All present at the battle described in the previous article agreed on the existence of one problem area: there was too much firing. With two fire phases per bound, with more than one round of fire per phase as the cards of the Fire Deck were drawn, and with lots of morale tests accompanying each round of fire, the firing procedures swamped the game. I couldn't agree more, as my French troops had been the victim of the excessive firing procedures. But in looking over the sequence, I found yet another weak point in the system; this one also concerned the frequency of fire. For each half-bound, the sequence uses the A Move/B Fire/Melee approach in which each side gets to fire after the opposing side moves. Since the moving and firing phases are independent of one another, there is no penalty for a side that continually advances, in contrast to one that sits immobile, entrenched in a defensive position. In the horse-and-musket era, a force that moves should have less opportunity to fire during a bound, than a force that doesn't move at all. Despite the artificial alternate phases of movement and firing imposed by the sequence, Simon's theory is that a complete bound takes up a given amount of time, and during that period, an appreciable amount of time must be spent in loading and firing. If a force advances, then it cannot devote as much time to the firing process as can a force that merely sits in place. In short, for horse-and-musket era games, a non-moving force should fire more often than a moving one. Using the Fire Deck procedures of the first game, Simon's theory was definitely ignored... units fired when the Fire Deck cards told them to, and this had nothing to do with movement. I still wanted to keep the basic system of A Move/B Fire, and so, for the next battle, the following changes were made which gave a non-moving, dug-in, defensive force more opportunity to fire its weapons. Note that the procedure doesn't guarantee that the force will fire; it only provides the opportunity to attempt to do so. a. Three Fire Classes were deemed a wee bit excessive, and so instead of 3, we now have 2 Fire Classes, FC1 and FC2, with FC1 being the worst. b. When Side A becomes the moving, active side, it marks those units that did not move. c. When the fire phase occurs, the sub-sequence is: 1. All units of Side B, the non-moving side, fire. 2. For Side A, a dice throw is made, using the corps commander's Military Capability, and those units that received a marker, i.e., didn't move during the active phase, see if they can fire: (i) If the dice throw is below the commander's MC, all FC2 units may fire. (ii) If the dice throw is less than 1/2 MC, then all FC1 units may fire. (iii) If the dice throw is above the commander's MC, then none of Side A's units fire. My thought was that this procedure would fix the "too-much-firing" problem, and, at the same time, balance the time allotted each bound to loading, firing and actual movement. On the weekend following the first game, I set up the second. The scenario, in essence, followed the outline of the first... a French attack on a British position, with pretty much the same force ratio as before. The French attack crumbled before the British dice throws. About the only glory for the French was the fact they overran the eastern town of Plok; they made no headway in the other parts of the field for the following reasons: a. During the fire phase, the non-active side fires, and the active side, having marked the units that didn't move so that they can fire defensively, attempts to have them fire, too. One might say that the active side "reserves fire", sacrificing movement for the chance to fire. The chance these units have to fire is around 60 percent; the reference is the Military Capability (MC) of the unit's division commander - diced for at the commencement of the game. The French had set up their artillery to provide covering fire for their advancing troops, and each turn, therefore, on the French active phase, the guns, having not moved, had markers placed on them. Unfortunately for the French, they seemed to fail all their MC dice throws, and so the cannons never got the additional round of fire so critical to the attack. b. The second reason for the French failure stemmed from the melee procedures. When a unit charged in to contact, it first had to "receive its orders", evidenced by a dice throw equal to, or less than, the MC of its division commander. If the dice throw failed, the unit didn't close to contact, but stood and glared at the enemy. Here, too, the French missed an amazing number of dice throws, which brought the attack of the entire French line to a halt. Logically speaking, there's really nothing wrong with a dice throw supposedly representing the distribution of orders to engage the enemy. But we're not talking logic here... we're talking about a veritable "game stopper"... a procedure which can completely foul up a scenario if the dice go the wrong way... which they did. c. A third cause of unhappiness was also to be found in the melee procedure. Here, the point system used to evaluate the combat points of the units engaged in melee was dreadfully askew. It was so bad, we needn't even discuss it... The solution to most of the above troublesome areas was merely to banish the MC dice throwing requirements. If a unit doesn't move on its active phase and receives a marker indicating it reserves fire... then forget about the MC dice toss, and let it fire. If a unit wants to close to contact, forget about the MC dice toss, and let it engage. All this leads up to the fact that there's yet another version of the rules in the making, which, if I can convince the Saturday crowd to try it, I shall report on in the future. One last item of interest: The assessment of "victory points". Here, what I will do is to define the value of victory points won by a smaller force as being "worth more" than those won by a larger force. For example, a side starts out with a total number of Battle Points equal to 2 x the divisions on that side. Each melee lost reduces the Battle Points by 2, until the side reaching zero first loses the battle, and must exit the field. Suppose Side A has 10 divisions, while Side B has 8. Due to the force ratio, since B is outnumbered, a melee won by Side B is of more value than one won by Side A. Each time B, the smaller side, loses a melee, we reduce its Battle Points by 2, whereas when A, the larger side, loses a melee, its Battle Points go down by more than 2, with the actual decrease defined as: Reduction in A's Battle Points = 2 x (A/B) = 2 x (10/8) = 2.5 Back to PW Review July 1994 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1994 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com