Franz Josef's Army
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2009
Many years ago, Jack Greene of Quarterdeck Games encouraged me to design the game system that became Panzer Grenadier. If I wanted to make money from my craft, he cautioned, I would have to design the games that people wanted to buy and play, not the ones I necessarily wanted to design. But, he pointed out, when you designed a successful game series, you gained the freedom to insert some of those pet projects under the series umbrella. So yes, I could design a World War One tactical game for Quarterdeck featuring the Austrian Army — as long as I first produced a winning World War Two system that would build a sufficient fan base to support the strange and obscure stuff.
Jack was guiding me in the right direction, though I'm still not sure if he really intended to ever let the World War One game see print or just held it out as an incentive. In any event, it took many years for Panzer Grenadier to come to full flowering and generate that fan base, and a couple of years ago it was obvious that we had reached that point.
Infantry Attacks, the World War One sister to Panzer Grenadier, takes most of the key concepts of the older game. It was really tempting to design new ways of doing things, to change the sequence of play and layout of the pieces, but we wanted players of Panzer Grenadier to be instantly able to recognize the information and begin playing in a short span of time. Artillery fire is handled differently, units are companies rather than platoons for the most part, and there are some changes in how Assault combat works (allowing a player to press forward with "cold steel," for example, or to fend off enemies by deploying in skirmish order).
Empires End, the first volume, is a large game. Its scenarios take place on the Eastern Front in 1914, and this is because it is a Holy Grail game and therefore must feature Austrian units in a lead role. And at the time that design work began, I wasn't really comfortable with mountain warfare rules in Panzer Grenadier and would not be until Dave Murray showed me how to make them work well afterward.
As frustrating as it's been to bring this game to completion, almost all of that has been on the business side. It's been a very satisfying design project and I think it does what I wanted it to do. And since that includes featuring Austria-Hungary, we'll start our look at the pieces of Empires End with the Army of Franz Josef.
Infantry
In 1914 the Common Army fielded 102 infantry regiments, each with four infantry battalions, plus a large number of independent battalions. The Austrian infantryman carried the Steyr-Mannlicher M1895 single-pull bolt-action rifle, a sturdy and reliable weapon with a higher rate of fire than most bolt-action weapons as the bolt did not need to be turned (though it was much harder to pull back than those of other rifles, requiring that Austrian soldiers be properly pumped up in order to operate it).
An Austrian infantry company was very large: five officers and 262 men at full paper strength, and mobilization in the summer of 1914 filled most regiments completely and even left many extra soldiers to be incorporated into Marsch battalions and brigades. Each company was in turn split into four platoons. The infantry depended on the firepower of its own rifles and shock of bayonets, as machine guns were in short supply.
Each battalion had a machine-gun detachment with a pair of Schwarzlose M1907 machine guns. It was a reliable water-cooled weapon with a good rate of fire, and intended to provide covering fire during assaults. The army high command desperately wanted to increase the number of these weapons provided to the infantry, but it had taken considerable effort to extract enough funding to give each battalion two machine guns.
The Common Army's elite infantry were the Kaiserjäger, recruited in Tirol. These specially trained mountain troops actually constituted a different service branch during peacetime, and numbered four regiments in 1914. They carried the same rifle as the line infantry, but also had specialized mountain equipment. After spending years carefully preparing these regiments to defend Austria's Alpine regions, the high command sent them to the plains of Galicia in 1914 where they suffered heavy casualties.
Cavalry
In July 1914, my great-grandfather Anton, a lieutenant in the 4th Dragoon Regiment based in Wels, rode to war with the Hungarian 1st Hussar Regiment (probably one of the many officers shuttled between units during mobilization, though he was always quite proud of having been a hussar). He commanded a zug in actions in Galicia, until he was wounded by artillery fire at Jaroslavice in August. Captured by the Russians, he spent the next five years in a prison camp at Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk and eventually walked home. One of the last casualties of the Great War, he died when fragments from that 1914 wound finally shifted into his lungs when he was well into his 70s.
Austrian cavalry comes in three flavors in the game: Dragoons, Hussars and Uhlans. Dragoons were the traditional armor-wearing heavy cavalry, Hussars the sword-armed light cavalry and Uhlans the lancers. By 1914 the distinctions were fading away; dragoons, for example, had lost their breastplates in 1862. Dragoons and Hussars still carried swords and Uhlans a ten-foot lance but all types of cavalrymen wielded a Mannlicher carbine as their primary weapon. Uhlan regiments recruited in Galicia, Hussars in Hungary and Dragoons in Austria, with Bohemia split between Uhlan and Dragoon districts.
Unlike cavalry units in Panzer Grenadier, those found in Infantry Attacks can dismount and fight on foot. This is one of the more noticeable differences in the two game systems, but in many scenarios Austrian cavalry is not allowed to dismount — in 1914, cavalry commanders still sought a decisive encounter on horseback. In game terms, Dragoons are not quite as fast but have greater firepower, as they usually trained more with their rifles than the others, while Hussars and Uhlans receive special bonuses in shock combat.
Cavalry receive their own dedicated leaders in Infantry Attacks games, and those of the Austrian cavalry have better personal morale than the usual run of infantry leaders but are less likely to have large fire modifiers. They are crazy brave and personally inspirational, but less impressive on the technical side of things.
Artillery
Austria-Hungary went to war in 1914 supremely deficient in artillery — in both numbers and quality. While the gunners maintained the high standards seen in the 1866 war, the guns left much to be desired. The designs themselves were not bad, but the M1895 and M1905 8cm guns and M1899 10cm howitzer retained the steel-bronze alloy barrels introduced by Maj. Gen. Franz Baron Uchatius in 1875. Steel-bronze guns were held to be more durable and cheaper to produce, and in 1875 Austria-Hungary could not produce the high-quality steel required for artillery barrels. In practice the barrels drooped under rapid firing, suffered numerous breech explosions, and turned out to be much heavier than anticipated. A despairing Uchatius — better remembered today for his contributions to motion-picture technology — used one of his cannon to commit suicide. But Austrian industry managed to keep the steel-bronze technology in the Army's arsenal for another generation.
Steel-bronze guns equipped all Austrian divisions at the start of the war, with only 42 guns (compared to 54 in German divisions). Within weeks the army began a crash program to replace them with modern guns, and by late 1915 excellent new weapons in the same calibers would start to appear. Despite the limited capability of the weapons, Austrian doctrine made things worse by insisting on firing over open sights — while the guns were capable of indirect fire, they rarely employed it, and in many scenarios the Austrian artillery is not allowed to fire indirectly.
The weapons compare favorably with their German and Russian counterparts, but where the German 77mm light artillery piece is very mobile and can move by itself when limbered (much like light guns in the Panzer grenadier system), the Austrian 8cm cannon (actually of 76.5mm caliber; the Imperial and Royal Army rounded off fractions) does not have this ability. And while Russian artillery can fire from hidden positions in most scenarios, the Austrians almost always must have a line of sight to their target, which exposes them in turn to their enemies' fire.
If the fans and the gods are equally kind, Empires End will be the first of a series as rich and diverse as Panzer Grenadier has become. First, of course, we have to get the first one in their hands.
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