Again the purpose of this is to provide information on aspects of the combat engine that you can (sort of) influence.
I'll try to draw together the material on how combat takes place in a later post but here I want to concentrate on Frontage. Before the detail, it is worth noting that the AGE engine sub-divides all units into combat or support. The reason this matters in terms of frontage is that support units go into a separate category (in other words they don't compete for space with the combat units).
If you have too many units for the frontage, then the excess are not used in the battle. This is not always a bad idea as this allows badly damaged units to be replaced in a second or subsequent round of combat.
The basic data on frontage can be found in the directory …/Wars of Napoleon/NGC/GameData/Terrains. There you will find a text document for each terrain type and information on how it behaves in clear, mud, snow, harsh weather.
For our purposes we want some information near the top of each section:
The first bit is the coding between 'ranger' and 'wheeled'. This sets the base multiplier for each element of that particular type.
The second block of key information is the lines 'combat_units_quota' and 'support_units-quota'.
As an aside note that at the bottom of the image – clear terrain in clear weather means that the base combat values of both attacker and defender improves over that on the unit data.
To work out how many elements can fight we need to compare the first score to the weight of the base weight of the element. This is in the post on unit statistics. So all our infantry are treated as heavy infantry for frontage purposes. As far as I know, it makes no difference to frontage if the battalion is at full or weakened strength.. So to start the calculation, each element in a line infantry battalion in clear terrain is 2*2 (this is the frontage for open terrain from the unit statistics) is 4. Of course a given unit is made up of more than one element, so a unit with say 4 battalions will take up 16 slots.
You basically have 180 slots in clear terrain.
In hills there are two constraints. First you only have 130 slots and second elements take the higher frontage cost (marked as closed on the unit description). Note that in poor terrain this gives the British a huge advantage compared to the French – in effect it can deploy double the effective combat power of a French force. Again this is one of those instances where raw combat power can be misleading.
You can check out how many elements were present in the detailed battle report, but this doesn't tell you who actually fought.
Finally some commanders have a trait that allows them to deploy more units than the notional frontage allows for. This of course means they can bring more power to bear than someone lacking this trait.
So basically a large army under Blucher has great problems bringing its firepower to bear. One under Napoleon is likely to be able to fight at full power. You can work out how many (and what type of) elements fought but that means checking out each line.
So does all this matter?
Well not that much. Basically you can deploy around 4/180 ie 45 elements of line infantry on an open battle. More if you are led by a commander with the right trait. To this can then be added a second block of support units – basically artillery and typically each battery takes up 2 slots and most artillery units have 2-4 elements.
But its another reason not to just form huge stacks and wander off looking for the enemy. You may well find yourself beaten by a smaller force, especially if they are defending in the sort of terrain that reduces the number of units that can fight. In the example, Napoleon won in part as he could actually use more of his army than Blucher. All that extra combat power in the Prussian army was wasted when it came to the battle.
The data here is basically an update of Narwhal's excellent post originally done for Alea Jacta Est
