"Do the French ever win Salamanca games?" Topic

Salamanca is a fascinating battle with distinctive geometry: a kind of French 'L' facing an allied 'V' on interior lines. It does seem as though the French are doomed to fail because of their initial extended deployment (well done, Wellington). Or perhaps I'm just whingeing because in our game this week I was on the French side, we were drubbed, and I need excuses! (Battle report here:)
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What do other TMPers think and what's been your experience? How often do the French manage a win?

Never played Salamanca game, but have done lots of historical games, some are very hard to beat the historical odds

Try playing Napoleon at Rivoli…..

I feel it depends upon how the scenario is setup. If the before noon historical dispositions are used, then the French likely have a chance. If the mid afternoon historical dispositions are used, I doubt the French can win. Most scenarios I have seen start with the mid afternoon dispositions. Having Thomieries' (spelling?) division thrown out way to the right, and especially if started in march column, severely handicaps the French.

I assume you did not start with Marmont wounded, but let the dice decide his fate?

Yes I won as French using Command and Colors.

As noted above, it partly depends on exactly what time the action starts, but yes it is quite winnable as the French. They have some hard decisions to make about concentration of force though. If they just engage everywhere and hope to roll a lot of sixes, they are going to lose.

Neil Thomas captures the essence of Salamanca very neatly in one of his One Hour Wargames scenarios. It is eminently repayable, and let's you figure out some optimum strategies on how to exploit their central position.

What do other TMPers think and what's been your experience? How often do the French manage a win?

Henry Hyde has recounted the tale of how he won as Marmont at Salamanca at the Wargames Holiday Centre on several occasions…

Not having to pause your participation for extensive medical treatment eases the problem somewhat.

Thanks for all these sensible replies.

Indeed, the scenario set-up and victory conditions are obviously critical.

On the set-up: I feel it does need to start with Thomieres out on a limb and that "oh merde" moment, otherwise it isn't really Salamanca. Of course it could start earlier and with more options open, but that would be a different game answering a different question.

On the victory conditions: I think Mark's scenario set these up nicely. The French can plausibly win (if they're more sensible than I was) by ending up in a secure position on the high ground across the SE quarter of the battlefield. In real-world terms, that would mean they had successfully fended off Wellington's surprise attack and kept their army relatively intact.

Good to hear some of you confirm that you or others have won it for the French.

There was indeed a Marmont rule that will probably take him out on a random turn, with his successor taking over control some variable time later.

I've always thought it was a tricky battle to play as a wargame. As has been said, there wouldn't have been a battle if the French hadn't overextended themselves.

"otherwise it isn't really Salamanca"

Why is that Chris? What you want isn't just that the French player start out with a misapprehension of Wellington's intentions, but instead that the French side makes all of the mistakes they made in the real battle leading up to Wellington's attack. This would be the equivalent of starting a wargame of the Battle of Austerlitz at the point where Soult launches his attack.

Why? Because I think Salamanca's distinctive feature as a grand tactical challenge is how to recover from an operational overreach. Omit the overreach and it loses what makes it special and becomes just another lineout.

But I don't have a strong view on this and wouldn't presume to prescribe. I will happily acknowledge that there is a whole spectrum of possible starting situations and degrees of freedom of deployment. The point along that spectrum at which it ceases to be "really Salamanca" depends what we mean. You could legitimately have a "Salamanca operation" game that produces a very different game on a different battlefield.

Salamanca arrogance always ends in failure.

Salamanca violence always breeds more.

Salamanca only wins when they decide to lose.

ding ding ding ding ding ding

I tend to think two thing make Salamanca into Salamanca: the tactical overreach, and Marmont's wounding at a critical moment, which slows and disrupts the French response. It's sort of interesting to think of this from the play standpoint, because while the overextension was a product of tactical error, Marmont's wounding was a bit more of a wild-card type event.

The question about how to simulate battles that turned on low-probability events like that always fascinates me. Do you create a special rule that takes it into account, or do you instead just let the rules deliver their results? The latter approach makes exact repetition of historic events unlikely, but considerably changes the range of potential outcomes.

'Wild-card events' – interesting point.

For me, wargaming is mainly about making on-table decisions. I conceive of each battle as being a unique tactical puzzle. Whether and how to represent a 'wild-card event' depends what challenge you want the players to have to overcome. There isn't necessarily one right answer.

BBB, like many rulesets, does have provision for commanders being put out of action. You don't necessarily need a 'Marmont rule' for Salamanca at all. Mark chose to have one; its effects aren't too drastic, they just throw a modest historically-flavoured spanner into the French works.

I've used different approaches to wild-card events in different scenarios. My Gettysburg scenario allows for an outside chance of the Confederates winning the off-table cavalry battle at East Field, which affects whose cavalry arrives on-table later. For the Franco-Prussian battle of Coulmiers (1870), there are a couple of possible random events (franc-tireurs, etc) that might add or remove forces during the game. Pakozd (1848) was so full of bizarre incident (eg, the Croat HQ being temporarily isolated because of drunken Grenzers hunting panicked sheep) that it has a whole random events table and something happens every turn.

What you say makes sense- but one of the great challenges of wargaming (to me, anyway) is figuring out how to account for contingency at the various levels of command. Scientifically speaking, I suppose the question is, "what do you control for?"

I think like a lot of gamers, I've always liked the idea that rules should incorporate a lot of contingency, so that no two games are ever quite the same. There are lots of ways to do this: you can simply randomize a lot of things, and abstract the contingency away through lots of dice rolls, or you can go the Advanced Squad Leader route and create a set of rules an inch thick in an attempt to cover every possible contingency. The more "narrative" you want the game to be, I suppose, the more worthwhile the complex rules are.

Has anyone in the game design business made any attempt to use computer power to address the fiddly, complex problems of contingency and combat resolution? I've looked at a lot of war games since I reentered the hobby a few years ago, but it's a little surprising how fundamentally similar game mechanics seem to be (in the sense that we read the rules, roll against tables, and auto-interpret the rules to obtain results) to those that Charlie Roberts started with in the Fifties.

Good questions, Nine pound round. I held off answering in case someone more expert than me wanted to pipe up, but it's been a few days, so here's my 2p.

I assume that by "contingency" you mean some random event that messes up the plan: the things that Clausewitz lumps together as "friction" when he talks about an army as being a machine with 10,000 parts, any of which can go wrong.

As I said, for me, wargames are about making decisions. I definitely like games to incorporate a healthy dose of contingency so that the situation changes regularly, players cannot absolutely rely on things happening the way they want, and they get challenged with fresh decisions and find out whether their plans were robust enough to cope.

The problem is that it is surely impossible to legislate for (or program a computer for) every possible contingency, isn't it?

I don't know much about the computer-moderated end of wargames, but I have been told the US military has wasted millions of dollars on such wargames that make spurious promises of accuracy in results, while giving most of the players too little to do – maybe one decision a day. I say "spurious" because they can model technical things in a super-detailed way, but it is impossible for them to model all the unknown unknowns – the contingencies – with the same granularity. As Einstein said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

In giving players wargame decisions to make, I think what matters is to generate a sufficient degree of friction to inject a suitable degree of unpredictability. I don't care exactly what random event produces the friction – bees' nests, food poisoning, a courier falling off his horse – I care about the effects of friction on the players' attempts to solve the force-time-space equation.

There are various ways to achieve that. In the "Arc of Fire" skirmish rules, there was a random events table with 100 possible contingencies (the food poisoning and bees' nests approach). Other games use a deck of event cards. Rules that use command dice pips limit what a player can do but (for my taste) still give too much control if you can always be sure of doing the one thing that is most important to you.

I prefer activation rolls. These are "semi-random": there is the element of unpredictability, of chance – but a smart player can influence that chance (put your generals in the right place, keep your troops out of the difficult terrain, hold them in column of march if you want them ready to move, etc).