INTRODUCTION Readers will note a new advertisement running in the REVIEW for a game called FIX BAYONETS! (FB) This is a computer based game which furnishes all the record keeping and logistics background for a Napoleonics miniatures battle. Of necessity, therefore, one must have one's computer at tableside, and I wonder if this alone will put a crimp in the market for FB. For example, I keep my computer down the hall from my ping pong table and for the first test battle, I set up a small 3 foot by 6 foot surface in the computer room, rather than lug the machine to the gaming table. There are wargamers who get their jollies by rolling dice; for them, FB is a lost cause, for the computer takes over all the calculating and dice rolling functions. As Commander, what you essentially do is issue orders to your troops and input a few basic factors about the terrain and unit configurations. The computer chews on this, and outputs an update on what happened, and if there are any "task points" left, it even gives the unit another try. IN THE BEGINNING FB comes on two 5 1/4 inch disks; the cost is $25. The program is billed as compatible with all IBM clones. I have one of the older TANDY 1000 units ... everything ran as advertised. The $25 brings you two disks. One holds the working program itself. This disk is jampacked, for it also contains data pertaining to about a dozen countries and to the different types of units fielded by each nationality.' France, for example, has Cuirassiers and Light Infantry and Old Guard and Divisions, Artillery and Veteran Infantry and Chasseurs a Cheval and so on. The second disk contains all the documentation required for the game and here it was that I ran into the first problem. One helluvalotta work went into the FB package, and to keep the selling cost down, SMALL WARS doesn't put out a printed manual. Instead, their second disk holds two major documents: one is the operations manual which instructs the user in setting up and running the game. The other is the rules book itself, which discusses terrain and firing and melee and all the nitty-gritty of the game procedures. I started to print out the manuals and quickly discovered there was no pagination. The text ran on and on and on, covering the 8 1/2 by 11 page completely from top to bottom ... in several instances, even running off the paper. Very frustrating. My solution: a. First, I went to a condensed print to reduce the size of the finished page. b. Second, I went to a continuous printout, giving me one long, long, long sheet, which... c. I then cut into page-size increments and xeroxed to form the 8 1/2 by 11 booklet at which I had originally aimed. All this made me quite unhappy. At the least, the rules book should be paginated, with appropriate spacing between the topics! Another source of unhappiness: it must be noted that the documentation contains no Table of Contents. There is a brief index given in the instruction manual, but lack of a comprehensive index was a definite negative during our playtesting as we continuously thumbed through the papers looking for our items of interest. Wise old codger that I am, I had actually prepared an index for the rules section, but as usual, my scientifically derived table never seemed to contain whatever it was we desired to read about. SMALL WARS doesn't really want its copies of FB bandied about, and so their method of copy protection is interesting. Once the program is initially booted on a computer, it will no longer run, they state, on ANY OTHER TYPE of computer, i.e., it has been customized for you and you alone. This doesn't prevent you from making your own backup copies for your own machine... it does prevent you from making copies for all the good buddies in the neighborhood. AND NOW, THE GAME Personae Dramatis: Here we have the Lion of Ostlandt, General W Simon, as French Commander. Here. we have General Brian Dewitt, commanding the British. And here we have Brian's better half, Leilani Dewitt, without whose flying fingers at the keyboard we could not have succeeded. This first effort was a minor engagement. Dewitt's British consisted of a brigade of Highlanders, one of Royal Marines and a horse gun, all set up to defend a small country place known as The Farm. The Lion's attacking fcrces contained a battalion of Lights, a battalion of Veteran Infantry. a battalion of Crack Infantry, and one battery. Keep in mind that each new display of information appearing on the screen was carefully researched ... we didn't want to input incorrect data and foul up this first effort. Nobody's perfect, however... Our first faux pas was that we actually obeyed the program directive to name our units. In a burst of sheer genius, I cleverly named the first artillery battery the "First Artillery". This may seem rather bland, but having done so, whenever my battery was targeted or fired on or attacked, the complete name had to be typed out on the keyboard over and over again. FB allows you a 20 character name... I'm thankful I didn't go the full route. We swore that in future battles, we'd use unit designations of A, B, C, etc. We also discovered that spaces were critical in the naming process. Another fit of innovativeness overcame me, and I called my crack infantry unit the "Green Plumes" to identify them by the green tufts on their shakos. Inadvertently, when the expression "Green Plumes" was typed in, we put a space after the "s" without realizing it. Thereafter, we were puzzled when no one could fire on the unit, for the computer wouldn't accept, as a target, the name "Green Plumes". I was quite content with this... how many generals have commanded a unit completely immune to enemy fire? It was only when we found out we had to type in "Green" plus "Plumes" plus SPACE that my crack infantry began to take losses. Oh, well ... Now for some confusion The ground scale. At the outset, the computer asks: how many soldiers does one figure represent? We typed in a 30:1 soldier-to-figure scale and, in response, were told, for example, that my crack infantry had 26 figures in it. Now 26 x 30 equals 780 men, who, arranged in three ranks, had 780/3, or 260 men per rank. If each man takes up 2 feet, the 260 man frontage takes up 520 feet and the unit frontage becomes 520/3 or 170 yards. FB's formula to compute frontage in yards is: [(No of men in unit) x 11] / 54 Which, for my 780 man battalion, equates to 158 yards. The difference in the two figures, 170 versus 158, comes from whether or not you believe each man occupies a full 2 feet of frontage. The FB calculation only permits 22 inches per man rather than the 24 inches I used. Whatever, let's compromise and use a frontage of 160 yards, a nice round number. FB now says that it defines a unit in line formation as a "continuous line of figures exactly two figures deep." And so I arranged my 26 figure crack infantry battalion in two ranks of 13 figures each. Since each figure measured 3/4 inches across, the 13 figures gave me a 13 x 3/4, or 9.75 inch frontage. Remembering that the 9.75 inch frontage represents 160 yards, we get a ground scale of (160 yards)/(9.75 inches) equals 16.4 yards per inch This is not good. Why is it not good? Because, for all its calculations, the computer asks for distances in yards. And if you think I'm going to measure, say, a range of 7.5 inches and multiply it by an oddball factor of 16.4 to get 123 yards and then input the 123 yards into the machine... you're mistaken. After all, the computer is supposed to do away with all the calculating effort. What to do? Well, we stretched the 16.4 scale factor to 20, and multiplied all our measured distances by 20 to get the range. This meant that a musket that should effectively reach out to 6 inches (6 x 16.4 is just short of 100 yards) now got cut down to 5 inches (5 x 20 is 100 yards), but if you won't tell, neither will I. Back to the Battle The good General Dewitt had brigaded his two infantry units together, and for some unknown reason, when we came to the part of the program that allocated leaders to the troops, no leader figure was assigned to the British. In contrast, the program promptly assigned General St Cyr to my French force of one battery and three infantry units. The manual states: "Leaders will be allocated based on ( ... the... total number of units." Perhaps the smaller British force didn't rate a leader; perhaps the computer was anti-British; perhaps we did something wrong. We never found out. Lack of a leader didn't seem to bother General Dewitt's men; they moved and fired as well as mine. Getter, as you shall find out. St Cyr himself didn't do too much. He was fired on several times, his losses were recorded in the depths of the machine and then, silently, he sank out of sight. I assume he was killed but the computer never informed us of the loss. He was dropped from the order of battle and we simply never saw him again. Au revoir, St Cyr. The St Cyr syndrome showed up in another game wherein a unit of British Fusiliers kept loading and firing at an approaching group of French Old Guard. This went on for several turns, when it was noticed that the Old Guard regiment seemed to have been dropped from the sequence. One of the options available on the screen is to select an update on any unit, and when we examined the Old Guard, it turned out that the regiment, during its approach, had been blasted into nothingness. In other words, the Fusiliers had been, over the course of several turns, wasting ammunition and firing at a non-unit. The computer does not alert the gamer to the act that a unit has been wiped out; it's up to the player to find out if a target really exists. The computer sequences through all of the units on the field, asking each one, in turn, what its orders are. Each turn, the "menu" on the screen lists whichever orders the unit can perform. There are 25 types of orders which may be given; whether or not some can be performed depends upon the number of "task points" left to the unit during the turn in question. In our battle, as my French forces approached the small farmhouse known as The Farm held by Dewitt's Highlanders, each time the Highlanders' turn came, we noted that although the tabulation of data indicated that the Scots' muskets were loaded, the order "Fire" was not among one of the permissible orders listed. As the French drew closer, General Dewitt became uneasy; there stood a staunch unit of Highlanders, 33 strong... 990 men, muskets loaded, but, somehow, they could not fire on their enemies. For some moments we discussed the possibilities, such as: had the computer simply flubbed-de-dub, or perhaps in the case of the Highlanders, did it want them to ignore their muskets and resort to their claymoors in good old fashioned head-banging hand-to-hand combat? We came to no useful conclusion. Brian finally noted that one of the optional orders available to his Scots was "Disperse". Desparately willing to try anything, he pressed the "Disperse" button. And sho' nuff! "Disperse" worked! The next screen promptly appeared and lol ... the Highlanders could fire! Immediately, we dove into the documentation to find out what "Disperse" did. It turned out that during our set-up, Brian had brigaded the Highlanders with the Marines. In this mode, the brigaded units have limited options ... they can move, stand, etc., but they cannot fire. To be brigaded is to essentially be placed in a movement mode. By evoking "Dispersed," the Highlanders were broken out, were on their own, and could now perform all the normal combat actions. And just in time, for my dreaded "Green Plumes plus SPACE" battalion was almost upon them. A quick order to fire, and BOOM!, my battalion strength dropped by three figures, 100 men, from 780 to 680. A rapid reload and BOOM!, another 100 men down. The Highlander 33 figure battalion, 990 men strong, was simply devastating once it got going. The "Green Plumes plus SPACE" unit broke and fled... the computer ordered it to flee a couple of hundred yards. And right behind it, of course, came the now jubilant Highlanders. Tough times for the "Green Plumes plus SPACE"! The British Marines were also having a high time of it. Their firepower had wiped out my French Lights, and now they and the Highlanders. no longer needing to passively defend The Farm, advanced over the walls and in the best "up-and-at-'em" fashion, a la Wellington, drove the French from the field. AND IN CONCLUSION As of this writing, we haven't played a "big" battle, one of a corps-sized force. Assuming around three battalions per regiment, three regiments per division, and three divisions per corps, we'd have 27 battalions per side, some 52 units in all through which the computer would have to cycle each turn. I'm curious to see how this would be handled... it would appear that it would be necessary for one person to be devoted full time to data entry. In the main, whomever I asked to participate in our test games liked the concept, liked the way it was interpreted, and liked the flow of the game. All agreed that to come to any valid conclusion, we'd have to set up a larger encounter. The relatively small skirmish battles we staged and on which this article was based did whet our appetite for more. FIX BAYONETS is definitely unique, and it's something for which the hobby has waited an extremely long time. In this description of our first familiarization efforts, I've tended to stress the goofs we made...goofs which, for the most part, tended to stem from operator error rather than from the program itself. After we set up one or two larger battles, we'll take a second look at FIX BAYONETS. And, as a final note, I should relate that we tried a "teeny weeny" skirmish... we chose, from the available listings, one North Italian Grenadier versus two Austrian soldiers. Despite lots of close range (40 yards) firing, no one seemed able to hit a target. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the computer, there must have been a percentage loss calculated, but since the loss was probably a fraction of a figure, the machine never registered a full hit, and no one fell down. The computer did tell us that when the North Italian Grenadier attempted to melee with an opponent, he couldn't hack it... we were informed that the North Italian routed. We accepted this as the epitomy of historical accuracy. EDITOR'S NOTE Sometime in December of last year, I sent SMALL WARS a copy of the preceding manuscript for comment prior to publication. To date, I haven't heard from them. The usual PW routine is to publish both a review and answering comments by the author simultaneously... it makes better sense if one can read the reviewer's comment, and then immediately refer to that of the author, indicating why the reviewer went off the beaten track, or misinterpreted something in the rules. Rather than hold up publication of my notes on FIX BAYONETS! until the boys in Leavenworth, Kansas, reply, I decided to publish the article this month, and if I ever receive any SMALL WARS' comments, will publish them at the time of receipt. In this case, I went even further... below are some additional notes on FIX BAYONETS! which may prove of interest. Back to PW Review March 1988 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1988 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com