Supply Wagon

[zu Pferd]

Hello,

the Supply wagon as a unit has its own set of statistics.
I can give it a strength in defense level as it really only represents the LOC for
a Division with the Corps having one of its own and up to Army level, would I be wrong in thinking
this. ? I can put more than 90
This also goes for artillery, the caisson that accompanied the gun carried substantially more.
I don't want to drown in details, at this point because I have noticed that supply wagons are introduced
in other PC games such as John Tiller Campaigns were the Supply wagon does re-supply the division up to the
Army level with supply points, that are deducted from the wagon starting from such a time as needed
or when firefights times last longer, and consumption is higher.
and the supply wagon can be captured and re-captured losing supply value points in wastage.
and also have a defensive value, if attacked.
In my build of an Habsburg army list of 1799 I included Supply Wagon for the Corps and each individual division.
(I  did not add any ammunition value in the box but an overall strength of 50 considering the narrative below)
In the game will these units have a function such as the loss of the LOC for the division as in my example which
will lower I presume the morale level for the army a notch ?

Further :
according to my reading  Thunder on the Danube V H Gill and a recent confirmation, from a blogger
named ErzherzogKarl from reddit  information from a book titled Early Modern Habsburg Monarchy and Central Europe.
The book points out that:

A Habsburg musketeer from the infantry regiments of the kaiserlich und königliche Armee or k.u.k, would be provided with 60 rounds.
(I took the liberty of using this number for Line Infantry and 80 for the skirmishers present in the Habsburg armies.)
 In 1809, the average number of men in a battalion from a German line infantry regiment was 900 men, with a three battalion regiment consisting of 2700. If you remove the regimental officers and the company officers, feldwebel (sergeant-major) and fourier from each battalion you have 2540 muskets. Thus, a regiment when marching into Bavaria carried (according to math) 152,400 rounds of ammunition.
(A company fires 108 shots a minute on average, with a battalion firing 648).

Based upon contemporary sources of the 1809 campaign, battalions from both sides would withdraw from action after 20-30 minutes of sustained fighting.
The baggage trains for each battalion would consist of 30 pack horses with ammunition (on average 36 rounds for every soldier), adding a further 91,440 rounds to each regiment. Though small isolated companies or battalions fighting in fortified granaries or villages may have fired off all their principle ammunition, if a battalion had access to their baggage trains they would never exhaust their allocation.

[besilarius]

Very interesting details, and congratulations on your research.  Digging this type of information up can be very daunting.
Since you are interested in the Austrian army, have you contacted the Theresianum Military Academy at Wiener Neustadt?
The Austrian military attache in the 1970s in Washington, DC, indicated that they have all the records of the Austrian army there, dating back to the Academy's founding.
Two possible sources would be the General Staff study in four volumes of the 1809 campaign.  It is encyclopedic.  At one time the Library of Congress had three of the four volumes.  One had been "lost".
The problem with this is it is in the old Gothic script, so unless you are able to read German in that script it is hard to work through.
A more easily accessible source may be "armies on the Danube" by Scott Bowden. It is written for wargamers, so has lots of material that a general history would not include.

[Andy ONeill]

I've not written the parts of the game that'll use this but here's my thinking at present.

Supply wagons don't fight - back.
They can be destroyed through shooting or close combat though.
Strength is a measure usually of how many combatants you have but in this case it's more a measure of resilience.

We hadn't considered any unit changing sides.
There are practical reasons make that highly unlikely to be implemented.

In reality there would of course be a finite amount of supplies you'd parked up out of the way. As conceived, supply wagons in the game don't run out. You would need to either risk loss by driving up next to a unit in combat or pull a unit back out the line to resupply.  Either involve issuing orders and the delay associated.

As I said, this is as per the current outline design.
As I implement this if it's practical to make something more interesting then that is likely to change.

[zu Pferd]

Thanks Andy
for the update on the Supply Wagon, and I'm looking forward to what develops.

Thanks Belisarius, for sharing the possible link to information source on the Habsburgs.
I was thinking out what the supply/loc might mean in a wargame as such with its own positive and negative effects.
I was also searching for information on ammunition carried on the battlefield to fill the 'pouch' in General Staff unit,
and stumbled neatly into the Reddit blog.
The only books I've read of the Napoleonic period are the trilogy by J J Gill on the 1809 Danube Campaign in detail.
And I've been following Enrico Acerbi blog on the 2nd Coalition Campaign, found in the Napoleon Series, Acerbi is also
a wargame maker.
I've visited a few of the sites of the Italian 2nd Coalition campaign and visited Austria as well.
The dudes with the white wigs under the crested helmet and the sans culotte did march through the Italian countryside
at one point, and the conflicting politics attitude and culture did influence the shaping of early Italy as a Nation.