Waterloo: Design Notes
By Mark Latham

In my time as a freelance games designer for Warhammer Historical, I’ve had the privilege of working on some great products for my favourite periods of history. This couldn’t be more true of Waterloo, which has finally given me the opportunity to write a rules set for Napoleonic wargaming at my favourite scale.

If you’re new to Napoleonic gaming, then everything you need to know is included in the book. Everything from collecting and painting your models, to primers on figure ratios and ground scale is right there for you. One thing I learned when getting into the Napoleonic period of gaming is that it’s actually not that accessible, and takes a lot of work to understand all the intricacies that set the period apart from other types of historical and fantasy wargaming. I wanted to ensure that Waterloo was solid from introduction to history to rules, and I really believe it achieves that goal.

The Book

So, whether you’re a raw recruit, or you’re an old hand at button-counting and bricole-related banter, what can you expect to find?

First off, let’s talk about the eye candy. The book’s designer, Matt Hutson, did a fantastic job making this book really shine. Everything from the typefaces to the page numbers oozes period detail, and I couldn’t be happier about our collaboration. He also did most of the photography, and you can expect to find many pictures of beautifully painted models on some stunning scenery setups throughout the book. For my part, I spent many hours in contact with art agencies, museums and galleries around the world to procure some excellent period paintings and illustrations, which are shown off in all their glory. Warhammer Historical were keen to produce a large-format book, in hardback and full colour – every page makes use of colour, and the book is a weighty beast at 288 pages. On the miniatures side of things, I can’t thank the legendary Perry twins enough for their help and input. Not only did they loan us hundreds of models and museum-quality artefacts for photography, but they also helped with playtesting, checking historical details in rules and background (I got a few scoldings along the way, I can tell you), provided images from their Perry Miniatures box sets, and Alan Perry provided many additional illustrations – the uniform guides that accompany each army list, and every single entry in each army list, will be invaluable to gamers old and new. Last but not least, the original artwork in the book by Phil Moss and the stunning cover by Alex Boyd really round off the look and feel of the book.

So, that’s the visuals out of the way – ‘What’s in the book?’ I hear you cry.

Gameplay

The rules themselves are simple to pick up, but have lots of added extras that really bring a depth of tactical options into play. I would describe them as a brigade-level, tactical set of rules. This means that a ‘standard game’, if such a thing exists, will typically have 6-10 units per side (infantry battalions, cavalry squadrons and/or artillery batteries), plus officers, and can be played in a single afternoon or evening. The rules scale up and down quite nicely – obviously the bigger the game, the longer it will take.

In terms of rules design, what I’ve tried to achieve is to make the basic principles of manoeuvring quick to resolve and free-flowing. Units move around, march, arrange themselves into formations, throw out skirmish screens and so on in an intuitive manner. The idea is to make the player feel like he is in command of the grand sweep of the battle, with the strategic plan unfolding before his eyes. Of course, how effective a Napoleonic unit is once it is in position is all down to the quality of your commanders – you must invest in a good chain of command to get the best results. You can even tailor your officers’ abilities to suit your plan. I don’t want to dwell too much on this aspect, as it’s a really fun thing to discover for yourself, and can add some real personality to your force.

With regards to points cost (see the army lists bit later), officers are quite ‘pricey’, but this represents their battlefield worth. This is not a fantasy game where officers have prodigious combat skills (although you might get a small bonus for some officers, representing their staff and influence over the soldiery). Instead, the better the officers, the better able your force will be to handle a given situation and stick to the plan. Some officers are truly heroic, inspirational figures, and give a huge morale boost to your side – to this end some famous officers, such as Boney and Nosey, have been afforded their own rules – the main customisation rules are there so you can create your own officers, or represent your favourite historical officer on the tabletop.

Units begin each game turn with a number of Tactical Points, or TAC, which dictate how many actions can be performed during the turn. TAC is determined by the unit’s experience, and ranges from 2 to 4. Officers get their own points, called Strategy Points, or STG, which can be used to activate special orders, supplement a unit’s TAC, or activate a Grand Strategy. These can do all kinds of command and control effects, from quick redeployment to interrupting your opponent’s turn. Unlike TAC, however, Strategy Points expire when used and do not replenish – this basically means that your chain of command is vital for holding your battle plan together, but you can’t rely on compensating for individual tactical errors for the whole battle or you’ll run out of steam.

I’ve tried to be fairly accurate with movement rates, effective ranges and ground scales, but I confess I’ve taken some liberties with artillery. They are a really tricky aspect of the game to balance, often being either too powerful or too weak in other games I’ve played. So I started out with a boring mathematical exercise – looking at how much damage the various types of artillery ought to inflict, and how often on average they ought to inflict it. I layered things like effective ranges and estimating the range to a target onto that starting point, and I think the result actually makes the ‘power level’ of cannons, mortars, howitzers (and even rockets) about right. I also added various types of shot (such as British shrapnel), with varying battlefield effects. From a design point of view, this was all very satisfying, but the overall feedback I received (from such luminaries as Alan Perry and Jervis Johnson) was that working out the artillery fire slowed down the Shooting phase too much. The answer – look to history, young man! Artillery bombardment was not a quick affair, but it did happen mainly at the start of an engagement. I thus created a separate phase of the game for artillery, occurring before moving, shooting and combat, and then streamlined the process a bit further, and I’m pretty pleased with the result.

The game mechanics reward a balanced combination of infantry, cavalry and artillery – in certain scenarios you may surprise your opponent with a force heavily weighted one way or the other, but generally a well-balanced army will be equipped to face any situation. If any one group can be said to be the most important, it would be infantry – without the infantryman to hold objectives and anchor flanks, most forces would be outmanoeuvred and overwhelmed. Cavalry can be vital, and a well-timed heavy cavalry charge will crush most opponents, but if the unit operates without support it will find itself shot to pieces. There is, naturally, an aspect of ‘scissors, paper stone’ to Waterloo – most cavalry will beat most infantry and all artillery; massed artillery fire will beat anything that remains inert, especially squares; whilst infantry can hold positions and, if deployed in square, will see off most cavalry. Getting the balance right, in the right area of the battlefield – and at the crucial moment – will be the key to success; and that’s something that the best dice-rolling in the world can’t buy you.

 

Models and Units

Units are made up of a number of bases, referred to in the game as company stands. A typical French line infantry battalion, for example, comprises 6 such stands, two of which will be elites (grenadiers and light infantry). Whilst the rules place emphasis on the actions of each unit, we don’t go so far as to count each individual figure. Instead, a stand gets its own combined profile, and soaks up damage like a single entity. Models are not individually removed from play, rather a unit accrues wounds until enough damage has been inflicted to remove an entire company. This represents a unit thinning out and tweaking its formation to compensate for losses, only feeling said losses when an entire company’s worth of men has fallen.

Finally, how you base your models isn’t really critical, as long as you’re consistent. The book recommends six figures on 45 x 40 mm stands for each company (or 3-4 figures for light infantry), for example, but actually you can use fewer figures (or more if you play Prussians and you’re a stickler for an accurate figure ratio) and different sized bases if you already have a Napoleonic miniatures collection – there’s a handy conversion chart in the book. I personally prefer the look of the ‘36-figure battalion’ (assuming you have six companies), and the current crop of plastic miniatures on the market certainly caters for them. However, the rules are flexible on the issue, and some of the photographs in the book show other configurations. The important part of organising your units is the number of company stands, not the number of models.

Force Organisation

The army lists are provided for Great Britain, France and Prussia, as well as allies for the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign. These lists encourage you to choose full-strength units by allowing bonuses and upgrades for doing so, but do allow you to take under-strength units if you wish. In a similar vein, if your full-strength unit is hammered during a game and falls below a certain threshold in terms of size, then you lose your elites’ abilities – historically, units took casualties from across their complement, not from specific companies, and after a certain point the elites would simply plug holes in the line and stop operating independently (naturally, if a unit gets to this point it will probably be routing, but if you’re lucky…). I’ve had to use abstractions in some areas to keep things ‘neat’; most notably, a full-strength British infantry battalion is 8 company stands strong, rather than 10. Quite simply, the British had more companies than the French (who had 6), but each company was smaller – if I’d allowed the British to take 10 stands, not only would the figure ratio suddenly be wrong, but the unit would be disproportionately more effective in the game. Abstractions are there to help the gaming experience, without overly impacting on the look of the forces.

The army lists are there for two reasons: firstly so that players who are used to the ‘points match’ style of play can pick balanced armies for a quick pick-up game, and secondly so that players wishing to play a narrative, historical battle have a framework for organising the order of battle. Several ‘orders of battle’ for the Waterloo campaign are provided in the book, along with notes on when and how the historical list diverges from the army lists, and how to handle such occurrences (basically, it’s okay to break the army list rules when a scenario calls for it, but you knew that already).

Scenarios and Campaigns

The main scenarios in the book are fairly generic and objective-based, inspired by historical actions from across the Napoleonic era. There’s even a set of siege rules in the book, complete with a special siege scenario, allowing you to fight battles over fortresses or even just fortified farm walls (this type of game opens up new options, like wall-mounted swivel guns and ladders, just for fun).

It’s important to note that, given the scale of the game, a scenario usually represents just a slice of the action from a larger battle. So, for example, you would be unlikely to play the entire Battle of Waterloo on one gigantic table, but you could manage Hougoumont or Plancenoit without much difficulty.

Which brings me nicely to the Waterloo Campaign. Now, the army lists in this book are focussed on the Peninsular War and the Waterloo Campaign (Napoleon’s Hundred Days), but that’s not the limit of the rules set, more a limit set by the page count. I think that campaigns are a vital part of historical wargaming, and so I really wanted to provide a comprehensive section covering this side of the hobby. There’s a whole section devoted to campaign types and rules, and how to write your own campaigns, and I’ve provided the eponymous Waterloo campaign by way of an example. So, you get a bunch of scenarios, all with laboriously researched orders of battle (which really were the most time-consuming part of the writing process – I only hope I’ve got all the details right!), allowing you to refight sections of the main action – from the crossroads at Quatre Bras to the final attack of the Old Guard. Following the examples in the book, you could just as easily create Wellington’s battles in the Iberian Peninsula, or, with a little more work admittedly, Napoleon in Russia. You’ll even find a few rules in the book that specifically cover other forces across the Napoleonic period, such as pike-armed units, which are really there to allow you to devise rules and army lists for your favourite armies/periods.

History

Last but by no means least, this book contains a weighty history section, which acts as a sort of primer for the entire Napoleonic period – the political tension, the main protagonists, the important campaigns, the officers, men and weaponry, etc. Even if you’re well-read on the topic, hopefully you’ll find it a lively read; I certainly enjoyed writing it. The section also includes a comprehensive timeline, with every battle, treaty and random occurrence of note that I could find, presented in such a way as to provide inspiration for your own battles, homebrew scenarios and campaigns.

 

That’s All From Me…
So, I saved mention of the history section until last because it represents a bit of a full circle for me. I’ve been a bit of an enthusiast of Napoleonic history for many years, and it’s taken me almost two years to finish this project, from concept to release. It represents a real labour of love for me, and is probably the last big rules set I needed to write to complete my boyhood games design aspirations – as an aficionado of all things nineteenth century (yes, I know it’s late eighteenth too, but bear with me), having Legends of the Old West, Trafalgar and now Waterloo out there fills me with pride. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it.

Before I sign off, I’d just like to remind you all that Warhammer Historical Wargames gratefully receives comments, questions and feedback, as well as fan-submitted materials such as house rules, scenarios, army lists and so on – if you feel so inspired, drop the customer services guys a line, and your comments will undoubtedly wend their way to me, too.

Have fun,

Mark