The Battle of Lutzen (1813)

Today I played General d'Armee with the wargamers I met at Pacificon and played FOW with last month. I consistently see GDA as among the top recommended Napoleonic rules online, so I was excited to try it out and was lucky Keith understood the game well and was willing to teach it.

 

We would be running the Battle of Lutzen (1813), one of Napoleon's battles during the War of the Sixth Coalition. Matt and I would be playing the French, and Alex and Paul would be playing the Russians and Prussians (the Premium Russians). The French controlled the towns and could deploy on almost the entire map, meanwhile the Coalition forces would be deploying 9 inches from the tables edge and would have to assault the towns, trying to capture 3/5 objectives by the end of 15 turns. Each side would receive reinforcements coming from the edge of the table sporadically throughout the game.

 

I held a village and riverbank on the left, and had the rest of my battalions holding the farmland between the left and center villages. Opposing me on the left would be Alex and his Prussians.

Matt had the right side of the battlefield, he occupied everything from the center village to the right village and everything in between. He faced Paul and his Russian force.

The village on the left didn't have the most defensible position. There was an unprotected opening facing the enemy, and it basically left a hole that the enemy artillery would be able to just fire down and bombard any infantry I had inside the town. And that's exactly what Alex did, he parked 2 artillery battalions on the hill facing the town and just blasted away at my Frenchmen for several turns.

In the center and right of town, Matt and Paul were having an epic melee over the villages. The fight went back and forth for several turns, but eventually, the Russian reinforcements arrived and they were slowly able to capture the 2 villages that Matt was defending.

On the left, Alex was informed of the unfortunate news that cavalry was not capable of attacking villages, so he shifted his cavalry further to my left, trying to attack the reserve unit and artillery I had across the river. He chose to charge his cavalry into my cannons, but this did not end well for him as he was running into grapeshot and the supporting fire of 2 nearby battalions. His cavalry charge failed and was forced to fall back. But not all was lost for Alex, he still had plenty of infantry on the way, and after several turns of bombardment my battalion was forced to retreat from the village, leaving it undefended. I could have moved another battalion into the village, but than they would just be sent into the same meatgrinder as the last battalion, sitting in a town with no cover, being fired at by artillery every turn, so I decided to abandon the village and instead try to hold Alex's units from moving to the right.

While his infantry had been forced to retreat from the towns, Matt still managed to inflict decent casualties on the enemy, and his cavalry was wiping the floor with Paul's Russian cavalry. We had given up the 3 objectives the Coalition needed to win, but they needed to hold it until turn 15, it was still only turn 7 and that was the turn that the last set of off table reinforcements would arrive, 12 battalions of Young Guard entering on the side of the French. In the real Battle of Lutzen, the French and Coalition would fight back and forth, with the villages exchanging hands several times until Napoleon's Young Guard finally arrived on scene and chased the Coalition away. Would we be able to repeat history this day?

Unfortunately we wouldn't be able to find out. It took us 6 hours to get 7 turns in, and we didn't want to play another 6 hours to finish it. We called it a draw, which like I said last time, is always a result I'm happy with.

I read a lot of criticisms about GDA's ADC command friction system being a bit too harsh, but I didn’t think it was that bad. With the system, you generate a pool of ADC's (aide-de-camp) by rolling dice, which help you activate and give orders to units. Each unit also has to activate by rolling 3+. So you have 2 layers of command friction that can make it hard to make your army do what you want it to. Some people found that system too limiting but I thought use of brigade attachments to reroll activation made things a bit more manageable and I didn't find the system too intrusive. It could also be because we had some consistently good rolls for the ADC pool. Either way I tend to enjoy command friction rules and prefer them to games where you just control all your forces perfectly like its some RTS video game, and consider such systems to be historically accurate. To quote a poster on the GDA forums, "the reasons for hesitancy were numerous and occurred in virtually every battle ... This is friction and the fog of war, bringing perhaps just a fraction of the frustration felt by Napoleonic commanders home to the player."

I enjoyed the rules. Was quite simple to learn. Makes me excited to try V&F and Shako 2 eventually because I have some friends who keep telling me those games are much better than GDA. Anyways, hopefully I'll get to join these guys for their game next month, The Battle of Quatre Bras, but I have a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign I'm also playing that takes up certain Sundays. I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Until next time, folks!