A modified version of the Wavre French Army scenario

[mcaryf]

I have produced a new variant of the Wavre French Army Level scenarios based on watching DarkRob’s very useful videos and trying the scenarios myself – this variant fixes an “error” that causes about 30% of the AI’s Prussian force to rout as soon as the scenario starts so it should provide an interesting and possibly harder to win challenge. It should be used with a mod I have also supplied that makes adjustment to both artillery and terrain effects. The scenario French army Wavre Full strength Prussians should be copied to the scenarios folder and the MCF Artillery and Maps mod to the mods folder.

I should say initially that the historical battle of Wavre was not that interesting. The French failed to get across the river until between 7pm and 8pm when a Prussian officer had pulled his men back from guarding a bridge at Limale and Pajol managed to rush some cavalry across. Other French troops crossed and beat off some Prussian counter-attacks. The battle resumed the next day but by then the Prussians already knew about Waterloo and withdrew as it was not worth their continuing an unequal fight when the war was already won.

It was not surprising the French could not get across the river as it could not be forded and the Prussians had destroyed various wooden bridges and guarded the others from nearby fortified buildings and with artillery sited to dominate the bridges. Vandamme, disregarding earlier orders from Grouchy, did try to cross at Wavre and lost a lot of men. Gerard later tried at Bierges and was himself wounded.

So how might you make an interesting scenario out of that? The answer the designer seems to have adopted is that the French should be made stronger, the Prussians weaker, the fortified buildings ignored and the river made intermittently fordable (actually a feature of SOWW rather than this design). In the standard scenarios the French are more than 20% stronger than they should be historically at over 40k men because none of the 8,000 or so casualties Gerard and Vandamme suffered at Ligny have been taken out of their OOBs. The defending Prussians also do not have any losses subtracted but, as the Prussian III Corps hardly participated in the Ligny fighting, their casualties were very low. Historically the Prussians did lose around 10,000 men as deserters after Ligny and a proportion of these, possibly as many as 4-5K, were III Corps men but there isn’t much historic detail of the units concerned. When I first looked at the Prussian Army scenario I thought that the scenario designer had included a simulation of that desertion as a large number of Prussian units immediately routed totalling about 8,000 men. In fact the routing happens because there is a fault in one of the scenario files although it is possible that there was subsequently a deliberate decision by the designer to leave the error uncorrected to simulate the desertions. I include a detailed description of the error at the end for those interested.

The net result of this is that a force of just over 40,000 French has to overcome a force of less than 20,000 Prussians but because the Prussians are behind a river the scenario is actually interestingly balanced. I am not sure that all these variations from history were fully intended but they do seem to have resulted in a better scenario than would have been the case with an accurate historical one!

In my revised version I have tried to get a little closer to history by stopping the Prussian rout but also providing an artillery mod, giving historic ranges for canister, as this helps the French, who have more guns, to batter their way over bridges. All the Prussian units have been given normal values for fatigue and morale so none of them initially rout. I have extended the scenario time to 3 hours so that it finishes at 7pm which is the earliest time the French may have historically got across the river. I have not implemented the French Ligny casualties but when I play tested it myself I did not use 3 of the available French Divisions which roughly equates to the losses from Ligny. I have left these divisions in the scenario so players can choose to use them or not. I typically reach the scenario major victory target of 10,000 points at around 6.30pm.

I have added some terrain effect changes within the artillery mod but if you do not want those you can use my previously published artillery mod. The terrain effect changes for Wavre are designed to increase the fatigue of units that try to cross water obstacles. Unfortunately in SOWW it is not possible for designers to completely block units from crossing water so in the standard scenario you will see some units crossing at what DarkRob calls secret fords. I think these are actually somewhat random occasions where the game engine lets units cross and are not intentionally designed. In my version, if a player attempts to find one of these random crossings, their units may cross but will suffer very large fatigue penalties. I have left the Prussians a bit stronger than they should be historically as I know the AI will lose some units by trying to cross water obstacles. My mod for the Wavre map also somewhat slows movement as the ground was historically sodden after the rain on the 17th June and that partially offsets the extra 1 hour of game time in my version. The mod can also be useful for Quatre Bras scenarios as it forces units to continue to move when their flag symbol has entered any water, this prevents the nonsense of units remaining in the Materne Pond and firing from underwater!

I should note that if you rely on the AI to select munitions for your batteries you may find it firing shot and shell when canister would be a better choice. The new Grog Toolbar option for battery commanders to order their guns to use canister is very useful here and it is worth checking your batteries regularly as they will be your biggest point scorers. I have set Prussian units to guard some batteries as the AI often leaves them vulnerable. Being better protected and behind the river plus having a longer canister range gives the AI batteries a better chance in this particular scenario to cause some damage to a human opponent. My final advice is to keep an eye on your casualty totals in case you need to move a unit that has unexpectedly come within range of an AI battery.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions to improve either the scenario or mod.

Regards

Mike (mcaryf)

This paragraph is a detailed description of the file error for those interested.

In the “scenario.csv” file, which is in spreadsheet format, every fighting unit has two values usually both set to “9” to represent its starting situation for fatigue and morale. Officers do not suffer fatigue or lose morale so they do not have equivalent values. Units are listed on sequential lines in the file by corps, division and then as appropriate by battalion, squadron or gun. Each commander of a fighting unit is located in the list on the line before the first unit of his command. It seems that all the values representing fatigue and morale for the entire Prussian list got displaced somehow to the line below. As officers have a blank or a zero in the fatigue and morale spots this means that the first unit in each command starts the scenario with zero fatigue and morale and in my experience this causes them to immediately rout. I noticed in DarkRob’s video version playing as the Prussians he seems to have time to rescue at least some of his units but of course when the AI is playing the Prussians it would not do this. The problem with using this fault to simulate the actual Prussian desertions is that the small detachments guarding the crossings at Bierges, Limale and Limalette are disproportionately reduced. All officers lose the first unit of their commands so, if the command only had two units, this would be half their strength. Also the first unit is often the one with the highest quality ratings so a bad one to lose.