THE NAPOLEONIC WARS
Starting with the two games that are available so far, Marengo, Napoleon’s day of destiny in northern Italy, and Austerlitz, The Battle of Three Emperors, and followed by every major land battle fought between the French armies and the rest of Europe, the Napoleonic era will be completely covered. In addition Waterloo, which is ready now, and Trafalgar, the two principle battles in which the British were involved, will be produced early and out of sequence.
In producing Napoleonic Battle AML has balanced historical accuracy with playability and there are certain features, common to a number of AML Games, that are present in every Napoleonic land battle.
- The playing board, the battlefield, is kept as small as possible. Not everyone can commandeer a large space for a long time.
- Whilst the use of hexes, to determine movement and range, is accepted, the board is not criss-crossed with lines showing where each hex is located. Battlefields did not have geometric lines all over them and neither have AML boards.
- Counters only show the type of unit involved.
- Infantry, major and minor units.
- Cavalry, major and minor units.
- Light, medium and heavy artillery.
- Infantry in square
- It is accepted that infantry and cavalry units differ from each other and a single counter can represent 600 guardsmen, 800 regulars, 1,000 reservists or 1,200 militiamen but this is determined before you, the player, sites down to command your army, so that all major infantry units have the same value and capabilities, as do all major cavalry units and all minor units.
- The counters are kept as simple as possible.
- Counters do not have numbers on them, so there is no need for complicated mathematical calculations to see what has happened when one unit meets another in combat.
- Movement is split between Grand Tactical Movement ( GTM ), which varies according to the type of unit moving and which is undertaken in a Grand Tactical Period, and Tactical Movement ( TM ), during which all units move in the same way…….one hex !
