Scourge of War Boards

Updated to provide V2of scenario and V3 of mod see later post for detail



This scenario and associated mod has been developed from the standard WL10 Waterloo all day scenario. I must apologise immediately that my French and Italian language capability is not sufficient to translate this post or indeed most of the new courier messages I have added - I have added some English with occasional French and italian words in those messages. If anybody wants to translate them for me that would be great.

My purposes in making the changes were to produce a more accurate historic representation as follows:

1) For game balance reasons WL10 only includes Bulow’s IVth Corps but elements of Ziethen’s Ist and Pirch’s II Corps also participated. The French OOB in WL10 is also somewhat inaccurate in that Teste’s division is included in Lobau’s Corps although it had been attached to Grouchy’s force. I am aware that my own OOB’s are not 100% accurate, e.g. I merged one or two Prussian cavalry units, but they are close enough for most purposes.

2) Having tried the standard scenario I found that a key British advantage, Shrapnel, seemed to have no real impact and the general effectiveness of artillery, particularly in respect to canister range was too low from a historic perspective.

3) I found that it was relatively easy to win the standard scenario by taking care to maximise points accumulated from holding objectives. The documentation and settings appear to indicate that the AI should also benefit from holding objectives. I am not sure that this actually happens and, even if it does, the AI as a player does not pay much regard to placing its forces to maximise its score. In a long scenario objective point accumulation can become too big a factor.

Before you read further I should advise you there is a weakness in my scenario and its associated mod in case this means they will not suit you. In my opinion they are less suitable for those who wish to play in HITS style. I will briefly explain why – I have increased the effective range of canister to its historic levels. Thus for example Napoleon’s 12lbers, his “Beautiful Daughters”, can fire out to 450 yards. Unfortunately I do not know how to tell the intrinsic AI used by both sides to manage most artillery units to be aware of the munitions’ capabilities. I have arranged for the AI of both sides to be periodically ordered to use canister but this is not ideal as the situation may or may not be right for this. Thus my scenario and mod are possibly more suitable for those who prefer hands on style. I have developed and tested it using the “Normal” setting and have proved to myself that a Major Victory is difficult but possible! Finally I believe that my modified Munitions file would stop this being used in multiplayer mode. This is a pity as having additional players to help manage the French batteries and make them use Canister properly would be a benefit.

The scenario should be extracted into the User Scenarios folder which on my system is in mydocuments/sowwl/Scenarios folder and the Mod into Mods folder which on my system using steam is found at Steam Apps/Common/Scourge of War Waterloo/Mods. The pdf file included gives some further detail and guidance regarding the scenario and mod. I guess the scenario should run without the mod but I have not tested it. The mod does give the human player some advantages versus the AI as you will know the new capabilities for artillery on both sides but after all the AI will eventually have had about twice as many troops as you!

You will need to activate the mod. It has been tested using the ordinary Grog Toolbar (not High Res)

As the scenario takes several hours to play I cannot claim that it has been exhaustively tested but it does now seem to run through to a conclusion albeit with one or two CTD restarts on the way. Do use autosave!!

Regards

Mike

AI artillery will use canister when it is in range. If your artillery.csv has added canister ranges longer than the stock values this should work fine.

Thanks for this. Been thinking of fighting the whole thing SP but using HITS, though I will most likely combine the scenario with the KS Mod for this.

Also,

The scenario will also run if you create a folder in the mod named Scenarios (and put the scenario inside this folder)

Yes I'd like to try that too, Grog.

Martin (J)

Hi Saddletank

My experience with the scenario is that the artillery is quite happy plugging away with solid shot or shells when it could now be using canister e.g. at 400 yards. If I spend a little time personally managing a 12lb battery that I have moved within its new range towards Allied units then I can do a load of damage but if I move it and do not tell it to use Canister that does not happen. In the Battlescript I have issued orders via Wellington and Napoleon to tell all artillery units to use Canister as frequently as every 15 minutes when I think the heaviest fighting is likely to occur. However, it seems to me that every time a gun switches to a new target it switches back to solid shot or shell if over 200 yds range.

Anyway you can try it for yourself now if you wish.

Regards

Mike

We reset all the canister ranges in the KS Mod and our 12pdrs happily use it at over 400 yds. You could d/l it to see what we did.

I'm afraid I don't have any interest in playing the stock scenarios or the stock game - no disrespect to your great work, which will please a lot of players, its just that I have only played the KS Mod for months now and wouldn't change to anything else

Hi Saddletank
I have downloaded the KS Mod, not tried it yet but had a look at the munitions file. I see the main change the KS team have made to Shrapnel/Case is to increase the maximum number of kills to 22 and extend the minimum range (not sure the range change is historically accurate). I previously experimented with increasing max kills in my mod but did not detect any very significant impact on Shrapnel's effectiveness. Do you find that Shrapnel/Case has a big impact in your games?

If the answer is no, the person who made the changes to the munitions file might like to look at what I did with mine and the related artillery file. Because I was unsure what rules might exist for names of munitions I used canister ammo from the 18lb British gun already in the Waterloo file and gave it the attributes I wanted for Shrapnel and let it be used by British Howitzers instead of the standard 5.5 canister. It works very well! I increased the failed shot % to take account of mistakes in fuse settings and increased the percentage holding of this munition cf shells for Howitzers to 75/25 as shells are fairly useless anyway. That simulates the 10% holding of Shrapnel across all 8 x guns in British batteries. I made it an air burst and that gives the Black Rain effect.

Regards

Mike

Dear All
I have found an error in my Artillery Mod which I have traced back to the original WL10 scenario files. I note that the KS Mod has corrected this error so it may have been reported before.

The error is that the French 6in Howitzer has its Shell munition specified instead of its Canister munition. I noticed this as the Canister range appeared as 1100 yards. I presume it will be the same in all the standard scenarios.

I attach a revised version of my Artillery Mod and I hope I have corrected the download on the 1st post.

Regards

Mike

If anybody has already downloaded and started to play my Mod, I have a confession to make. When I developed it I was pretty well concentrating on whether the French had a reasonable chance to win after adding the historic Prussians and boosting artillery.

Now that I have started to develop an equivalent all day scenario playing as Wellington, I have realised that there are some big gaps in the Allied OOB in addition to the 2 x Prussian Corps that I added. In particular 6 of Wellington's historic Batteries were not included in WL10 or WL20. This makes a huge difference as they are mainly the batteries that he used to defend his centre. For example the most famous battery commander at Waterloo, Cavalie Mercer (he wrote a book about his experiences in the campaign), is not included. In fact in standard Wl10 Napoleon will most typically have more artillery than the Allies and Prussians combined and the troop levels are not much different! I presume it was done for game balance.

I will experiment over the next few days to see what effect it has if I add in Wellington's missing 6 x artillery units as I may need to change the opportunities for Objective points.

Regards

Mike

I have now modified my “Historical” variant of the WL10 whole day scenario to include Wellington’s six batteries which were excluded from WL10 and reinforced the many Allied batteries which had crews with as little as 1/3 their correct manpower. As I had already made Wellington’s batteries much more effective by introducing a new version of Shrapnel, I decided I needed to implement a further historical review to see whether the game might still be winnable for the French player using a “normal” setting. Just as an example in a recent test game those 6 additional batteries alone caused over 3,000 French casualties! I have now completed and tested some changes and have updated the scenario and associated mod file which are attached to the first post in this series and I can say it is still possible to win as the French!
For those of you interested in my historical reasoning the following describes the changes I have made and the justification for them.
1) Deployment of the extra 6 batteries: Wellington actually used 3 of the six batteries concerned to constitute part of a tactical reserve – I have recreated this reserve and prevented these three batteries from being deployed by the AI either until they actually were (12.30, 14.00 and 16.30 respectively) or until the French have captured some significant objective that might have caused Wellington to deploy them. Wellington stated after the battle that if he had not created a reserve, he might not have had any artillery still functioning by the end of the battle. He was no friend of the separate artillery organisation within the British Army so you will have to judge what he said in that context. He complained that the crews of his batteries had been given orders to retreat into the infantry squares if attacked by cavalry, however, instead of doing this some actually left the field of battle altogether. I would guess that this did happen in some cases but whether it was as widespread as he suggested I doubt. He most probably created the reserve for 3 reasons, first to prevent the reserve batteries from being destroyed or damaged in any early French attacks or bombardment; second to prevent all his artillery from becoming ineffective from over use due to exhaustion of the crew or overheating of the guns; thirdly so that he could tactically deploy it when Napoleon’s intentions became clear. In this last context it is interesting to note that of the 4 batteries he treated as reserves, all of them were eventually deployed to the right of his centre. Virtually all historians regard the French attacks on Hougoumont as having been a failure in attracting Wellington’s reserves but I have never seen any of them commenting that none of these reserve batteries were used against D’Erlon’s attack whilst two had already been moved towards Hougoumont!
2) Reduced rates of fire: Firing intervals for artillery have typically been increased by 30 seconds. I mentioned above that Napoleonic batteries could become ineffective due to the exhaustion of their crews and the overheating of the guns – this was doubly true at Waterloo due to the muddy ground. In Mercer’s account he states that after 4 hours heavy fighting his crews could no longer reposition the guns after recoil partly due to exhaustion and partly because the guns had dug themselves into the soil. I also noticed that the KS mod decreases the normal rate of fire for artillery. I am not sure how the maximum rate of fire value is used (can anyone tell me?) but I have adjusted the various normal firing intervals by about 30 second each. Obviously this effects both sides but is more significant for Wellington’s batteries as they have better target opportunities once the French start to attack. The reverse is true when the Prussians start attacking but by then the French player should be in either a winning or losing position.
3) Increased misfire rates for Shrapnel: I have increased the rate of misfires for Shrapnel from my original 15% to 20% this will partly offset Wellington’s increased number of batteries capable of firing Shrapnel. This was not an arbitrary decision. I came across details of a firing trial conducted by the British in 1819 which identified that 19% of Shrapnel rounds either exploded in the barrel or failed to explode at all. The additional 1% to make it 20% provides a small increase to the normal hit or miss calculation to reflect the importance of getting the timed fuse correct for the range of the enemy target. I should warn players that despite this reduction British Shrapnel can still be a big long range killer of French troops and gun crews.
4) Unreliability of Wellington’s troops: I have arranged it so that when French forces capture particular objectives there is some chance of various Allied units withdrawing from the battle. Wellington was not entirely confident about his army which he described as “infamous”. There were two reasons for this – firstly most of his veteran troops had gone to fight in America and he had many units with little or no experience of battle. Secondly some of his Allied units had previously fought for rather than against Napoleon and he was not sure of their loyalty. In fact only one unit, the Hanoverian, Duke of Cumberland Hussars under Col Hake, quit the field after refusing to advance when La Haye Sainte fell. None of the other objectives that I have used for this potential French benefit actually did fall, so there is no historical argument one way or the other. The objectives that might cause a withdrawal are La Haye Sainte, Hougoumont, Centre and Mont St Jean. The fall of Mont St Jean will cause significant Allied withdrawals, the other locations might do so.
5) Participation of Grouchy’s units: There is now a chance that some of Grouchy’s units will arrive in time to play a part in the battle. My scenario runs until 9.30pm as daylight actually persisted until then on that day in June 1815, thus even an arrival about 8pm might be useful. I have previously posted that since Grouchy did not actually arrive, I would not include him. However, my view now is that I will aim to produce the historical situation as it was at 11.30am, thereafter events can take a different turn. I have carefully researched the location of the 5 units that comprised Grouchy’s force when he and his subordinates first heard the sounds of battle at 11.30am. If they were to reach the field of Waterloo, they would have needed to cross the River Dyle at the two stone bridges near Mousty. Exelmans was only 2.5 miles from Mousty and Mousty is only 5 miles from the Eastern edge of the Waterloo map near Maransart. Thus if Grouchy’s units had received revised orders by noon then Exelman’s cavalry would only need to cover 7.5 miles to appear on the Waterloo map. The armies only seemed to be able to move at 1 – 1.5miles per hour on the poor cross-country roads that had been made worse by the storm. However, Exelman’s Corps being cavalry might have been at the high end i.e. 1.5mph. So he could possibly have got on the map about 5pm albeit still some distance from the battle. On the other hand, Grouchy might not have decided to march to the guns (of course he really did not march) and, even if he did decide to do so, Exelman’s forces were already in touch with the Prussian rear guard who were retreating towards Thielman’s III Corps which had stayed at Wavre. If the Prussians had detected Exelmans’ men moving away from them towards Mousty then they might have tried to interfere with him or the other Grouchy units that would need to cross the bridges there. Thus there still have to be possibilities that Exelmans or other Grouchy units would not arrive. Vandamme’s Corps was about 5 miles from Mousty so 10 miles and possibly 8 hours from Maransart, Gerard about 6 miles from Mousty and Pajol’s cavalry plus Teste’s infantry Division 7 miles. Teste’s infantry could not really cover 12 miles in time so I have excluded them. For the other four units, I have provided each independently with 3 possible arrival times and three possibilities of no shows. This creates 256 different possible combinations with respect to what units might or might not appear and when, the balance of probability is that two units will arrive. I have created one further boost for the French. If any of Grouchy’s units do appear then there will be an increase in morale for French forces still fighting. Historically, Napoleon deliberately misled his troops issuing a message saying Grouchy had arrived which was meant to encourage them. This eventually had the reverse effect and contributed to the collapse. I have not yet discovered whether there is a method in the game to lower morale so I have just arranged for a one-time rise if any Grouchy unit does appear. Of course if players want to try to win without Grouchy then just leave his forces at the edge of the map when/if they arrive.
6) Possibilities for Wellington: if any reports of playing the scenario indicate that it is now too easy to win as the French I could always add a possibility of Wellington recalling some of the detachment, equivalent to about a Corps, which was guarding his right at Halle about 8 miles away.

Regards

Mike