The 12:00 turn finishes the action. The Prussians move in and fire up the remaining Croats who hold Lobositz. They rout and the Prussians capture the town. The Austrians throw in the towel.
Some after battle comments on the rules. One of the first things I had to get used to was the lack of target modifiers for the firing rules. There are no positive modifiers at all for flank, rear or column targets. The only positive modifiers are for those troops designated sharpshooters and for close range artillery fire. Negative modifiers are handled with saving throws. The rules overlook these general fire modifications because of the large ground scale that the game employs. As an example long range musket fire is only two inches. Instead V&B relies on the melee rules to determine a decisive conclusion to a battle. Bear in mind that the melee can represent an actual melee, or units moving in that last few yards to deliver that killing volley. You just have to rationalize this in your mind to get over this visual hurdle.
A second issue that I had to come to grips with, was the subtle way that V&B differentiates between troop types. Because this is a six-sided dice system a plus one modification is a fairly significant modification. As an example the Prussian infantry units in this game had three hits each and had a morale rating of six, which is the highest you can have. The Austrians were given two hits each, with a morale rating of five. Division exhaustion is determined by using a floating scale of 40%-60% of its strength points. Better divisions receive the higher percentage.
The saving throws are also a very subtle way of defining advantages. Any troops that become disordered are at a big disadvantage because any hits they give out, the receiving unit can roll a saving throw for each hit taken. Units have a 50% chance of saving when they get a saving throw and most times during the game they made the save which generally resulted in a melee victory for that unit.
As with any set of rules these are aimed at a certain level of game play. The rules are extremely grand tactical in nature with most battles of the period easily played out on a five foot by ten-foot table. As an example the battle of Kolin fits on a four by six table. If you seek a more tactical level game these are not the rules for you. Some of the magnitude of a miniature game is lost at a troop rate that is this high. This was really noticeable when the large cavalry actions took place between two forces that represented a total of 6000 horsemen. These battles occurred on an eight-inch square area of the game table!
On the plus side the actual game took less than three hours to come to a conclusion and that's with us moving at a very slow pace. With the generalized base sizes any figure's scale can be used without chart adjustments. The rules give examples of using 54mm troops all the way down to 6mm figures. This allows the flexibility of these rules to be used with any figure scale that you choose. I also felt that in their own simple way the rules reflected the period quite well and nothing happened on the gaming table that we felt could never happen in a real battle. In my mind that is an awful positive thing to say about a rules set. Having reflected for a time on that last sentence I must also credit the hex system that we used in the game in simplifying matters as well. The ability to know exactly were each unit is, its exact facing, the area it is holding, knowing the exact range and arc of fire, and exactly how each unit interfaces with other units I believe makes a big difference on how smoothly a miniature game plays out.
Of course with any rule set that I employ I'm apt to change a few things around. As I mentioned above I added a +2 modifier to hit for units attacking units in the flank. I also retained the original -2 modifiers for the morale check after it had been reduced by the designers in an update to -1. I also decided to extend long range of the heavy and field guns. This was based solely on my battlefield touring with Dr. Duffy and would entail a separate article to defend my reasoning for this. To lessen the over all effect of this I allow troops who are hit in extreme range to save against those hits.
As for any changes to the scenario itself I suggest allowing the Croat units to deploy further forward than the 18 inches allowed but restrict them to the slopes of the Lobosch hill.
As a note of interest the rules are going to be updated and republished in July of 1999 by Old Glory Miniatures. As I understand it, the new game will contain different levels of play, to include battalion games all the way up to the big brigade scale games. Several rules will be modified as well. I also believe the name of the rules will also be changing, something along the lines of Bayonets and Glory, what a shock eh? Volley and Bayonet has a Web Page as well as an e-mail-mailing list, that's were this information was obtained. So it is quite possible that by the time you read this that the new rules will be available.
More Lobositz using Volley & Bayonet
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© Copyright 1999 by James J. Mitchell
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