Unfortunately, the fiasco was mine, not that of the English Civil War. I presented an ECW battle in which the combat factors were slightly askew, and only realized it when the participants, during our post game discussion, rubbed my head in the mess I had made. The table-top had… as all ECW battle table-tops should have… pikes and muskets and cannon and cavalry. A unit was composed of three 15mm stands, except for the single stand artillery batteries. As in many sets of my own derived rules, the sequence for the half-bound was subdivided into two basic subsequences, each one started by a movement phase. a First subsequence 1 First, there was a phase during which the active side could move and fire its units. 2 This was followed by a defensive fire phase for the non-active side in which he could blast away at the units the active side had sent into contact. 3 And this was followed by what I termed a reaction cycle, in which both sides could move and fire individual units to respond to the enemy’s actions. 4 Finally, melee resolution occurred… the melee outcomes were determined for the contacts made by the active side’s advancing units. b Second subsequence 1 First, there was a phase in which the non-active side’s cavalry could move. 2 This was followed by a defensive fire phase for the active side in which he could blast away at the cavalry units the non-active side had sent into contact. 3 Another reaction phase, in which both sides got to respond, with selected units, to the reactions of the enemy. 4 A final melee phase, in which combats, which had resulted from the non-active side’s cavalry making contact, were resolved. Where It Went Wrong Where I went wrong was in phases a4 and b4… melee resolution. This had two parts to it… the sides struck at each other to produce casualties, and then several parameters were grouped to determine who won the fight. The casualty-producing phase wasn’t too bad. Depending upon its opponent, a side was given a percentage chance to strike and knock off casualty points. For example, heavy cavalry had a basic 70 percent chance to strike at a musket unit, while the musket unit had only a 30 percent chance to strike back. No one took issue with this. But now, looking at the way the winner was decided, here’s where I flubbed de dub. Each unit had some 20 points in it, representing its basic strength. Take the unit’s remaining points (remember it had lost a couple of points in the casualty phase), multiply by 5, and add a percentage dice throw. The winner is the high total. But multiplying the remaining points by 5 always seemed to come out around 100. Which means that both sides were basically adding the same number to their percentage dice throw. And this, in turn, meant that a unit, supposedly with an advantage… such as cavalry over musketeers… had no advantage in the determination of the outcome. The winner was, therefore, decided by a completely random 50-50 toss of the dice, with no relationship to the factors that should have governed the melee. The above looks logical enough now, but how come it wasn’t that obvious when I was typing up the combat tables? Another item of interest to me was the way the participants looked at the firing calculations… which was, at all cost, to avoid them. What I had done was to intermix a multiplication step with an addition step… that’s a no-no. From now on, no more multiplying and then adding… only one or the other, not both. In the firing calculations, there was first a factor related to the fire power of the firing unit. During the bound, a unit, when it fired was given a number of actions, which it could devote to moving or firing. A movement action permitted a unit to advance 5 inches, a firing action permitted it to fire a volley. The fire power of a unit was proportional to the number of stands firing and the number of volleys issued. Take the number of stands firing and multiply by the number of volleys. That’s simple enough. A 3-stand unit of musketeers with 3 volleys had an initial ‘fire product’ of 9. But here’s where I goofed. I said, now take the ‘fire product’ and multiply it again by 3 to get a final ‘fire product’. In the above case, that comes out to 27. And here’s my second goof. I said to take the final fire product and add it to a basic Probability of Hit (POH). In the case of musketeers, the basic POH was 30. And so the final number we get in the above case is 27+30, or 57. Toss percentage dice below this and you successfully produce an impact on the target. Although the above seems not at all complicated to me, the participants, for the most part, never latched on to the calculations. They’d say, “I’m firing!”, toss the dice, and then start to calculate using those awful, awful numbers… multiplying and adding. In a sense, it reminded me of days of yore, when the WRG ancients rules were in vogue. The morale test was fairly predominant in the sequence, but it had so many parameters (around 30 of them), that no one wanted to go through the effort of calculating whether or not a unit passed. “Toss the die!” the players shouted, “And then we’ll see if it’s worth analyzing!” To me, this was not the way to write a rules system, and, sensitive fellow that I am, it hurt me deeply that I had fallen into the WRG way of doing things. The sequence in the game, as described above, seemed to work and was accepted as adequate. Note that in the first subsequence, Step a1, the active side moved all its units. Here, all troops, infantry and cavalry, moved the same distance. It was on the next half-bound, when the now active side became the non-active side, that its cavalry got to move an additional distance on Step b1. Thus, during the entire bound, the cavalry moved further than the infantry, albeit, the movement was broken into two distinct increments on two separate phases. Back to PW Review December 2001 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com