Army size limits

[Jim D Burns]

Why on earth are the army sizes limited to x units based on terrain? Given these artificial limits, Borodino would be impossible to fight, and forget Leipzig...

Please remove these artificial limits. I can see delaying reinforcement entry times significantly in rough terrain provinces, but shaving your maximum army size allowed on map down to 17, 15, 12 or whatever size is just plain not historically accurate. It’s a gimmick and should not be a part of an historical wargame.

Perhaps adding an option to use the limits or not upon scenario launch would be better, in case anyone wants it in for some reason.

Jim

P.S. Oh yeah, and please, please quadruple (at a minimum) the size of the naval battle maps.

[Russian Guard]

I respectfully disagree Jim, if you calculate these numbers its very easy to have a Borodino-size battle, and much larger in fact. Agreed Leipzig would be tough to match, but Leipzig was actually several large engagements fought over several days.

Example:

Base limit = 22
Random 0 to +3
+1 Defender
Reinforcements (usually a Division or two over the Battle limit)

In open terrain (such as Borodino) this would equate to a possible 26+ Divisions, or 220,000+ troops for one side (assuming some Artillery in there) - much larger than either side at Borodino.

I'm in agreement with you on increasing the size of Naval maps, although not as big as you suggest

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Russian Guard

I respectfully disagree Jim, if you calculate these numbers its very easy to have a Borodino-size battle, and much larger in fact. Agreed Leipzig would be tough to match, but Leipzig was actually several large engagements fought over several days.

Example:

Base limit = 22
Random 0 to +3
+1 Defender
Reinforcements (usually a Division or two over the Battle limit)

In open terrain (such as Borodino) this would equate to a possible 26+ Divisions, or 220,000+ troops for one side (assuming some Artillery in there) - much larger than either side at Borodino.

I'm in agreement with you on increasing the size of Naval maps, although not as big as you suggest

Well this site:

http://napoleonistyka.atspace.com/Borodino_battle.htm

lists 37 infantry and cavalry divisions (not including any artillery units) for the French. The Russian Army isn’t broken down into divisions but I believe they had more individual divisions on the field than the French did.

But my point is the artificial limits to the number of units are just that. It’s artificial and has no basis in reality whatsoever. Name one battle where either side had to leave units out of the fight because the number of units present in their army was too many… it's just silly.

As to quadrupling the map size, currently my fleets span from one edge of the map to the other at start with a second row created because I have too many ships for a single battle line. If you quadruple the map size, that’ll add 1 1\2 the current distance to each side of the map.

After extending the line to one single battle line, I think it’ll leave about one maps worth of open water on either flank of the fleet for room to maneuver in, so I don’t think that is unreasonable.

Jim

[Russian Guard]

I think it was George Will who said "reasonable men of good conscience can agree to disagree honorably".

In CoG, Divisions are usually at or near full strength when they fight (10,000). At Borodino, most Divisions were severely under-strength; just a few thousands per Division in some cases. I love the site you reference, and I believe it states that rough estimates of either side at Borodino was in the range of 135,000 to 155,000 troops per side.

Ideally I guess, battle limits would be based on number of troops, not Divisions. I remember being quite perturbed playing Empires in Arms when a Corps - whether it had 1 factor or 30 factors - counted as a Corps for all purposes. In any event, I think the system works well in depicting reasonable battle sizes for the period.

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Russian Guard
In any event, I think the system works well in depicting reasonable battle sizes for the period.

Unless of course your divisions are under strength, then you're stuck with an unreasonably tiny army due to these artificial limits. That’s the problem with the system, it assumes you’ll have full strength divisions, something that I rarely have after one or two big battles.

So it only works when you’re fresh and at full strength. But once you start fighting, the limits become a severe handicap. Especially if a fresh power attacks you a year into a war or something. All his units are 10k strong and yours are only 3-5k or so.

So even if you have 300,000 men in your big army, his 180,000 man army will whip it every time due to artificial limits preventing you from fielding all 300,000 of your men.

Jim

Edit: And don't even get me started on battles where all your artillery and cavalry show up, but most of the infantry is left out because of the crazy limits, it just plain doesn't work well for what it is supposed to try and do.

[morganbj]

Well, I look at this in another way.  I don't see the units as divisions per se, but as "chits" or groups of 8-10,000 men.  Divisions were never much more than 6,000 in actuality, even when at "full" strength.  I felt the same way you did when COG came out and researched the number of engagements where large numbers of divisions were present and found that while there may have been 30 divisions, most were not anywhere near 8,000 in strength.  After a few months of campaigning, they were down to 2,500 to 3,000 in most cases.
 
The size if the army should be thought of as the total number of men.  An army of 180,000 was large in those days.  While there were certainly times when battles were upwards of 400,000 combined strenghth, those were relativey rare.  The vast majority of the significant actions were about half that.
 
I see your point about the restriction in the number of units involved, and in some ways I agree with it, but if you're truly using Napoleon's strategy, you'll have a second army (or several corps) close enough to call in as reinforcements.  That's what actually happened many, many times.  A battle would start, and would grow in size as more and more units arrived.  That is replicated very well in the game.  Most times I start a battle with fifteen or twenty "divisions," but by the next day, I have many more.  That's pretty close to correct, I think.
 
Borodino, for example, had a French strength of about 130,000 men.  In game terms, that's about 16 units of 8,000 strength.  That's very doable.  If each unit is at 6,000 strength, that's 22 divisions.  Surely, one can muster that with an army reinforced by a corps on the second day.
 

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: bjmorgan
Borodino, for example, had a French strength of about 130,000 men.  In game terms, that's about 16 units of 8,000 strength.  That's very doable.  If each unit is at 6,000 strength, that's 22 divisions.  Surely, one can muster that with an army reinforced by a corps on the second day.

That isn’t fair, you’re looking at just the final battle and assuming things are reasonable if you can somehow fudge the numbers in a mathematical breakdown of the systems upper limit *possibilities* without putting it into context of the campaign in question.

Napoleon began the invasion of Russia with 600,000 men. His army suffered from attrition and battle casualties and only had 180,000 or so left by the time Borodino was fought. So he had lost 2/3rds of his beginning strength levels by the time Borodino rolled around.

You’re 22 unit estimate gives a max army size of 220,000 (10k per unit) in the game, which is nowhere near the 600,000 men he began with. But even so, if they lost 2/3rds of their strength, those 22 invading units would fight with only 67,000 or so men by the time a Borodino rolled around.

In the current system we have, 600,000 men would be about 60 full strength divisions, of which at best a little over 1/3rd of those units could ever participate in any given battle (usually far less than that).

Now assuming your 60 unit army suffers the same level of attrition Napoleons army did as you advance into Russia. Your 60 units would have strengths of about 3,000 men (180,000/60) per division by the time a Borodino was fought. Using Russian Guards estimate of upper limits for units on the field gives us 26 * 3000 = 78,000 men, still far too few.

So artificial limits make a Borodino battle impossible with the current system. Unless of course you are fighting your very first fight of a war with full strength units. But a long campaign with a large battle at the end? No way will it even be close to historical.

Jim

[barbarossa2]

The amount of troops a region can field should be limited only by the level of cultivation, the rules and practices with which the army lives off the land, the season, and the amount of supply it is receiving from outside which goes to those troops, and the density and quality of the road network over which these supplies travel. I too feel that placing artificical caps on unit density is a-historical and a gimmick used to cover for weaknesses in the modelling of these other factors.

When you exceed this number which the region can support, people start dying or falling ill. And the more you have there, the faster it happens.

I would prefer a system like this over arbitrary caps on density.

[Mr. Z]

But there are also geographical concerns. One of the motivations for battle limits was the notion that it should be highly unlikely to impossible to fight a Borodino-scale battle in, say, the Swiss Alps, or in the middle of the Pripyat. Or in Libya or the fjords of Norway.

Tying battle limits to something like Forage value could be interesting--though it might take a subsequent review of forage values. Say the square of the value as a very rough estimate. Perhaps a depot or a road could add a handful of units to the count.

I do feel that limits should be in place, though, even if they may need to be raised higher.

I agree that calling reinforcements can easily bring any battle to a Borodino-scale, though I admit I couldn't promise they would arrive on the same day.

[barbarossa2]

Dear Mr. Z,

I would like to say, that in what many people consider to be some of the most restrictive terrain of the world, the Swiss Alps, you can still put 1,000,000 men into a region the size of those on your maps. I am probably not unique in this forum when I say I have been there on several occassions. Heck I even lived in the Austrian Alps right next door.

What you should change is the battle resolution method. Though even though you can fit 1,000,000 men to a side into these regions, what you can't do is fight the same way. In wide open space like that around 1813 Leipzig, you could actually line up 500,000 men and have them shoot at each other fast long and hard enough to deliver a decisive moral blow to one side or the other within 2-3 days. If you are talking southern Switzerland, this would be difficult. It seems engagements between such large armies would be stretched out in time. Approaches are narrower. And smaller armies would be at less of a disadvantage as the larger army wouldn't be able to envelope it as easily and bring all forces to bear as quickly.

Supply issues are also different. I would think that this is the limitation on long term troop deployment in regions the size of those in CoG:EE in 18th and early 19th century warfare. In the Swiss Alps, the roads ARE worse for supply. Lots of winding doubles, triples, or quadruples road lengths required to get from point A to point B. The roads in these regions connecting valleys are surely also worse, making delays, slow marches, and breakdowns more frequent. There isn't as much agricultural area around you to support such an army. But there really is place for the 1,000,000 man army to march up these valleys and passes and there are many locations where you could camp such an army...like little islands of space surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet. People take up surprisingly little space. Of course, what happens when they meet and fight over a tiny pass is another matter. And then perhaps quality of your best units takes a front seat in the engagement.

And I haven't mentioned WINTER! In winter the passes of late 18th century become literally impassible -- starving larger armies out which are cut off. I don't know if you would have any real movement above 1500 to 2000 meters back then.

But I assure you that if the supply network is there (i.e. modern transport systems, roads, rail, and 21st century logistics systems) you can easily ship enough supply in to keep a 1,000,000 man Napoleonic army maneuvering indefinitely--even in winter. And a good supply model is what would probably make it difficult to field such a large army for more than a couple of weeks in such terrain in the early 19th century.

Again, the nature of deployment and the style of warfare would just look totally different. Maybe the changed combat model would make it not worth your while to put so many troops there.

I have always wondered why we really have stacking limits in hex based games. Because technically, you could have fit all of the armies of WWI into a single hex in most theater level games. But in reality, you could never supply all of those people in such a tiny place I am guessing...the supply and transport networks would be taxed to their limits. Not without relaying about 4000km of track? I think that among other things, the max stacking allowance is there to "simulate" the nature of an imperfect supply system which would break down when over taxed.

In my humble opinion, I would say your "natural" stacking limits (no help from outside) should be in proportion to:

(the *fertile and cultivated* area of the region) X (the quality of the road network or ease of travel between most two points) X (the nation's foraging and "logistics tech") X (seasonal modifier)

How many FOREIGN napolenic soldiers (assuming none of them come from the local labor) can a region like Southern Switzerland support comfortably without outside support for a longer period of time? I don't know. Maybe for a region like southern Switzerland the number works out to 150,000? Who knows.

Imagine the difference between foraging in the Loire river valley and foraging in the Upper Rhine river valley (SW of Chur in Switzerland). In the Loire, you can send troops in every direction (360 degrees) for a day and have them hit fertile land to pillage and loot. In the upper Rhine valley, you can send them in exactly 2 directions, on narrow paths. Going north or south isn't really an option. The available fertile and cultivated area for such support operations simply drops dramatically and you are probably dealing with 10% as much open space within a "day's march as the bird flies". You can make up the surplus requirements for 1,000,000 men by shipping the extra goods in. And that wouldn't be a minor undertaking even by modern standards.

Players could send more supply INTO the region (say southern Switzerland) from France to increase this number, but its effectiveness of redistribution would be modified by the quality of the road network and the "logistics tech". What was left over would be the number of troops which could be there comfortably.

Of course you could put more troops in, but once it was over this level additional troops would suffer from high rates of attrition, which could rise exponentially as this number was exceeded. This would allow players themselves decide on if it was worth shoving too many troops into a region for a short period of time and see them eaten away quickly.

[Mus]

Whats the size limit for a battle 2-3 days into an engagement when you are calling in reinforcements?
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Borodino#Prelude 
 
So if you had a 2-3 Corps meet a pretty big Russian Force and started calling in reinforcements and they did likewise how many men would you have a couple days later for a big showdown?

[Lord_Stanley]

Army sizes should only be limited by "natural causes" not artificial numbers.
Natural causes are things like supply, national manpower, command limits and other factors.
 
If a game is good there are no artificial army size limits.
The army sizes will remain similar to their historical counterparts because of these natural forces.
Large armies will struggle under their own weight naturally, there should be no artificial limits.

[Hard Sarge]

I think you guys are forgetting one thing, one of the main complaints about CoG was that you could force a much too large a battle, it didn't happen, it couldn't happen, so it shouldn't happen, the designers took that to heart and made changes to the system, so the Large Battles of CoG can't happen any more

(I was one who said, it shouldn't matter, you let large battles happen, there will be complaints, you don't let large battles happen there will be complaints, but the Complaints from CoG won out)

so basicly now, something that was seen as a Issue in one game and fixed in the next, is now seen as a issue on the other side, the Designers can't win

[barbarossa2]

Hard Sarge,

If the battles are too large, in my opinion, the system isn't punishing players enough for collecting too many troops in one place. I am not saying the battles should be large. I am saying there should be mechanisms in place which punish the players for putting so many troops in one region for any time without adequate logistical support.

Then let the players decide on whether they want to lose 100,000 troops of a 400,000 man stack before they even hit combat in the Pripyat marshes. Of course, in the real world your supply officers would tell you that a move like that would be impossible, but a crazy general could order it anyway and suffer massive losses.

[Erik Rutins]

This does seem to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't"... there were many historical problems based on the real operational issues of command, control, coordination, communication, road networks, terrain, etc. that often left divisions and even corps unable to participate meaningfully in a battle. The same applied in the later American Civil War.

I think there's a case to be made for battle size limits as a way of limiting battles to a more historical size, since the operational factors need to be somewhat abstracted at this scale. I'm surprised there haven't been more grogs pointing this out.

[Joram]

Well Erik your thoughts echo mine exactly I just couldn't put it as eloquently. 

[Hard Sarge]

ORIGINAL: barbarossa2

Hard Sarge,

If the battles are too large, in my opinion, the system isn't punishing players enough for collecting too many troops in one place. I am not saying the battles should be large. I am saying there should be mechanisms in place which punish the players for putting so many troops in one region for any time without adequate logistical support.

Then let the players decide on whether they want to lose 100,000 troops of a 400,000 man stack before they even hit combat in the Pripyat marshes. Of course, in the real world your supply officers would tell you that a move like that would be impossible, but a crazy general could order it anyway and suffer massive losses.

there already are, put 400,000 men into the Propyat marshes and see how long they last ! there are provinces that will not support large troop numbers, no matter how good the supply line is

[morganbj]

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns

You’re 22 unit estimate gives a max army size of 220,000 (10k per unit) in the game, which is nowhere near the 600,000 men he began with. But even so, if they lost 2/3rds of their strength, those 22 invading units would fight with only 67,000 or so men by the time a Borodino rolled around.

So, did those 600,000 ever engage in combat all together? No. And in game terms, those would be in three or four armies of 20 divisions, or so.

You should know from a casual examination of any map of the 1812 Russian campaign that those 600,000 men were not, in game terms, all in the same province. That's my point. Those 600,000 men were in several "game" provinces, and moved in different directions. Two corps split off and went northwest. One more "watched" the southwest flank. Another was many miles behind the main army. This means that the army could be in four or five different provinces, perhaps more. So, I stand by what I said.

Frankly, I would love to play bigger battles myself, but can't. However, with the brigade combat option, it can get the feel of playing a very large engagement. It helps a lot.

The real point is that in all games, reality is abstracted. Do the abstractions developed to take an infinite number of variables found in real life to a simple set of rules in a game recreate that reality closely enough? I think COGEE is very good at this. It's certainly not perfect. I could find many things I think are off here and there; I've had many arguments about them on these forums. If I had my way, I'd double the number of divisions allowed in an army and that can engage in combat, but reduce the maximum number of men per unit to 6-7,000. But, overall, the game is a very faithful representation of the period, from a strategic perspective and I'm willing to accept the abstractions to make it playable.

[Randomizer]

Have to agree with Erik, Hard Sarge, Joram and bjmorgan here and throw out my opinion on size limits.

I think that the unlimited-army crowd severely underestimates the logistical and command nightmare created by huge field armies.  They are ignoring that in that era, control was exercised by voice or with mounted runners carrying quickly scribbled notes for orders and where no commander ever had the god's-eye panorama view or the information about the enemy, even with game imposed fog of war, available to gamers today.

Gamers have no requirement to manage the sick and wounded, see to feeding and sanitation of the troops and the thousands of camp followers that grew exponentially as armies grew in size.  Nor is forage for the tens of thousands of horses a matter for the player, they want to just keep adding numbers ad infinitum in the name of some counterfactual 'realism' ideas.

Although terms like battlespace and span of control did not exist in timeframe of CoG-EE, the battle realities that caused them to be coined were as real for Napoleon as they are for field commanders today.  Cramming 600,000 soldiers into a single field is certainly possible, you could fit them all into some sports stadiums so this issue is not space alone but the net result is that under any sort of stress they will cease to be an Army and become a mob.

I think these restrictions are just one of the areas where the CoG-EE team got it right.

Edited to correct the spelling of Erik... D'oh

[barbarossa2]

If you think that troop concentrations are verging on being too high, then really all I am saying is that the punishments inflicted by the game for putting too many troops in place should be higher then perhaps. And that there should be no artificial and magic ceiling for troop concentrations. The return on putting so many troops in one region should fall off gradually and then rapidly as the numbers go up. It is possible that in some campaigns they were already operating at the point on this slope where things were rapidly dropping off. Who knows.

There SHOULD be limits on how many armies and men are COMFORTABLY in one place. And players who exceed them should be BRUTALLY punished. A good example of a system which I find fantastic in this manner is AGEOD's Birth of America 2. An older game system would have simply disallowed any movement between December and March. BoA2 allows players to risk marches and campaigns during this time and getting caught in the open. Doing this, especially if hit by very adverse weather conditions and in highly concentrated numbers IS a recipe for disaster. But! If you need to do it, it CAN be done. But is the expected payout worth the gamble? In my humble opinion, putting a cap on your stacking limits is like saying, "no movement from December to March".

However, having said all of this, perhaps the simplest system to use is the one already in place. After all, players don't have the luxury of having a logistics officer that reports to them every morning who has already done all of the research and can spot problems BEFORE they arise. That is probably something for 23rd century gaming.

And look, I think CoG:EE sounds like an incredibly awesome game. And I am very close to buying it. It is not that it is not within my monetary budget, but games also come with a price tag of hours of play attached to them. And this is the budget it might not fit in with me. I am truly worried I might love it so much that I put 500 hours into it this year. And I have to be careful about that.