Actually the basic idea of using actual numbers of men instead of the number of figures, (e.g. 768 men in a battalion, 24 figures), was suggested to me by two Ancients blokes who were doing a display game at the North London Military Modelling Society do at Stoke Newington last year (where my friend was doing guard duty as a 57th Line Voltigeur in the old Sabre Society). This is what you do: Each separate TYPE of figure is given a firing value. I give British Light Infantry 4.5, and Prussian Militia 2.5, and fit all the others in between the two, so French Line are 3.5, etc., etc., (in Napoleonics of course). The number of figures in the firing unit are counted, I normally only count the front rank, and have a maximum range of 20cm. Then the number of figures firing are multiplied by the firing value of its type, e.g. 14 French fusiliers would be 14 x 3.5 = (pocket calculator) 49. Then look at this chart: Firing unit not moved - +5% Target unit not moved: +5% Resting guns on wall, etc: +5% Smoke obscuring target: -5% plus any other interesting situations you can think of. All the different percentages are totalled, and a final percentage arrived at, so e.g. Target not moved, firing unit not moved, target obscured by smoke would be +5 +5 -5 = 5%. What you do then is to apply the percentage to the total you already have, in this case 49 + 5% 51.45. You can forget the .45. Then you take away the last digit from the total and throw the number of dice that you get, in this case, 5(1) become 5, so 5 dice are thrown, if you had got 119, you would throw 11 dice, etc., etc. Add the dice score to the total. For average's sake, let us say we threw 18 with our 5 dice. This would give us 51 + 18 = 69. Then find the average range between the target and the firing unit, in centimetres, and triple it. Then taking your result as a percentage, take it away from your previous total, so if our 14 fusiliers were firing at 12cm, take away 36% from 69, which gives 44.16. Scrap the .16 and you have a total of 44 dead. Now I use a scale of 32 men equals one figure, and so I would take away 1 figure and have 12 CREDIT left for the next volley against that unit, whoever fires against it. This means paper records must be kept of the state of credit of each battalion. If the next volley scores say 74, two figures would be taken away (64) and that would leave 10 credit to add to the 12 credit, and 22 would go down on the record for that target. This sounded bloody impossible to me at first, but with a calculator, it takes less time to bonk out a musketry score like this than my old +2, +2, etc., system, which' does not allow for national trends in firing efficiency. Of course, with 32 men equalling one figure, this works well, e.g. those 14 fusiliers (14 x 32 = 448 men) killed 44 men, which is about 10% casualty rate at 12cm. My scale is 1cm to 8.6mm, so the actual range was near enough 100m. 10% at 100m, it sounds pretty fair to me, of course the British are more deadly, but even with the best unit and the best dice throws, they can only get 25% at very close range, so it is quite fair. For different scales, though, the multiples must be altered, but this allows personal prejudices and knowledge to effect the musketry (which I am all for!) Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 171 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1976 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com