A Buncha Games

Command Control

by Wally Simon

Fred Hubig set out one of his own Napoleonic tactical rules sets in 25mm. In this scenario, both sides were given the same forces: 2 infantry brigades, and one cavalry brigade. Where the sides differed was in the command parameters assigned to the Force Commander and the Brigade Commanders.

Each commander's Command Capability (CC) was diced for. My fellow commander, Fred Haub, and I found out that

    a. Our Big Guy, the Commanding General, had a CC of 90
    b. One infantry brigade cdr had a CC of 60
    c. The other infantry brigade cdr had a CC of 50
    d. The cavalry brigade cdr had a CC of 70

These were not the highest ratings in the world, as we were to find out.

On our half of the turn, we diced to see if our Big Guy could activate his entire force. With a CC of 90, a percentage dice toss of 90 or under was easily achieved. Then we tossed for each brigade cdr, and while the cavalry cdr came through, the two infantry brigades failed. Thus, for this first turn, only the cavalry force moved out.

Fred Hubig and Bob Hurst, representing the dreaded Enemy as the opposing players, managed to get their entire force to move forward, and it was our turn again. And once again, only our cavalry moved.

Turn 3 came and went, the Enemy was successful in energizing his units, and again, all we had was our moving cavalry... the infantry simply refused to move, in fact, refused to appear on the field. Around the 5th Bound, the Enemy was formed in line... they had advanced to a position, about 2 feet from our baseline, and since we still didn't have any infantry on the field, I ordered a historically-realistic Napoleonic Banzai cavalry charge against the entire Enemy line.

In truth, the results were more successful than I thought they would be... the lead cavalry unit contacted an infantry unit. Melee was one-unit-on-one-unit, and our cavalry won the first encounter. After that, we were in trouble.

It didn't seem quite logical to me that our cavalry could plunge into one particular unit located smack in the center of the enemy line, and the defending infantry could not call on the troops nearby for support. That's the reason that just about all Simon rules, when dealing with melee, permit a nearby unit to attempt to assist the units in combat.

Sometimes I have the supporting unit furnish combat points, sometimes it merely adds a few morale points to encourage the lead unit... but at least, its presence is felt. Here, the involved units were concerned solely with each other.

Due to the complete lack of infantry response on our side, we gave up the ghost on this scenario, and Fred indicated he'd revamp the CC procedures to prevent this from happening again.

More Buncha Games

Back to PW Review May 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