I'll try to give a bit of a review. Take into consideration I've only used it a little and I have no other pc-mod rules to compare it to. Two things I want to mention first. Support from Nigel Marsh, the programmer, is excellent. I have already sent a number of e-mails and he always responds the same day. Secondly this program is a hobby for Nigel, not his livelihood. Time for him limits his main focus to the modeling of the battle not the prettiness of the program. The first thing that jumped out was the interface. It is in a very old DOS style. Minimal menus accessed by pushing a number on the keyboard after making sure CAPLOCK is on. It is a bit confusing at first as to what to do but following the instructions in the manual did get me going (I have become very used to Windows). There are two modules the campaign and the tactical. They do tie together but I have only begun work on my first campaign so I can't tell much on the campaign part. I set up my armies for the tactical portion based on a scenario for Fire and Fury which uses a brigade level for the base unit. For the games units and separate officers are created. I had to fudge a lot on the qualities of the units and officers since Fire and Fury uses far less qualities than can be used in C&G. I only created officers at the divisional, corps and army levels. Soon after starting play I realized I should have created brigade level officers also. Two of my Union divisional officers were seriously wounded and I needed replacements I didn't have. The scale can pretty well be whatever you want since the movement and ranges are based on paces i.e.: 50 or 100 paces to an inch for brigade level and maybe 25 paces to an inch for regimental. I imagine you could go down to a company level too. After the armies are created an OOB is created by importing the groups orders and off table marches and reinforcements. Orders can be issued at the beginning of any turn, which is 15 minutes regardless of scale. Orders are issued from a higher rank down to a lower rank leader following the chain of command. There are 3 orders: Stern defense, all out attack and support. Each order has manual rules to follow. The game play is simultaneous with a sequence of movement, then fire, close combat, morale/rally checks and end of turn. Movement distance is automatic with a set number of paces for unit type and formation. Only special movements are checked with the program i.e.: formation change, enter works, charges, etc. Some units will do it depending on fatigue and quality with extra movement and sometimes not. The charges will be OK if the orders are attack or an officer is accompanying the unit. It's up to the players to decide what is accompanying and what's not. I chose a physical touching of the unit and that had to happen in the turn before since special movement is done before standard movement of units and officers. This is also where I had a problem not having separate brigade officers. Fire is next with units that are in range deciding to fire, how much of the unit will fire and at who. This is done one at a time and is the slowest part of the game. Especially playing solo since each unit is numbered and I had to remember distance, unit numbers, etc. before going to the pc to enter it. I ended up writing it all down for all firing units on a piece of paper and then sitting at the computer to enter it. Then charges/close combat is done with units still in range that had the orders. Units will frequently retreat before actual contact. Markers are used to note certain results as they occur. This is for the rally check and to know who may not be able to move next turn. The rally check follows by attempting to get units out of morale trouble with officers. After that all markers except the rout markers are removed and the end of the turn phase occurs. This tells which units rallied or are still in trouble, whether or not they retreat, etc. and markers are returned to units that have problems effecting their coming turn. I'm sure I missed some stuff but that's generally the mechanics of the setup and play of the tactical portion. Since this got longer than I expected I'll save the tactics I've learned, how it seems to compare to a dice game and the modeling of the battle for the next post. If there is stuff I missed that you want to know ask and I'll try. Back to Tornado Alert #34 Table of Contents Back to Tornado Alert List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Tornado Alert! 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