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Author Topic: ESR for Napoleonics!  (Read 9758 times)

bayonetbrant

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on: October 27, 2018, 09:28:30 PM
OK, Cyrano/PanzerDE - fill in those not in the know...   


What's ESR and what's it good at in the Napoleonic realm  :3musketeer:

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Staggerwing

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Reply #1 on: October 27, 2018, 10:49:42 PM
OK, Cyrano/PanzerDE - fill in those not in the know...   


What's ESR and what's it good at in the Napoleonic realm  :3musketeer:

ESR= erythrocyte sedimentation rate. If your foe's collective ESR is elevated then his troops are dying from dysentary?

Vituð ér enn - eða hvat?  -Voluspa


bob48

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Reply #2 on: October 28, 2018, 06:45:04 AM
Saw Jim and Doug talking about this on FB and it looks very interesting indeed.

http://thewargamingcompany.com/esr/

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bbmike

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Reply #3 on: October 28, 2018, 09:09:30 AM
Saw Jim and Doug talking about this on FB and it looks very interesting indeed.

http://thewargamingcompany.com/esr/

That looks fantastic! I'd love to watch those two play it.

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Cyrano

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Reply #4 on: October 28, 2018, 01:20:52 PM
This is an article waiting to happen, but I will sum up.

Napoleonics gaming -- pace the beloved KS -- begins with the skirmish-as-battle begun by luminaries like H.G. Wells and Don Featherstone.  They lumped a bunch of fellows from the same regiment into groups of 20, roughed out the regiments that were at a particular battlefield, and fired them at each other.  No basing, other than what you needed to make a fellow stand upright, ground scale was not an issue and neither was time scale.  Most of the stuff was either 54mm or, later, 25mm.

As time went on -- I point this to the late 60s into the 70s -- you saw fellows start to care about ground scale, figure scale, &c.  This, then, opened the issue of who the player actually is.  A brigadier?  A corps commander?  Napoleon?  For many years, rule sets struggled with the issue of balancing scope with playability.  In truth, most of the classic-era games were battalion level, but most everybody (not all to be sure) wanted to play Austerlitz, Waterloo, or Leipzig.  This usually broke the game in horrific ways.  CLS, Empire, and any number of lovely homebrews cracked under the weight.

Enter games like the seminal "Volley and Bayonet" by Frank Chadwick which turned the base units from battalions to brigades under the twin arguments that brigades were actually the primary MEs for high-level commanders like Wellington and that you could successfully game Waterloo in a lifetime.  Others have followed including the well-regarded "Grand Armee", "Blucher", "DBN". and the horrifically-titled "Snappy Nappy" which I've long thought British players would associate with a child's nether-garments..  Others took matters in a different direction trying to distill out the granular detail that made older rules such a slog at high level while still keeping the battalion as the ME..  The greatest of these was surely "Shako" (I and II) although I have a soft spot for "Le Feu Sacre".

Other systems have tried to put the granularity and detail into brigade-level games.  The two best here are "Napoleon's Battles", which I still prefer in the AH edition, and the estimable "Age of Eagles" which is a now well-developed riff on "Fire and Fury". 

And, of course, all along folks have clung fiercely, although in diminishing numbers based on my experience, to their "hyper realistic" games.  The best examples I can think of here are "Empire", "General de Brigade", and the depressing slog that is "Carnage and Glory".  To those playing the latter:  PLAY THE ENTIRE DAMN GAME ON A PC.  YOU'LL LIVE LONGER, HAPPIER LIVES.

With all this, one would think people would tire of writing rules, but part of the spirit of minis gaming, I have come to think, is a desire to get what you think these battles should look and play like to the table and share that with others.

"Et Sans Resultat", named after a famous quotation re: the Battle of Eylau, seems (I've not played it) to be poking at that middle space between Empire and Blucher.  The ME is still the battalion, but it's represented as a single base and orders are issued at the divisional level (a choice I find interesting).  The company behind it is producing a lovely line of campaign books around the key battle sequences during the history of the First Empire.  They have also shown themselves quite the aggressive convention demo team.

And that's prologue.

Doug and I have discovered the joy of TTS and I am NOT going back.  Next year I'm off to visit Aspern-Essling, Wagram, and, hopefully, Eckmuhl, so I must build games around them.  We're already pounding away at the early part of that campaign using "Flight of the Eagle" elsewhere.   A-E is the best regarded of them (really one of only three battles where the sides can be said to be even (bonus points for guessing the other two)).  I am going to build an ESR A-E set in TTS and will be inviting ACD minions to play.  This will be televised...Twitched anyway.

Also, it is hoped, the folks behind ESR will be joining the ACD crew at Historicon.

Doug and I are relieved of all other responsibilities and will be yelling at each other in highly-inflected German.

Selah.


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bob48

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Reply #5 on: October 28, 2018, 01:54:26 PM
That's very interesting, Jim - thank you!

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bbmike

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Reply #6 on: October 28, 2018, 04:51:52 PM
+1  :bigthumb:

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panzerde

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Reply #7 on: October 29, 2018, 02:05:08 PM
Adding to Jim's excellent explanation above, ESR seems to be one of the best supported rules sets around right now. As a company, not only do they have the rules and campaign books, but they carry minis and various battlefield additions like buildings, as well, all in several scales. Warfare Miniatures probably makes getting into Napoleonic minis about as easy as possible for a company here in the US.

Miniature gaming is probably more popular than hax and counter in the UK, and the density of minis makers there reflects that.

I'm very intrigued at the idea of having battalions on the map but giving orders at the division level. I'm wondering if this addresses two of the (very few) shortcomings of my favorite Napoleonic system from John Tiller Software; namely a) that there are orders, and b) that orders (and hopefully things like morale and imitative) impact higher-level organizations like divisions, and not just battalions. Far too many tactical games of all eras simply ignore the latter issue, at every scale.

The challenge for me with minis has always been that I really am not that interested in painting. I'm also not interested in taking out a second mortgage on the house to have someone else paint them. TTS and KS, and to a growing extent games like those from Command Post Games offer alternatives to traditional minis while still preserving some of the best aspects of miniatures gaming. ESR is ground-scale agnostic as well, which means that I can get away with 2mm minis...which don't require much painting at all!

I actually don't really like games.

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bayonetbrant

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Reply #8 on: October 29, 2018, 03:04:25 PM
have you looked into something like the Army Painter tools to still get the army painted, but much quicker and at a lower-level of detail?

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panzerde

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Reply #9 on: October 30, 2018, 08:38:08 AM
All my stuff is exclusively Army Painter. It still takes too long.

I actually don't really like games.

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bbmike

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Reply #10 on: October 30, 2018, 08:50:31 AM
Uh-oh, what Army Painter tools do I need that I didn't know I needed?  ???

"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence."
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bayonetbrant

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Reply #11 on: October 30, 2018, 09:03:12 AM
All my stuff is exclusively Army Painter. It still takes too long.


yikes!  :o


are you just doing 1 man = 1 fig?  :hehe:

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panzerde

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Reply #12 on: October 30, 2018, 05:26:25 PM
All my stuff is exclusively Army Painter. It still takes too long.


yikes!  :o


are you just doing 1 man = 1 fig?  :hehe:

There's a HUGE difference between painting two armies worth of 20+ figure battalions and painting a batch of figures for use in a fantasy game. Even at 6mm, that's a lot to paint, regardless of the level of detail. I found I could reasonably paint about a battalion an hour in 6mm.

2mm will be much faster. However, with 2mm, yes, I am doing 1:1...

I actually don't really like games.

Castellan -  La Fraternite des Boutons Carres


Cyrano

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Reply #13 on: October 31, 2018, 09:50:35 AM
My books are scheduled to arrive TODAY.

Loosing at YOU Mr. USPS guy...


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panzerde

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Reply #14 on: November 01, 2018, 11:41:52 AM
With any luck mine should be here today or tomorrow.

I actually don't really like games.

Castellan -  La Fraternite des Boutons Carres