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eRules Napoleonic.txt is a set of rules for the Napoleonic wars designed by WargameSystems following the same principles as eRules World War II, except that Napoleonic.txt is provided free as a draft document for you to download, try out and contribute to. Let us have your suggestions for adding to it or improving it.
Again, our aim with Napoleonic.txt is to promote wargaming that is fun and fast while producing results as close as possible to historical accuracy.
The problem with most rule sets is that they badly distort the relationship between movement speeds and casualty rates. For example, in a wargame of the battle of Waterloo, the French typically march up to the English lines, a brief exchange of fire takes place followed by 2 or 3 bounds of melee, then one side or the other turns around and flees. Meanwhile, each side will have lost around a quarter of its figures as casualties. In the round, this is not unrealistic as long as each unit represents a division, musket range is a fraction of the frontage of a unit and each bound of play represents half an hour or an hour in real life. However, there is already a problem here in that in the space of an hour even an infantry unit could have marched 2 or 3 miles, whereas on the wargame table, it will have moved only 200 to 300 meters. This is because wargame rules tend to average out between moves all the delays that occur in real life due to the difficulty in the nineteenth century of getting thousands of men to move in a coherent way as intended by the commanding officer without them all bumping into each other and causing chaos before getting anywhere near the enemy.
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