Third Party Combat and Miniatures

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: moopere
I don't think we'll be able to create a bolt on (or glue) piece of software to help much with the recording and tracking of factors inside EiA as EiA is a closed system until a battle actually occurs. Factors can be pretty much freely transferred between corps by players at the EiA level and without meticulous record keeping by interested humans I just can't see how you'd break into this in an automated way.

Yeah, you're right, that could be a problem if you wanted to track particular regiments, etc. Wouldn't the same problem exist with a paper system though? I haven't played EiA yet so don't appreciate how often factors tend to get shuffled around--have to think about this one...
I'm not saying that tracking factors can't be done, but it would be hard and open to a lot of mistakes by a group of humans with more or less motivation to do it properly.

ORIGINAL: moopere
Having said all that though, if we are all happy enough to live with a bit of force composition "creativity" at the time of the battle(s) then a piece of glue software could certainly be written to take the exported data from EiA and massage it into something useful for import by an existing PC based tactical game or a miniatures rules system.

Yeah, but doesn't this get back to essentially using generic units in the tactical battles? For me that sort of defeats the purpose, but maybe there is no other way.

[hmgs1]

I think you might have misunderstood my listing, as I don't look at it as generic as much as I do historical. In that regard you could have dozens of variations. Have all Jaegers in an independent divisional command of several brigades. Lump all the 12lbers into an army artillery reserve. Rather than a militia division, attach a brigade to each regular infantry corps. All this has historical precedent
 
What you do NOT want to do is arrange 1806 Prussians in corps because they didn't use them. Likewise, if the French have 20 Guard factors in the battle, do NOT deploy 30,000 troops' worth of Old Guard. Put out the two regiments of OG Grenadiers and Chasseurs a Pied, and make the rest Young Guard, or perhaps Oudinot's Converged Grenadier Division if 1805 - 07.
 
Make sense?
 
Regards, Bill Gray

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: hmgs1
I think you might have misunderstood my listing, as I don't look at it as generic as much as I do historical. In that regard you could have dozens of variations.

My use of the word "generic" might have been misleading--by "generic" what I had in mind was that with this system it seems like it would be hard to track individual units (ie, regiments) over several tactical battles, because it would be difficult to keep track of how they've been allocated/transferred at the strategic level.

For me at least, a large part of the interest in systems which combine strategic and tactical wargames is being able to track individual units' and leaders' performance over the course of various tactical battles generated by the strategic level.

As I understood your system (or rather how AiE works in general), it will be difficult to know which specific named units should be included in particular tactical battles, because at the strategic level you are simply transfering around generic "infantry", "cavalry", "guards", etc. factors. Is that correct? Bear in mind that I don't yet own EiA so may have completely misunderstood something...

[hmgs1]

Oh, OK, that makes perfect sense now. Well you could do it with EiA, but it would involve a lot of manual record keeping. The other alternative is to find a campaign system developed specifically for miniatures. I know the author of one of these (Kip Trexel of the Empire Campaign System) and the reason they are unfortunately few and far between is that most lead heads use campaign systems as a way to even the odds, make their battles count for something in the long run, but mostly just to generate scenarios. Because of this in the past, a lot of boardgames (like the one's Kevin Zucker produces, Napoleon at Bay for example) filled the bill, but something like EiA should prove to be a vast improvement given the ability for record keeping and the fact that you don't have to leave the game sitting out on the table for weeks on end.
 
Good luck in your quest, however - makes sense.
 
Regards, Bill Gray