Cold Wars 2011 - Maipu
Incidentally for those who might not know, the cover of the program is a picture of the Battle of Chacabuco ( Chile 1817 ) and you can see San Martin, who was also the Patriot commander here at Maipu ( Chie 1818)
Ok so the game went great with both sides playing very smart.
Given that it was going to be a big battle, that I could have players that didn't know the rules and that the heaviest guns in the game would be medium artillery ( 8pdrs ) I decided to set up 12 BW in rather than the 6 BW to skip the first turn for each side since experienced Lasalle players will know to deploy in march column and go in but new players are not familiar with this.
For deployment I didn't want to force the historical deployment so I divided the armies as you saw above in the historical divisions and ask each side to tell me in secret if they would deploy all three divisions or keep one in reserve.
The division in reserve would be allowed to be deployed starting even from turn 1, no roll needed but it would deploy 6 BW in and deploy at the end of the turn. This meant that by using a reserve you could observe your enemy deployment and plan a bit before deploying those troops.
If one side was deploying fewer divisions that then other then each side would deploy one division and alternate starting with the side deploying more divisions, if they were deploying the same number they would alternate divisions starting with the Royalists.
As I mentioned the balance of forces was roughly the balance for attacker defender that we find in Lasalle AB, but both sides would get three subcommanders. Also there would be no overall commander, there was a command post on each side that was assigned a fixed position and that could command units with the "I'm with stupid rule".
For victory conditions I established a victory point system
+1vp for eliminating 30%+ of the enemy
+1vp for eliminating 50%+ of the enemy
+1vp for eliminating 60%+ of the enemy
+1vp for overrunning the enemy command post
+1vp for holding the "Lo Espejo" high ground, ie the hill where the royalist starts the game, this meant that the Royalists started the game with +1 VP
+1vp for having the cavalry advantage as per Lasalle ( this gavea +1 VP to the patriots from the start)
+1vp if the enemy army breaks ( both sides would check on 5D6 and the defender objective would simply give 1vp as stated above not force a beak test at 4VP )
Dif in VP 0 -> Tie , 1-2 Marginal Victory , 3+ Decisive Victory
Note that the system gives the same Lasalle result in most cases except in those extreme cases that sometimes annoy people, and also pushed both sides to keep fighting till the end. I don't have big issues with the Lasalle system when you are playing many games but for a one time convention game I want to avoid the quirky results. Note also that when an army breaks the opponent gets a +1VP but you still do VP calculation to see if you won. The enemy could leave the field but if you didn't cause enough casualties and you don't have cavalry advantage for example, it might not even be a victory if you yourself took heavy casualties and were simply lucky not to break.
The initial deployment ( royalists on the left side of picture)
The Royalists decided to leave Primo de Rivera's division in reserve and deployed the Chillan Dragoons to the left of the hills, Concepcion and Don Carlos in line at the edge of the hill on their left, their medium artillery on the center, Arequipa in line on the right edge of the hill and to the right of the hill the Arequipa Dragoons abreast. Finally they deployed the Burgos Battalion in a second line.
The Pattriots chose the historical deployment ( don't know if by chance or from reading the printed version of the summary that I gave them ). Las Heras division to their right with the powerful horse grenadiers abreast on the right wing, and Alvarado's division on the left side with the Horse Cazadores de la Escolta abreast on the left wing.
Quintana's division was left in reserve
(patriots on the right side of picture)
View from the other side. You can see that the poor Chillan Dragoons ( shacky ) are probably not a good match for the Horse Grenadiers ( Valiant/shock/large ) but they don't need to, they just need to be able to pass discipline tests long enough and fall back to gain time... ( clever Royalists )
(Royalists on the right side of picture )
On the first turn the Patriots initiated their attack with artillery fire on the enemy center and the Horse Cazadores charging the Arequipa Dragoons that were unfortunate to fail their first attempt to fall back and were even more unlucky when they were destroyed on the first combat.
The Royalists deployed their reserve to that flank to hold the enemy cavalry, the Frontier Dragoons facing the enemy Horse Cazadores and the converged cazadores and converged grenadiers, you can see that the Cazadores deployed in square in case the cav combat went the other way plus they had a battery of horse artillery that they could bring in to support. Now the Cazadores were in a very tough spot
Things got even worse for the Patriots as the combined fire from the Arequipa line and artillery finally destroyed the Andes Cazadores that were advancing on the center !
The Patriot commander of the left wing was clever enough not to go for broke and started to pull back falling back with the cavalry knowing he was in a loosing situation but hoping to hold long enough for the patriot right hook to succeed. So many players don't do this things and just sacrifice all their troops ! But the patriots were smart :)
On the other flank things were better for the patriots, the Chillan Dragoons had also failed discipline to fall back and had been destroyed by the Horse Grenadiers that were now threatening the royalist flank.
The patriot infantry had reach musket range and was forming line to soften the enemy up since the royalist infantry was better and had the high ground.
They had also deployed Quintana's division on that side to overpower the Royalist flank
( you can see this on the top of the picture )
At this point the Royalists started the counter attack on the Patriot flank, if they could only hold on the other side long enough the could break the patriots with this counterattack
Primo de Rivera's divsion started to push forward with the patriot Cazadores repeatedly falling back and giving up terrain looking for the protection of infantry and artillery
(royalists on the left side of picture )
Understanding the pressure they were now under due to the counter attack the Patriots had to attack with their infantry. The first attack failed as expected, the royalists had better quality on average plus the commander, Ordonez, had good tactics, and the patriots lost a Chilean line infantry battalion that got the fourth disruption when they lost the melee.
After this attacked it was difficult to initiate a new one but if they didn't they would loose precious time so the no11 infantry battalion had to charge again against concepcion. Concepcion and no11 were both reliable but concepcion was uphill and commanded by someone with "good tactics". Yet one of those things happened, the patriot doubled the royalist destroyed concepcion AND killed Ordonez in the process !
This horrible luck would be the beggining of the end for the Royalists
( Up to this point I thought the Royalists would win )
( no 11 breaks concepcion !!! and kills ordonez )
As you can see in the picture this left an open flank on the royalist left and Bugos quickly formed square to resist the Horse Grenadiers. Burgos an elite (valiant) peninsular veteran from Bailen that had won 18 battles and never lost one to this point in history
Meanwhile on the patriot left the patriot commandr was doing everything he would to resist a very well organized royalist counter attack and he was being very successful, I believe a less skillful commander would have lost the flank faster and given victory to the royalists but that was not the case !!
Burgos resisted the first cavalry attack and was now attacked by both Horse Andes Cazadores and Horse Grenadiers !, but they passed their discipline, formed square again and resisted again. Not easy to kill a large valiant infantry battalion !
But the Don Carlos battalion had being destroyed by musket fire from three enemy infantry battalions and that meant the Royalist had to check for break and they failed...
The Patriots got 4 vp ( enemy breaks, 30%, overrun command post, cav advantage ), the Royalists got 1 vp ( they never lost the hill thanks to Burgos ). Decisive victory for the Patriots !!!
It was an excellent game where both side maneuvered brilliantly and were as you saw the victory could have gone either way with the god of decides deciding the victory among very balanced armies and players !
An interesting thing about using Lasalle for South America war of independence is that you are no longer representing "a moment" in battle but the actual full battle.
Some time ago we had that long discussion about combined arms attacks in which I didn't participate and do not wish to restart here :) but in the Chile campaigns you can find specific examples of combined attacks. Both in Chacabuco where the Talavera square was attacked by cavalry and infantry at the same time according to the reports from the battle and also in Maipu as the Burgos was retreating in square and was also attacked by combined arms.
I believe this results from the fact that in the European theaters you usually had larger bodies of cavalry operating independently from infantry while in South America due to being way smaller engagements you would have cases like this battle were a full regiment of cavalry would operate specifically in support of an infantry brigade ( that being a full division in this theater ! ).
With that in mind the importance that Lasalle gives to combined arms, with inf, cav and artillery represent the precise tactical problems that commanders had to solve in this theater of war !!
All in all I really enjoyed the convention, it was very dear to me that the theme was a subject that I love since I am from Argentina and I loved running this game.
I was very lucky by getting very smart and good players that really played brilliantly.
