessive number of die rolls, so the Bley's approach is reasonable although the 'Napoleonic look' is somewaht lost. Maybe the best solution was to maintain the skirmsih fire as it is in NB, but only originating disorder, the main objectve of such fire.

With regard to artillery fire, the Bley's simplified option is very atractive, and I did not think anyway in something similar! They also maintain the NB modification for counter-battery fire, somewhat I changed, maybe without necessity. I must think about it, and test these new ways in an ad-hoc Scenario such as Lindenau:

The main conclusion is that one-half NB (and NBd) are viable options!