I've gotten a lot of response to the idea of company-based units-all of it favorable, too, which is always a shock. As there were also a number of questions, I'd like to clarify what we're talking about here.

We never thought of ourselves as the originators of the concept. It goes back to the dim days of 1 to 10 scale (and cheap figures). The old Frappe rules documents this quite well, along with the idea that a unit should be historically accurate.

To make a twenty-year-long story short, we evolved rules in the fashion of a Cold War race between playability and historically accurate information, based on hell of a lot of archival study by such devoted researchers as the lovable Editor-in-Chief and others too numerous to list.

Three Types of Rules

So, by the '90s, we ended up with three types of rules. The old big rule sets had evolved into some nice RPG skirmish systems, although Column, Line and Slaughter refuses to die the good dinosaur's death. The Division to Corps sized battle (where we stand), and the Armageddon/Corps+ battle.

I've always had a problem with the last category of simulation. It can be done with miniatures, but how much different is it from a board game? Indeed, we need to be aware of the tendency to wanton abstraction in all types of rules.

What we did was to base our rules on what a company/squadron of troops can do in a given amount of time, and the size of said units. Now, as a lot of these operations can be very time-consuming, we used the variable time concept, which is that many things -if isolated-are on their own time, although they catch up with the main events of the "battle" eventually.

As your journey into the Twilight Zone of rules continues, we EE&Lers had a nice discussion concerning "turns"-this was very Byzantine and High Church in style. The Editor is listed on the word "segment," which is an 8-minute part of time during which many types of movements maybe done by most units (without getting out of control). Perfidious Bill said, "It's still a turn." Now actually (I say, skipping over forty minutes of talk), it's both. Our editor wanted to drop all the baggage that the term "turn" carries while Bill said that people are familiar with the term "turn." You want to fight this debate out?

Deployment Room

Once we got by that, we found that real units always required deployment room, which most rules never required. Deployment room was equal to the distance that a column of companies (any nationality) took to swing left or right into line. This space was almost never violated by any battalion commander by more than a few yards if possible. EE&L gamers were the first (to my knowledge) to devise the idea of deployment templates to be used between columns to keep them apart. This really makes a difference as the size of battalions was a national difference.

None of this is really complex, you just have to alter your view. But it's enabled us to recreate the most realistic situations, at least the battles feel like a reading of existing battle reports of the era, with lots of the kind of ebb and flow that is always there in real battle accounts. I know I always need those extra two battalions that are never in reserve.

The printing and publication schedules of magazines in the real world means that when you read this I will have just come back from the Cold Wars convention (which takes place at the beginning of March). Then I'll know whether the figure companies are putting out their new releases in March or waiting for the big convention in July to release new lines, or, though I shudder to even contemplate it, whether there just isn't that much new stuff coming out anymore.

My secret snitches tell me that you 25mm people may find a whole new range of 25mm figures coming soon at the expense of "15s." I think I'll flock all my Blue Board and work on that ton of unpainted figures that make the rafters groan in the dark night with their plaintive ghostly horrific voices crying: "You got me, paint meeeee." Whoooo, scary, huh? How about a new Stephen King novel, "THE UNPAINTED FIGURES THAT WOULDN'T LET YOU DIE?"