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Curtis Lemay -> WATERLOO 1815 (9/15/2007 5:15:27 PM)
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I’ve always thought my “Waterloo 1815” scenario made the ideal TOAW beginner’s scenario. After all, it’s tiny (12 x 14 map of only 149 map hexes, 45 French vs. 45 Allied units, and only 10 turns – of which two have all units in Garrison deployment.) Plus, there’s no armored or motorized equipment, no aircraft, and no long-ranged artillery. Movement allowances are small (4 and 6 for the Allies; 6 and 9 for the French – since they have to convert hexes). You just move a little and attack a little. And all combats are adjacent.
But, on the other hand, it has some features that make its play non-intuitive. The unit-scale vs. hex-scale (Divisions @ 2.5km/hex) results in unit-densities so high that density-penalties have more impact on combat results than combat-odds do. My arcane efforts to reduce this effect include representing infantry companies with infantry squads and cavalry platoons with cavalry squads. (The equipment edit renames them to cover this up). This makes it even stranger. And the Attrition Divider is elevated to 40, making losses occur at ¼ the pace of scenarios using the default setting of 10.
In addition, the strategic situation requires a badly outnumbered French player to take the offensive against the Allied player. Shock bonuses help him somewhat, but he still needs to be quite skillful right out of the box to knock the Allied player off balance and keep him that way. Any sort of tentative beginning from him will make his task impossible. Beginning players often get frustrated.
So I’ve created this French-side AAR to attempt to give the new player an assist in that effort. I’ll go into a little detail for the first turn, since the initial situation is always the same. I’ll try to illustrate a helpful “trick” the French player can pull-off that turn, too. Subsequent turns depend upon the Allied player’s choices, so I’ll just show the end results from a game I played recently. At least it will show that a French victory is possible.
Note that in this game, I just played both sides in Hotseat mode (“switching hats” between player-turns). The PO will not obey the “do not dig-in” house rule. So it gains a bit of an advantage from entrenchment. (Still, it is the PO. It probably needs the help. But I can’t guarantee that the scenario works against the PO, although the PO is programmed.)
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