When our local group of ACW gamers first started gaming with the Johnny Reb rules, we made an agreement amongst ourselves that we would build all our regiments to the standard 400 man strength defined in the rules as being the average infantry regiment size. As time passed and we had played a dozen or so battles with our standard-sized regiments, we began to feel that we were missing something, and we eventually realized that this missing element was the variety of the tactical situations offered by regiments of different strengths pitted against each other in the heat of battle. In an effort to try and make some sense out of this question of regimental strengths and the orders of battle I had available to me, I tried to quantitatively evaluate some of the data that I had in my books and boardgames.
First of all, I assumed that the orders of battle found in the boardgames "Gleam of Bayonets" by TSR (Antietam), "Terrible Swift Sword" Second Edition (Gettysburg) by TSR, and "Shiloh: Bloody April" by SPI were accurate. These are regimental level boardgames from the "Great Battles of the Civil War" series, and I felt that their orders of battle, if good enough for boardgamers over the years, would certainly be good enough for my purposes as well. My primary source for Gettysburg data was the book "Regimental Strengths and Losses at Gettysburg", by Busey and Martin.
I have attempted to put the data in an easy to read tabular form with random generation tables at the conclusion, and I hope that my efforts are deemed worthwhile. Gamers can use these tables to derive strengths and weapons for the regiments and batteries of their commands, which can then be used in pick-up games as well as campaign games.
More Regimental Strengths and Weapons
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© Copyright 1988 The American Civil War Society
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