My intent is to develop a solo campaign to be played in a single day, using 15mm figures. The battles will be played on a 2-foot by 2-foot area, a la DBA. And, most important of all, the battles should be fought rapidly and decisively, perhaps within the time span of 15 to 20 minutes, so as not to hold up the larger picture of campaign movement and strategy. I didn't achieve my 15-minute battle duration... battles tuned out to last one half-hour... but that still resulted in a combat system which could be used for the afternoon's campaign. In truth, developing a campaign background for the effort is proving, by far, to be the more difficult part. The combat system was more easily developed. For our initial testing of the combat system, Fred Haub and I drew up a 'campaign map'... a series of junctions, i.e., towns, connected by lines, i.e., roads. Some of the roads were drawn in with dashes... these were 'rough' roads, and forces could traverse them only on the toss of percentage dice of 70 or under. Fail the test, and the force held its position. Other roads were 'freebees'. The chosen era was Napoleonic, principally because there were only three basic types of troops on the field: infantry, cavalry and artillery. Fred and I each diced for each of three initial field forces: 01 to 33 6 infantry units 34 to 66 5 infantry units 67 to 100 4 infantry units Each infantry force was also given one cavalry unit, and one artillery unit. A unit of either infantry or cavalry was composed of 2 stands. This is 'bare bones', but it lets you see the formation adopted by the unit: in line (2 stands abreast), column (stands one behind the other) , square (2 infantry stands back to back). Artillery was a one stand unit. If a 2-stand unit is defined as a brigade, then the entire force of infantry, cavalry and artillery may be termed a division. Again, I chose to start out with a Napoleonic tag to the campaign because there are only three basic types of units of interest, as opposed to ancients or medieval armies with their spears and halberdiers and bows and crossbows and arquebusiers and pikes and javilineers and armored infantry and heavy cavalry and so on. Here, I can deal with a minimum number of unit-types and their combat factors: Unit Combat Divisor Unlimbered artillery 4 Cavalry 4 Infantry 5 Limbered artillery 10 Note that each type has a Combat Divisor (CD)... the smaller the divisor, the more potent the unit. These CD factors are used both in the firing and in the melee phases. At First In our first outing, when firing or in melee, each 2-stand unit (infantry or cavalry) or 1-stand artillery unit tossed three 10-sided dice to get a total called D. This total, D, was then divided by the unit's CD to get the number of 'hits' on the opposing unit. Note that the maximum D is obtained by tossing three "10's", giving D as 30. Assume the 3-dice toss for a unit is the maximum of 30, i.e., three "10's" are tossed. Note that limbered artillery, in melee, don't fare too well... with a CD of 10, a battery can get a maximum number of hits on the opposition of 30/10, or 3. In contrast, unlimbered guns, when firing, for the same dice toss of 30, get a maximum number of hits of 30/3 or 10 hits on the opponent. In our test campaign, Fred was luckier than I, and managed to get 2 of his 3 divisions to have 6 infantry each. Only one of my divisions was a "6" force... the other two were weak divisions, each of 4 infantry. The actual strength of each of the opponent's divisions was unknown to us, and as I advanced, I took one of my "4" divisions and entered the town (junction) of Glotz, already occupied by one of Fred's "6" forces. Bad news for me... I was outmanned. I made up a deck of about 20 movement cards, with each card having a number on it ranging from 3 to 6. Fred had 6 infantry divisions, one cavalry division, and one artillery... a total of 8 units in all... he was dealt 9 movement cards (one more than the number of units he had). I had a force of 4 infantry, 1 cavalry and one artillery... a total of 6 units... and I was dealt 7 cards. These movement cards hold the key to victory. In the March REVIEW, in a battle of the American Revolutionary War, I described a precursor of these rules. There, each time a "bad thing" happened, i.e., a unit failed a morale check or lost a melee, one card (selected at random) was taken from its deck... when the side was down to 2 cards, the battle was over. In this present campaign system, a side was permitted to go down to only a single card before it was deemed that it lost the battle. Also, in this present system, when a "bad thing" happened, a side lost, not a randomly selected card, but one of its highest numbered cards. Note that the cards, in essence, were 'mobility counters'. Immediately upon a bad thing happening, the side would gather up its cards, select the highest number, pluck it from the deck, and reshuffle the now slightly smaller deck. Our battle commenced and after several turns, Fred commented that because the numbers on the cards only went up to "6", his force was, in effect, being penalized. He had 9 units and was unable to move all of them at once. In contrast, I had 6 units, and with a lucky draw of a "6", could coordinate the movement of my entire division. Distribution The answer to this is to initially distribute the movement decks to ensure that, at the beginning of the battle, there is the possibility that all units can be coordinated. a. For example, for Fred's 8 unit force, its movement deck should consist of 9 cards: 8 8 7 7 6 5 4 3 3. b. In similar fashion, my 6 unit force would be given 7 cards: 6 6 5 5 4 3 3. As the combat proceeds, and "bad things" happen to one side, it gradually loses its highest cards, and coordination amongst the divisions slowly deteriorates. Note that, given my initial assignment of 7 cards, if three bad things happened to my force, I'd knock off the two "6" cards, plus a "5" card, and in the random draws that followed, I'd only be able to coordinate, at most, 5 units. It will be no surprise to note that Fred's larger force defeated mine, causing it to fall back 2 junctions. This battle took about 20 minutes before I was down to a single movement card. We tracked each unit on a data sheet. We removed no units from the game until it received 10 actual hits, at which time it was deemed destroyed. The determination of the number of hits inflicted on a unit uses a 4-step filtering process: a. First, toss the three 10-sided dice to get the total, T. b. Second, use the unit's Combat Divisor (CD) to obtain the number of hits, and round up, since we want no fractions here. c. The target unit takes a morale test. It deducts, from its base morale level of 80 percent, 1 point for every hit. d. Fourth, multiply the number of hits by 10 to get a percentage, and see if you can toss percentage dice below this percentage. If the percentage dice toss is successful, register 3 "actual hits" on the target (three boxes crossed off on its data sheet), otherwise cross off one box. Thus, whatever the dice toss, units always get boxes crossed off their sheets in the firing and melee phases. This 'filtering' process was one I first noted years ago in an article by Hal Thinglum, editor of MWAN. Hal was drawing up his rules for his Zulu battles, and when the British fired, the firing player tossed wads of 6-sided dice, causing many, many hits to the attacking Zulus. These numerous hits were used only for morale testing of the various Zulu units. Then, for each hit resulting from the first round of dice tossing, another 6-sided die was tossed and if a "6" showed up, one Zulu figure would be removed. In this manner, the morale levels of the testing units were reduced substantially, while the actual casualty rate (the number of figures removed) was kept at a reasonable level. Here, in my campaign system, the "morale hits" on the target ranged up to 10, while the maximum number of recorded casualties was 3. All units started with a morale level of 80 percent, and 1 point was deducted for each "morale hit". And if the unit failed, of course, out would go one card from its movement deck. More solo play tests. I decided I didn't like the 3-dice tossing procedure. The average of tossing three 10-sided dice is around 15 or 16, hence the results were sort of averaged-out in that area. I wanted a greater dispersion of hits for the morale testing procedure. And so I tried the following combination: Add 20 to the toss of two 10-sided dice This gave a maximum D of 40, but averaged out around 30, due to the two dice tossed. A couple of play-tests later, and I decided that this method wasn't quite what I wanted, and finally settled for: Add 20 to (2 x 10-sided die) This gives a linear result, ranging from 21 to 40. The maximum morale hits, which may be inflicted when artillery fire, is 40/3 or 13, producing a unit morale test at 80-13, or 67 percent. The combat divisors remained the same, the movement decks the same, and all that remains is the development of the campaign background. Back to PW Review April 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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