Histwar: Les Grognards
Preview
When you think of Napoleonic battles, you think about huge armies, complex formations, and maneuvering. Also, infantry lining up firing their muskets, cavalry charges/counter charges and artillery use on a scale never seen before come to mind.
Many of us are still charmed by commanders of the era, who rode on campaigns alongside their men and led them to battle from the front lines, whose military cunning and intellect reshaped Europe and ended empires.
Histwar: Les Grognards (HW: LG) by Jean-Michel Mathé, aspires to put you in the saddle of these commanders, giving you control over huge armies and letting you re-write history. Will the French under your command relive their glory at Austerlitz? Or will the coalition prevail and put an end to their ambitions? It is completely up to you.
HW: LG is unique in what it offers; huge, varied armies on vast battlefields and realistic fighting in a Napoleonic atmosphere like no other. It is impressive to watch all these men walk into battle in formation to the sound of the drums, hear the trumpets of cavalry charges and counter charges while artillery roars in the background.
The experience can be as simple to as complicated as you want it to be with Histwar’s many options. From full visibility with relatively no delay in order transmission, to limited visibility and realistic delay times, the game has everything to welcome the novice and challenge the Grognard.
The battle starts with you defining the rules of the engagement:
1/ Time and weather conditions:
Which season and what weather conditions do you want to fight in? What does it matter? Well it matters when the sun comes out, how much daylight you have (the battle can last as long as your men can see). Will you have fog to limit visibility or snow to slow you down? Rain to render your muskets useless except for their bayonets? Or maybe you’d rather limit the weather effect by fighting in dry conditions.
2/Your Order of battle (OOB):
The game will ship with ten historical battles and their historical OOBs. But for more customized games you can make your own OOB. The OOB editor has such wealth of information that it alone warrants buying the game by any Napoleonic buff. You first have to pick the year of your army, as the percentages of Guard, cavalry and artillery in your army varied historically by the year. This feature will prevent spamming as you cannot abuse a type of units to a historically unrealistic degree. Every historical unit is there to pick for your army (with its custom uniform) with all Marshals, generals, Division and brigade commanders faithfully represented with attributes that would influence to a certain degree how units under their command react.
The customization is so in depth that you can pick how many battalions/squadrons you want for each regiment and for an extra price you may assign it artillery pieces to make it more deadly.
If you do not have time for this tedious but addicting micromanagement of the composition of your army, no problem; just let the software pick a random but balanced OOB for you according to the year and the size that you specified.
Another amazing feature in the OOB is that you can assign a delay for certain corps or individual units before they join the battlefield. This way, you can simulate reinforcements arriving.
3/ The map:
Histwar will also have a fully functional and comprehensive map editor that can make maps from 24 square kilometers to a whooping 675 square kilometers with villages, towns, castles, redoubts and other features that can bestow defensive advantages to their occupants. No time to make maps? Let the software make a random map for you for whatever size you specify. You will be surprised how good those random maps are.
4/ The doctrine editor:
This feature, which I have never seen before in any game, is a crucial part of your army making, and overall plan. It specifies what reactions your junior commanders (colonels) will have in specific situations. For example, do you want to allow heavy cavalry to chase down fleeing enemy units? Sure, that might guarantee a destruction of said unit or its capture, but what if while chasing the enemy it encounters stiffer resistance and is itself routed or captured. Do you want to take that risk or do you play it safe?
If a detached unit meets a stronger opponent, do you want it to engage at all cost, engage only if attacked or try to disengage? These and many other parameters will be available for you to customize to your war waging taste.
After these parameters are set you deploy your army in its allowed deployment zone. If your OOB needs to be amended at that time to reshuffle the corps in a way that would be more adapted to the map, you can detach units from a corps and reassign them to another. You can also at that time give the orders that will be carried out as soon as the battle starts. You can give chain orders, telling a corps to march to a certain area then change formation and deploy on a certain line immediately after it has arrived to the area or after a certain delay. You can also link up corps together so they would coordinate their advance.
The best feature is the ease with which you actually specify deployment lines and destinations. Just click and drag and it will inform you how wide your line can be with the amount of men at your disposal. This can be done in any viewing mode but the easiest I found was to do it on the 2D map. This way, you can view all your orders and make sure that all units will align in the way you want them to, that there are no gaps in your line etc…
When giving orders, you have at your disposal all the formations of the era, from echelons, to different types of columns to mixed formations (No worries, the manual will explain to you how all these formations were used in the fighting of the era).
Make sure to allow enough room for your corps to maneuver, units do not pile up on top of each other like they have no volume or do not take up space. You do not want two corps to run into each other, mixing their units, as this will slow them down and disorganize them as one corps would have to wait while the other clears the way.
The initial positioning of your troops is very important as major changes later will cost you a lot of time. You have to be sure all corps are within close distance of whatever support they might need. Asking a corps all the way in the north to go to the aid of a corps all the way to the south will cost you a lot of time. Time, being a luxury that these threatened men might not have.
Now that your army is deployed and preliminary orders are given, the battle starts. Hundreds of thousands of men (tens of thousands of models) maneuver to position. Hopefully, you will scout and try to estimate your enemy’s strength and organization in different sectors of the map comparing it to your strength in these sectors and use that information to adjust/tweak or completely alter your initial plan.
Walk without scouting in the range of batteries of 12 lbs and be prepared to write plenty of letters to the families of your dead men.
Have one of your infantry corps without cavalry support be surprised by an enemy cavalry corps, and watch in awe as your men are fixed in place in multiple square formations. Consider yourself lucky if the enemy has no horse artillery, but if he does those squares will only delay the slaughter as horse artillery deploys and pummels them.
Reserves are crucial; if the enemy breaks your line and you have no reserves to halt his advance you can lose your lines of operation which is a major blow to the moral of your army, not considering the fact that you now have enemies in your rear.
“La garde recule, sauve qui peut” (the guard is routing, save yourselves), screamed the French line as Napoleon’s finest routed at Waterloo. This could happen to you in Histwar too, as guard units routing through your men will also deliver a big blow to their fighting spirit.
Many parameters go into determining the outcome of individual combats, including but not limited to: size of the opposing units, their types, their moral, their previous victories or losses against other units in battle, supported or isolated.
You will enjoy watching these unfold in 3D; marching columns that turn into lines or columns of divisions or companies, musket duels, charges, counter charges, regimental artillery with canister fire are a sight to see. Villages, towns, castles and redoubts will provide their occupants with defensive advantages. Dislodging the enemy from these fortified structures will require planning and superior numbers which makes these points vital to certain defensive lines.
Finally the battle will end when one side has been destroyed or the sun has set. In the latter case victory will be determined by your losses (killed/routed/prisoners), the moral of your army, the lines of operation under your control and the total terrain under your troops’ control.
Beyond the actual game, HW: LG is a must have for those who like to play online campaigns. Its varied seasons and weather conditions can accommodate any scenario. Its map and OOB editors will provide countless hours of fun. It is even possible to start a battle with the remaining OOB from the previous fight, which makes it easy to fight a series of battles with the same men.
HW: LG will be released this summer for purchase from Battlefront®. The game will be available for download first, and then a boxed version will be shipped to you. Another thing to look forward to is its manual containing a wealth of information about armies of the era and their organization.
See you on the field.
Von_Clausewitz
The first preview of Histwar LG is out!
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