Bob and Cleo Liebl invited several of us to participate in a 25mm FIRE & FURY (FF) game of the American Civil War. The maneuver element in FF is the multi-stand brigade, and the FF text states that the average brigade size is 6 to 10 stands.
All brigades have one of three 'energy levels'. For talking purposes, with a 10 stand brigade, the brigade is termed 'fresh' if it has 9 or 10 stands. Lose 2 stands, and the 8-stand brigade is down to 'worn'. Lose a couple of additional stands, where the brigade is down to 5 or less stands, and the status is now "spent". This 'energy level' is reflected in the melee and movement charts. Each unit is also graded in status as 'crack', 'veteran', and 'green', and the 'energy' levels' of the three status grades affect the "fresh', 'worn', and 'spent' parameters, giving a mix of 9 different troop types. In our battle, I noted that we had been assigned several brigades with an initial size of 4 stands, which didn't give much leeway between the grades..
FF was written by Rich Hasenauer, and first appeared in 1990, and for reasons unknown to me, became the most popular ACW miniatures rules book, supplanting Paul Koch's ON TO RICHMOND, and several contemporary efforts of Scotty Bowden's.
You can't play FF without a copy of the charts in your hand, since you're continually referring to them for movement, firing and melee. This alone, in my book, is worth several negative points. You can easily tell you're playing this type of "chartist" game, when there's one guy, table-side, who is looked to adjudicate all firing and melee procedures. The other gamers simply sit there, not interested in going through the charts themselves, willing to take the other guy's word for what's going on.
I should also note that I've never liked the FF sequence, the fire chart is downright silly, and the melee chart doesn't quite make sense, with the poor umpire having to look at a roster of 17 possible die roll modifiers for both of the units in the combat.
In our game at the Liebl's, I was one of three Union commanders, and we outnumbered the Confederates by some 80 stands to about 60. Due to the fact that the number of stands-per-brigade varied (from 4 to 12), I'm not sure of how many Union brigades were on the field. I still don't know how the Rebels did it, but at battle's end, we Yankees had lost about two thirds of our force, while the Confederates had lost only about a dozen stands... a significant victory for the South.
And I must take note of the fact that this was a Class A Abomination Game... casualty caps were placed on the figures' heads to denote such things as "troops disordered', or 'troops out of ammunition', or 'troops routing'. Whoever invented casualty caps, and movement chits, and order chitties, and the like, should have his right hand severed.
In several prior articles, I've ranted about the sequence, which I maintain is not a proper one for the horse-and-musket era. The sequence for the FF half-bound is:
- (a) Active side moves
(b) Non-active side fires
(c) Active side fires
(d) Resolution of melees
In our battle, the outnumbered Confederates, instead of playing defensively, took aggressive action, advancing across the field to our Yankee positions. They came in with guns ablazing, advancing at a basic 12 inch rate. Musket range extends to 8 inches, and the movement rate permits a unit to close with an opponent and not be exposed to too much defensive fire.
Each infantry stand that fires contributes a Fire Point (FP) to a volley, while a battery, depending upon range, contributes from 10 to 2 FP. All the FP focused on a given target are summed, a 10-sided die is rolled, and the Fire Chart is referred to... this is a chart of FP factors listed vertically, versus the 10-sided die roll, which is listed horizontally.
Of interest to me is that if, for example, you toss a '7', the '7' means different things... it depends upon the FP which you're looking up on the chart. It can mean 'no effect', or 'target disordered', or '1 stand lost', or '2 stands lost', or '3 stands lost'.
To my mind, under the normal scheme of things, and in most rules books, a modified toss of a 7 should indicate a singular, particular outcome, say, 'lose a stand'. Thus whenever the die is tossed and the outcome is a 7, the gamer immediately recognizes that he's lost a stand. Here, however, you don't know what a 7 means, since it means different things at different times. Hence my previous remark that the fire chart is silly.
I pointed this out to Rich Hasenaeur some years ago.. At that time, he said he hadn't made up the fire chart... it was the work of someone else. Recently, at the '99 HMGS FALL IN convention, I mentioned it to him again. "Well, gee whiz!", said he, "I've never noticed this before".
Obviously Rich doesn't want to tamper with success.
Another interesting item in the firing procedures is that the Fire Points from all units firing at a target are summed. Artillery has a 32 inch range, and this means that several gun batteries, situated, say, 1800 yards apart (almost a mile, since the game scale is 1-inch to about 50 yards), can focus their guns at the same target and add their Fire Points, benefiting by the built-in global-positioning-system of the rules.
In our game, on the Yankee right flank, Cleo Liebl's Union brigades were consistently being charged by the oncoming Confederates. And consistently losing. And consistently falling back and taking off stands. And consistently being charged again by the Rebels.
The Confederates didn't seem to be losing any stands. After awhile, I began wondering how the Confederates did it, and discovered that the melee-results chart states that if the attacker wins, his unit suffers no losses, nor is it disordered, but can advance after combat.
In combat, each side tosses a 10-sided die, and adds a number of appropriate modifiers (there are 17 of them) to get a total.
The two sides compare totals, and the difference is referred to the melee-results chart. If the differential between attacker and defender is positive, the attacker wins and the defender is driven back. The larger the differential, the greater the defender's loss in stands.
But the attacker loses nothing... if he wins, there's no diminution in strength, there's no decreasing endurance factor, there's no disorder factor produced by the melee... he just goes on and on and on..
In a previous article on another of my 'favorite' rules sets, NAPOLEON'S BATTLES (NB), trying to find something nice to say about NB (a difficult task) I gave credit to NB for penalizing a unit each time it participated in melee, win or lose. This prevents a winning unit from pressing on in unreasonable fashion.
The FF approach is that taken by the DBA, DBX series of rules. A unit in combat is either in good shape, or is dead... no in-betweens. Regardless of the number of continual melees in which a unit engages, it always fights at full strength. And the rules devotees, the 'historical miniatures gamers', eat this sort of thing up.
Back to our battle. Two of my three brigades were composed of 4 stands, fairly impotent units. On the fire chart, I noted that with their 4 Fire Points, firing at a unit under cover, they could knock off an enemy stand only with a toss of a 10. In fact, firing at a unit in the open, the same toss of a 10 destroyed one enemy stand.
Sometime around Bound #5, I managed to line all my brigades side by side... the two wimpy ones and one 10-stand brigade... and fired at the advancing Rebels. I had amassed 13 Fire Points, and with this huge array of fire power, my die toss was low and managed to disorder the Rebels. This deterred them not, and they closed.
There are no morale tests in FF. When a unit is hit and becomes disordered (one of those wonderful casualty caps placed on it), it just sits. If fired on again, producing another 'disorder' result, the second 'disorder' is ignored... only one 'disorder at a time.
When a disordered unit is ordered to move, it rolls on the Maneuver Table, requiring a high die roll to recover. If it succeeds, the disorder marker comes off and the unit moves on. In fact, all troops, when commanded to move, must refer to the Maneuver Table. This is FF's version of implementing a command-and-control procedure. 'Fresh' troops rarely fail (they add a +2 to their roll), it's 'spent' troops (they get a -2 on their roll) that get into trouble.
Helping in the Maneuver Table die rolls are the generals... they add +1 or +2, depending upon their status. The generals have a 'command radius', and can only add their modifiers when the testing unit is within the radius.
We noted that very few of the horrendous losses taken by the Union forces were caused by fire. Most of the results of the firing procedures were simply to disorder the target. It was in melee that the Union took most of its losses. And remember that each time the Confederates won a combat, their strength remained undiminished, while the poor Unionists lost a stand or two.
As you can see by the above, FF is not one of my favorite sets of rules. A second edition has never been published, and probably never will.
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© Copyright 1999 Wally Simon
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