There was Unca Jim Buffers on the Union left flank, facing Unca Wally's Confederates, and doing a fine job of driving the Rebels back. I should note that since I retired, so has the Lion of Ostlandt... now I prefer the 'more-homey' nomme de guerre of Unca Wally, Man 0' War. And then it happened... not content with smashing the Man 0' Wars forces, General Jim grimaced, shook his head, and stated: "These are silly rules!" Egad! I am undone! I have been found out, thought 1. Someone has finally discovered the Truth, the awful Truth! But I reacted quickly... I thought that if I were to join General Jim, to become a member of his these-are-silly-rules party, I would, in effect, defang him. And so I replied: "No, Jim, these are not silly rules... these are stupid rules!" And it worked... now having an ally (and what better ally than the rules' author himself?), General Jim concentrated on the game itself, instead of the rules. Six of Us... There were six of us at the table, and we were pushing my 30mm collection of ACW figures. Tom Elsworth had set up the scenario, which required the Union to advance and take one of two positions near the center of the field, The Church or The Ridgeline, both of which were manned by Confederate forces. The basic Confederate tactical problem stemmed from the fact that Tom had placed a series of woods on the Union side of the table, providing the Yankees with lottsa cover as they advanced, and making the Rebel artillery fairly ineffective, since the fields of fire open to the guns were blocked. We were playing a grand-tactical game of sorts... a single stand of troops was defined as a regiment, and four stands, i.e., 4 regiments, comprised a brigade, while 2 to 4 brigades constituted a division. As I remember, each side had some 3 divisions, a small corps. Given the scale as described, wherein one stand (2 inches in width) equates to a regiment, the ACW rifled-musket range of, say, 300 yards, would come out to about 6, perhaps 8, inches. For gaming purposes, however, I defined musket range as 15 inches, which, historically inaccurate and realistically laughable as it is, makes - in my opinion - for a better game. In most games, the movement rates on the table are large compared with the musket ranges. Which means that advancing units take only one volley as they close to contact, moving completely through the defending weapons' field of fire in one move as they make contact. Here, the attackers were moving up at a maximum rate of 12 inches per bound (less, if they chose to halt and fire), hence the defense got to pot them a couple of times before hand-tohand combat occurred. Now, I should note that what General Jim had focused on, when he cried "Silly!", to the world, was not the distorted weapons' ranges. No, what he was concerned with was the Rally Zone, wherein stands, when they took a couple of hits from enemy fire, were placed, and from which, when rally-time came at the end of each half-bound, they could spring back to life and reenter the field. Unca Jim thought that for a stand to be reborn was, indeed, a silly thing. If you were hit, you died, and you stayed dead, thought he. There's nothing wrong with Jim's thinking, except that, the way I generated the rules, my definition of a "hit" wasn't really the same as Jim's definition of a "hit". Sequence In the move-and-fire sequence, units, i.e. brigades, were given a number of actions, and had to devote their assigned actions to either firing or moving. When firing, if the four regiments of the 4-stand brigade formed in line, each stand wa's given a 1 0-sided 'Hit Die' (HD), and a toss of 1,2,3 was a hit on the target. If more than one action was devoted to firing, additional HD were tossed. What this means is that a brigade, tossing perhaps 4 to 6 HD, could score several hits on the target. And if other brigades added their fire to the first, the target unit could collect many, many hits per volley. Note that each time a target stand was removed from the field, an entire regiment of some 600? 800? men was out of the fight. This results in a helacious rate of casualties... we need some kind of filter to reduce the actual casualty rate, otherwise we have a very, very, short game. My filtering procedure consisted of two parts. First, when a brigade took 3 hits from the Hit Dice tossed against it, one regimental stand was removed from the field and placed in the Rally Zone. Not all the men in the regiment were deemed to be out of the fight, but the unit was so disorganized as to be ineffective for the moment. Second, at the end of every half-bound, a rally phase took place, and both sides diced to see if they could reorganize their regiments, i.e., bring them back on the field. On the rally phase, every stand was diced for: a toss of 1,2,3 meant that the regiment fully recovered, while a toss of 4,5,6 meant that the unit was beyond recovery... for all intents and purposes, they were truly dead. A toss of 7,8,9,10 meant that the regiment stayed in the Rally Zone and could try again next time. The Rally Zone procedures are the ones in which units are destroyed. There is 30 percent chance of an entire regiment being wiped out (toss of 4,5,6), while there's a 40 percent chance (toss of 7,8,9, 10) that the unit gets a second bite at the apple. Note that the filtering process uses a lot of sequential percentage ploys. The Hit Die requires a 1,2,3 for a hit, then 3 hits removes a regiment, and finally, to recover from the Rally Zone, another 1,2,3 is required. This results in a game in which the firing player tosses lots of dice, gets lots of hits, yet the actual casualty rates - in terms of 'dead' stands - is kept within reason. Hence the difference in definition of a "hit" 'twixt me and General Jim. Another item with which Jim disagreed was the difficulty of changing formation. Each unit on the active side during the bound was given 3 actions; the unit could devote these to moving (advancing 4 inches per action) or to firing. The unit could also use its actions to change formation. Here, each action devoted to changing formation added 25 percent to the chance of successfully completing the formation change. Thus if all 3 actions were used to change formation, there was a 75 percent chance of doing so, while if 2 of the 3 were used, there was a 50 percent chance of completing the formation change. General Jim's Union artillery moved up the field, and around Bound #5, decided to unlimber. The unit devoted 3 actions to the maneuver, thus had a 75 percent chance of success... no such luck! In fact, they tried on 2 or 3 successive bounds to unlimber... Jim continually failed to toss his percentage dice below 75, hence the battery sat there, while the crew scratched their heads. Jim balked at the built-in difficulty of changing formation.... especially so when concerned with the fairly simple maneuver of unlimbering an artillery battery. And he's right... a better way of implementing the procedure would be to declare that a single action is required to complete a change of formation... no dicing, no probability of 'non-success'. The end of the battle came around Bound #8... the Union fought its way through the wooded areas surrounding The Church, and the Confederate brigade defending the area was inundated with Hit Dice, as several Yankee units concentrated fire on the Church. The defending brigade took 4 hits, hence one regimental stand went to the Rally Zone, while the remaining regiments took a morale test. The brigade morale level was defined as the sum of positive and negative factors. All units had an 'intrinsic' basic morale level of 40%, hence the positive factors of the defending Confederate brigade consisted of its basic 40%, and to this was added 10% for every regiment left in the brigade. With 3 stands left, this gave the brigade a total of 70%. The negative factor was the distance, in inches, to the Division Commander. The Division Commander had to baby-sit several brigades, hence couldn't maintain a close proximity to all of them. In this case, the Division Commander was about 12 inches from the defenders of The Church, and so 12% was subtracted, giving the defending brigade a net of 58%. But the Division Commander had additional capability... on his data sheet, he had a series of percentages which he could add to his brigade's net morale value. These percentages ranged from 5% to 20%. Each time the Division Commander used these numbers, they were crossed off. In this case, the Commander added 15% to the defenders, giving them a final morale level of 58 + 15, or 73%. The brigade tossed its percentage dice, the result was below 73, and the brigade held position. Union But, now, on the next half-bound, the Union stormed The Church. In hand-to-hand combat, as in firing, each of the stands involved received a Hit Die (HD), and here, too, a toss of 1,2,3 was a hit. The defending Confederates got an additional HD for being in cover, and one more for a support unit that shouted encouraging things. For the extra 'support' die, a friendly unit had to be within 6 inches of the unit in combat, be deployed, and pass its own morale test. As I remember, the attacking Yankee unit failed to receive support (the unit called upon didn't pass its morale test). Each side tossed its HD. After stands are removed (each 3 hits causes a stand to go to the Rally Zone), each side tallies the following: 10-sided die x (The brigade's surviving stands + Total hits inflicted on the enemy) The numbers within the parenthesis were fairly close for both sides, hence the result depended upon the critical die toss. The outcome: Yankees: one church, Confederates: none. Back to PW Review August 1996 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List Copyright © 1996 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