For this event, Robin's 15mm Napoleonics appeared. I was the French commander, attacking a British-occupied position of two redoubts, Borodino fashion. Once again, a low key, fairly small size game. In the redoubts were 5 British infantry regiments (3 stands to a regiment), 3 guns, and 3 cavalry regiments to support.
In this game, we diced for the actions of the active side... an action permitted a unit to advance or to fire. The active side, when dicing, received either 2 or 3 actions. As the French commander, I spent most of my actions in advancing, while the stationary Brits, not having to move, could use most of their actions to fire.
In the firing procedures, the basic probability of hit (POH) for one regimental stand was defined to be:
Thus if a regiment fired twice, its POH was (10 + 5x2) for each firing stand, and for the regiment of 3-stands, the total POH was 60 percent.
Each regiment had its own data sheet... 8 boxes crossed out and a unit was removed. By Bound #3, 2 of my 7 French regiments were pretty shot up. Not only were their boxes crossed out, but there were lots of stands in the Rally Zone, hoping to come back to the field, but not succeeding. Here, too, in this game, stands were "recycled", no one ever "died", and the only time a unit was completely removed was when it had lost all 8 of its boxes.
Robin's cavalry charged the center of the French line, and broke through, and that was the end. At this point in the game, counting all of the boxes available to both sides, I had lost 30 out of a total of 80, while the British had lost 16.
Robin and I discussed the concept of the Rally Zone. To my mind, with a game played with such small units, there were three possibilities available:
- (a) Remove casualties completely. If you're hit, you're dead... no bones about it. But I maintain that the Bang!-you're-dead effect is playable only with larger size units, perhaps of 10 or more stands.
(b) Institute a Rally Zone, and give stands one chance at a second life if they are rallied. If they fail to rally, then, at that time, they're out of the battle. But here, too, I think that larger units are called for.
(c) Institute a Rally Zone, and give the stands an 'infinite' life span, an indefinite number of attempts to rally. If they fail to rally, they remain in the Rally Zone, depriving their units of fire power and basic strength in the melee.
In our game, we essentially used a card deck for the movement sequence. The cards told which side moved, how many actions were available, which sides' troops fired, when a rally phase occurred, and when the cards would be reshuffled.
I noted that the French lost because in 3 of 4 bounds, a rally card was never drawn, and the deck reshuffled before the rally card appeared. Which meant that off-board losses kept mounting up, and there were too many 2 and 1-stand French units on the field.
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© Copyright 1998 Wally Simon
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