We've finally gotten our American Civil War campaign off to a start. In particular, what we did was: a. Specified the locations of 7 Union forces on the northern baseline of the campaign map. The Union's objectives are to (1) march south, eventually exiting the field, (2) secure a number of towns, and (3) destroy 5 southern depots. b. Specified the locations of 5 Confederate forces. The Confederates are fighting in their home country, and their objective, in general, is to prevent the southern march of the Yanks. c. Set up and fought a battle near the Southern depot at Easton, the subject of this article. A victory for the South, wherein the Yanks, thanks to the South's superior tactics and the Union's rotten dice throwing (all very historically realistic) fled the field. d. Packaged up all the above and sent it to our Umpire, Adak Jack, who will - we hope - respond by telling us which forces arrived where, and if there are any additional encounters, and just how far the losing Rebel force fled when it lost the battle north of Eastan, etc., etc. The various campaign forces of north and south are each of different sizes; they each represent a division in that they're composed of one to three brigades, plus artillery, plus supporting cavalry. In the battle we set up, for example, four stands of 30mm figures represented a regiment, and these regiments were combined into a division: First Brigade... 2 regiments of infantry Second Brigade... 2 regiments of infantry Third Brigade... 3 regiments of infantry Fourth Brigade... 1 regiment of cavalry Tally all the above units and you'll find there's a grand total of 32 stands of figures, a modest array of troops. Enough to provide a lot of room for maneuver, and a far cry from the forces set up by the fill-the-table-from-edge-to-edge crowd. Each force commander is given a grade (60, 70 or 80 percent) denoting his ability to align his forces on the battlefield prior to the battle's commencement. Our Southern commander turned out to have an 80 percent factor. We used these command factors in dicing for the initial set-up. If you toss high, above the commander's rating, he will not have all of his units on the field at battle's beginning... one or more brigades will be late arrivals. If you toss low (as we Confederates did), well below the commander's rating, then not only will he have all his forces deployed, but, tricky devil that he is, he's also entitled to have a regiment or two hidden somewhere in mid-field. With a low dice throw, I took advantage of this initial set-up, and I secretly noted that one of our Southern regiments was located deep, deep in the woods on the eastern side of the field, ready to pop out and do grievous harm to the Yanks. In the game's sequence, the half bound consists of 3 major phases: 1. The active side, Side A, moves and fires his troops. He dices for a number of actions (2, 3 or 4) assigned to every unit on his side, and can then devote each action to either firing or moving. i. When a unit is fired upon and hit, a marker is placed on it. The targeted unit does not take a morale test. ii. Advancing units can come no closer than 3 inches to enemy units. 2. After all movement and firing is done, Side A then advances a unit (which he had moved to within 3 inches of an enemy unit) into contact, amd melee is resolved. 3. Side A then dices to see if he has a "Rally Phase", during which: i. His commanding officer can attempt to remove whatever markers have been placed on his own troops. ii. He can point to any two enemy units and force them to take a morale test. Note that at the end of the third phase, a side can point to any enemy unit and have it take a morale test. This is where I became undone, far at the battle's beginning, the end of Turn 1, my worthy opponent, General Jeff Wiltrout, pointed to the woods in which I had my hidden unit, and requested that it take the test. "What unit?" I sez to the man... remember that I hadn't even set the unit out on the table, all I had done was to note its location on paper. But General Wiltrout wouldn't be denied his morale test, he knew a unit was there, and so it must test. Clever fellow. Each regiment starts out with a basic morale grade of 80 percent. From this we deduct: 10 percent for every missing stand, 5 percent for every casualty marker, and The distance to the brigade commander. This last factor keeps the sides from spreading their troops out all over the country side. The brigade commander must attach himself to one unit; he's used as a reference every time the morale test is called for. I hadn't realized that when I had placed my regiment, the 5th, in the woods, its brigade commander, leading a sister regiment, would end up some 20 inches away, thus deducting 20 percent from the 5th's morale level. Alas! 80 less 20 is 60, and the 5th Regiment failed the test, took a marker (which made its morale level even worse), and fell back out of the woods. A very inauspicious beginning for the South. But we Southerners are made of stern stuff... back into the woods went the 5th, this time bolstered by its sister regiment, and more importantly, by its brigade commander. General Wiltrout brought up his single-regiment cavalry unit, dismounted them and tried to hold the flank. No use. The 5th's dander was up, and not only did it trounce the cavalry, but it sent fleeing offboard another supporting unit sent in by General Wiltrout. The melee procedures use the "Combat Radius" technique. When the melee phase occurs, and the active side chooses one of its units to advance to contact with an enemy unit, two sub-phases are invoked: 1. First, there is a routine during which the two opposing units may get to fire at one another, thus placing markers on one another, weakening each other in the melee, and 2. Second, dice are throw for the combat radius, which may be zero, 6 or 12 inches. If zero results, then only the two units already in contact will fight each other. If 12 inches, then all units of both sides that have any men within 12 inches of the two engaged units, will be swooped into the combat procedures. Use of the combat radius prevents one side, the active side, from "ganging up" on an opponent, and thus getting an advantage by charging forward with several units against only one of the enemy's. The combat radius dice are impartial... they denote the area in which units are defined to be included in the combat, and so there's no wilful outnumbering of the opposition. As my 5th Regiment took on the opposing forces, the combat radii always seemed to turn out to be zero... indicating that only the 5th and its single opposing unit would cross bayonets, and supporting units would not be included in the outcome. Each of the 4 stands in an infantry regiment were valued at 4 points, giving a single regiment a total of 16 points; every 10 points yielded a 10-sided Hit Die. The 5th's 16 points gave it one Hit Die plus 60 percent chance of a second... most of time, it got its second. The actual combat procedure was: 1. Each side tosses one of its Fit Dice; numbers are compared, the higher number scores, and a casualty marker is placed on the opposition. Note that 3 markers causes a stand to be removed. 2. If one side runs out of Hit Dice, while the opposing side still has some, then the side that ran out can still toss a "blocking die", i.e., it can block a hit by tossing higher, but it can't inflict a hit. 3. After all dice are tossed, each side looks at its surviving stands, S, and the number of hits it inflicted on the enemy, H, and computes: 10-sided die x (S + H) The winner is the higher product. Note that if the combat radius was large, and several units were involved in the melee, a side, after adding its total points, could come up with a handful of Hit Dice and thus had the potential of inflicting many casualties, and placing many markers on the opposing units. Since 3 markers caused one stand to be removed, the casualty rate soon began to tell and units decreased in strength. One procedure used to somewhat alleviate the eventual buildup of casualty markers is the world-famous "Ride Of The Division Commander", taken, as I've noted many times before, from some clever author's rule book. Whoever he is, T thank him. On the second page of this article, I noted that the active side, when its movement and firing were complete, had a Rally Phase. In this portion of the sequence, the Division Commander sweeps over the field, dashing from unit to unit, attempting to remove his troops' casualty markers. The Division Commander dices for the distance he'll move during the Rally Phase, either 18, or 24, or 36 inches. Note that, in our game, since the commander had to cover the entire ping-pong table width of 9 feet (108 inches) yet was restricted to a ride of, at most, 36 inches, some units had to be left on their own. The decision, therefore, of where to place the Division Commander was of great importance throughout the battle. My co-commander, famed General William "Wild Bill" Rankin of the Southern forces, and I had several discussions as to which side of the field the presence of the Division Commander would benefit us best. When the Division Commander commenced his ride and arrived at a regiment gifted with a casualty marker or two, he'd dice to see if he removed a marker. Our Rebel commander, if you remember, had a rating of 80 percent, and that was the percentage chance that he could remove a marker. Removal of the second marker came a little harder, for the chance was reduced by 10 percent. Each successive removal decreased the chance by another 10 percent. And if the Division commander failed his dice throw, he'd add a marker to the unit. I noted that the opposing Yankee forces had a Division Commander who was graded at 70 percent. He could remove a first marker at 70 percent, but the chance of removing a second, at 60 percent, would be sort of dicey. And a third, even more so. Three markers removed a stand, and the victory conditions for the battle stated that removal of the fifth stand was critical. At this point, each of the stands removed counted for 5 percent, and this triggered a test to see if an entire regiment headed home. Since each of the casualty stands counted for 5 percent, there was an initial 25 percent chance of a regiment fleeing the field. This test was repeated for every stand lost after the fifth, with the intent being that the division strength would gradually crumble, enabling the commander to decide, at some point, when to completely withdraw his force and save his resources for the remainder of the campaign. In our battle, the Yanks decided to give up the ghost when they had lost their eighth stand, giving them a 40 percent chance of a regiment fleeing. A ninth loss would have upped the percentage to 45 percent, and so on. Enough was enough, said the Yanks. Even though they had lost 8 stands in battle, the actual Union campaign losses were computed to be at a lower level... otherwise the campaign itself wouldn't last too long. Back to PW Review September 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 (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com