How it works

The short answer

Save it, then send it

Every scenario you generate can be saved as one finished file — the staff map, both orders of battle, objectives and victory conditions already drawn into it. Three things follow from that, in order.

Save it

The saved file is the finished battle, not a set of instructions for building one. It opens in any browser, needs nothing else installed, and will not change. That’s what to send a friend or the club, and it’s named for the battle — The Action at Niederfeld.html, say — so it’s obvious what it is when it lands in someone’s inbox.

A code rebuilds it

A generated scenario also carries a short code. Paste that into a copy of the app and it builds the battle again from scratch, using whatever choices and tables that copy of the app currently has. The thirteen historical battles work differently: a battle’s code is its own name, and it brings up the same researched battle on any copy.

So share the file, not the code

If your copy of the app and your friend’s aren’t the same, the same generated code can build two different battles. A saved file can’t do that — it’s already built. Save it, then send it, and everyone at the table is looking at the same battle.

The longer answer

Why a code can drift and a file can’t

A code is short because it isn’t the battle — it’s a handful of choices: the theatre, the table size, and a word or phrase to start from. Type your own — WATERLOO-CLUB-NIGHT works as well as anything the app suggests — and everyone who pastes the same code starts from the same place. That’s a genuinely useful trick for an evening’s play, and the app keeps doing it.

Building the actual battle from that code is done fresh every time the code is pasted in, by whichever copy of the app does the pasting. As the app is developed — a theatre added, a choice reordered, a new kind of scenario given a chance to come up — the same code can lead to a different battle than it did before, because it’s built by whatever the app does today, not by what it did when the code was first generated.

We’ve watched that happen: the same code building a different battle once the app had moved on. It isn’t a defect and there’s no date on this page for changing how it works — it’s the ordinary cost of a program that keeps being improved, and it’s exactly why a code is a recipe and a saved file is a record. Keep the record when it matters that the battle doesn’t move.

Built from the sources, checked as it’s built

What a Vedette scenario carries with it

This is the part a printed scenario book can’t do: show its own working, on the sheet, for you to check.

Sourced, not invented

The thirteen historical battles are built from the published returns and histories, and every sheet names what it stands on — to the page, where the source has pages. A generated scenario is not a real action, so there is no return to cite for it: its forces are built to the period’s own establishment — how those armies were actually organised for that year and theatre — so what you field is what a division of that army looked like. Either way, where the record has a gap the establishment fills it with a standard figure rather than a guess dressed up as one, so every unit still plays.

Fitted to your table

You say how big the table is. The scenario is cut to fit it, not the other way round.

The working shown, not just the verdict

Balance isn’t a single number handed down from nowhere. The sheet gives you the odds, then says in plain words what actually decides the fight — who holds the ground, who has the weight of numbers, who has to attack across the open, whose command is divided. Reasons you can argue with, rather than a score you have to take on faith.

Reasons on the sheet, not just rules

Reinforcement timing, deployment order, special rules — each is tied to the specific action it describes, with an umpire’s note saying what it’s for. Nothing generic, bolted on because a template needed filling.

None of that changes because of what this page is about. A generated battle is built afresh every time; a saved one is built once and kept exactly as it was. Generate the battles you want to try, and save the ones you want to keep.