1809: Talavera

🎯 The Goal

Achieve higher victory points than your opponent by inflicting heavy casualties (causing step losses, stragglers, and destroying cavalry), capturing and holding key geographic objectives on the battlefield, and maintaining your army’s cohesion.

⚙️ Core Actions

Players alternate taking activations based on their commanders’ Strategy Ratings ($SR$) and execute the following phases:

• Command & Movement: Assign Order Markers ($OM$) to formations within command radius to maneuver units across the map in Line, Column, or Square formations.
• Fire Combat: Coordinate infantry line volleys, skirmish screen harassment, and artillery barrages (including canister and ricochet fire) to inflict stragglers on enemy lines.
• Assault Resolution: Commit columns or shock cavalry into desperate melee combat to break enemy positions, trigger morale checks, and force retreats.
• Rally & Reform: Spend command points during recovery phases to rally stragglers, reform broken lines, and prevent Army Cohesion collapse.

🧠 Why you’ll like it

It perfectly captures the agonizing friction of Napoleonic command. You aren’t just moving pieces; you are managing line-of-communication radii, wrestling with the vulnerability of massive columns against devastating canister fire, and balancing the high-stakes momentum of a grand cavalry charge against the looming threat of combat fatigue.