FOGN for the Peninsular War - artillery

[timt9cole]

I very much like the scale of FOGN for the Peninsular War for infantry and cavalry. It should make battles like Salamanca easily achievable.

However, for artillery I am less happy that this is the right path for this theatre. If we look at the Anglo-Portuguese army at Salamanca the infantry divisions each had a battery and there was one battery for the cavalry. Under the rules this equates to selecting particular brigades to receive an artillery attachment or artificially moving batteries from one division to another to create Position Artillery. In practice batteries fired individually or combined as circumstances dictated (for example the battery of the third division was joined by the cavalry's horse artillery battery for the initial attack of the third division). The French artillery at Salamanca was similarly parcelled out between the divisions with one centrally controlled battery. I can imagine that this must have caused headaches for the rule designers - how do you account for the small number of guns in a Peninsular battle when you also have to cater for the gun-fests of central Europe? I can see that one battery on its own may not be enough to do sufficient damage under the rules.

Has anyone else done any thinking along these lines (so I can pinch your ideas)?

Regards
Tim

[terrys]

You are quite correct that under the rules the most likely distribution of guns for some of the smaller battles, most often in the Peninsular is represented by adding attachments to your units. This of course reduces your long-range artillery capacity. However, given the relatively large size of the target (a small unit is about 1750men), the damage caused by a single battery at long range is small.
We made a decision to depict 'Artillery of Position' as seperate units, and 'Support Atillery' as attachments, as we felt that this produces a more accurate depiction of their usage and their effect. An added advantage in doing this is that it makes the game much faster to play - since we're not wasting time limbering/unlimbering/firing individual artillery batteries that have negligible effect on the game (at long range).