For the second battle, I took out my little used 54mm ECW figures. I defined a company as 6 figures, and a regiment as composed of 3 companies... despite these definitions, the battle took on the aspect of a huge skirmish effort as the 54mm figures moved along the field. Brian and I were the Royalists, attacking the Parliamentarian forces perched on Slaughter Ridge. When the battle started, Slaughter Ridge was aptly named, for in the rules, I had given the defense way too much fire power, and the slopes of the ridge were littered with Royalists. Each company of 6 musketeers could, at the start of the bound, fire its weapons, then during the bound, load its muskets, and then fire again. Each firing figure contributed 15 percent to the Probability-Of-Hit (POH), so that the unit could fire with a net percentage chance of inflicting a casualty of 90 percent. This turned out to be way too high. I used markers to show whether or not a musket bearing unit was ready to fire. Each musket company had an officer attached... when the officer was placed in front of the unit, this indicated the muskets were loaded... when the unit fired, the officer retired to the rear until the weapons were again loaded. Unfortunately for we Royalists, the Parliamentarian officers were showing up in front far, far too often. What to do?? The first thing we did was to take a pizza-break for dinner, during which time we cogitated on several methods to reduce the fire power. The basic options we considered were: a. Reduce the per-man POH to 10 percent from the current 15 percent b. At the start of the bound, when the active side fired, have it 'fire hastily' with a severe penalty to the POH c. Instead of permitting a unit to load its weapons immediately after firing, give it a percentage chance of reloading muskets. We chose options (a) and (b) for our post-dinner continuation of the battle. I like option (c) and will probably incorporate all three options in the next edition of the rules. With the defense restricted in its firing capability, we Royalists were now able to make a wee bit of headway in our attack on Slaughter Ridge. On our right flank, Brian led a Sword-and-Buckler unit up the ridge, winning three combats in a row. Each time a unit won a melee, it received a banner, and each banner gave it a "+1" in subsequent melees. I should note that on my flank, the left flank, Jeff Wiltrout also had a Parliamentarian 3-banner unit. One of the reasons for Jeff's accumulation of three banners was that my key unit, Lord White's Royal Musketeers, didn't seem to know how to fire, or for that matter, how to load their muskets. After awhile, I gave up on Lord White's Royal Musketeers, and simply told them to charge forward. Alas! Here, too, they proved inefficient, since they refuse to cross the rough terrain (70 percent chance of doing so) between the two armies. When a unit took a casualty, one man was placed in the Rally Zone, and at the end of the bound, both sides attempted to bring back to the field the men in the zone. In most of my games, each figure in the zone is diced for... he has 50 percent chance of returning, otherwise he's dead. In this game, I used a procedure borrowed from a set of rules published in the current COURIER; here, the chance of a man returning to his unit depended upon the number of men in his unit still remaining on the field. Every man in the unit on the field contributed 20 percent to the chance of recovery. Thus, if 3 men were in the Rally Zone, and 3 still on the field, the first man in the zone would have a 3x20, or 60 percent chance of recovering. And if he did recover, then since there were now 4 men on the field, the next man would have a 4x20, or 80 percent chance of recovering. The Parliamentarians had a cannon on Slaughter Ridge, and this, plus the defending musketeer units, effectively beat our Royalist forces off for some 8 bounds, at which time, we withdrew. Battle the First: Seven Years War Battle the Second: English Civil War Battle the Third: Samurai War Back to PW Review December 1997 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 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