Dresden 20 Design - Phase 1: Research (continued)

Building a Prototype: The Map

With those three critical aspects of the battle as the game’s major design goals, my next step was creating the basic physical elements of the game itself: the map and counters. Since Dresden 20 was to be the initial part of an entire sub-series of seven games covering the principle battles of the 1813 autumn campaign in Germany, I needed to ensure that the maps and counters I used for this game would also be compatible with the other games in the set. This was a rather unusual consideration that I never had to deal with in any of the previous games in this series. Realistically, it meant that I had to pretty much do the basic research for ALL the games in the series at the same time so that I was sure that everything would mate properly when this ‘Germany 20’ subseries was completed.

To create the map I first used a screen capture of satellite imagery of the area and then super-imposed a grid of hexes over it in different orientations at a 1 hex to 1 mile scale. Once I found a pattern that allowed me to include the entire extent of the terrain that I wanted, I then set out to overlay the various rivers, towns, roads and other critical terrain features that I felt were significant in shaping the battle. In this, I was assisted by one of our playtesters, Andreas E. Gebhardt, who coincidentally lives near Dresden. Andreas was able to contact authorities at the local military museum and provided information and copies of documents that helped provide a superb overview of the area that I was interested in. Without this invaluable resource, my research work would have been much more difficult.

Building a Prototype: the Order of Battle

In calculating the ratings for the various units, I relied primarily on George Nafziger’s “Napoleon at Dresden,” using Scott Bowden’s “Napoleon’s Grande Armee of 1813” as a supplement for the French forces. For those who’ve never seen Bowden’s work, it’s an odd book that has been best described as “the biography of an army,” containing detailed numbers and information about every unit in the French army, down to battalion, squadron and battery level. Unfortunately, it only covers the French.

Basically, I made up a matrix displaying the raw numbers of troops in each corps level formation, and then calculated rough unit strengths based on various ratios (i.e., X number of troops per strength point). The goal was to find a “happy medium” where there was a wide enough spread in strength ratings to give the various units individual character that more or less echoed their historical performance, but not so wide a spread that we ended up with more than a handful of “super-powered” units. Experience with the Napoleonic 20 series has shown us that any unit rated higher than a 5 has a significantly destabilizing effect on game play. Anyway, I eventually arrived at a range of roughly 6000-6500 troops per strength point, rounding up or down according to highly subjective criteria on how many battle-hardened veterans or “elite” troops there were in the unit.

In assigning the various unit strengths, it quickly became clear that eyebrows were going to be raised at some of the strength ratings I assigned. In particular, the powerful French Imperial Guard would seem at first glance to be badly underpowered. But the various sources I consulted were all clear on two things: first, most of the troops that fleshed out the Guard divisions (with the exception of the vaunted Old Guard) were raw recruits with minimal training, and second the Guard endured one of the most grueling forced marches of the entire Napoleonic period to arrive in time for the battle, suffering march attrition losses of up to 20-25% of their starting strength by some estimates.

Regardless, the strength ratings and map were just a point of departure. The “real” details would have to be worked out during playtesting, the next step of the process...