I have just finished reading a recently published wargaming book by Paul Stevenson called The American Civil War [Wargaming In History Series, Argus Books, Hertfordshire, 1990]. This book is full of juicy facts and figures. What particularly attracted my attention was a table showing the percentages of various small arms used throughout the Civil War. I have expressed these percentages as ranges of numbers between 0 and 99, and presented this in the table shown below. To use this table you throw 2 decimal dice to generate a number between 0 and 99 for each of your infantry units. Then look up the number in the table to determine the armament of your unit. This enables you to randomly generate an appropriately armed force for the year and theater of your scenario. I use On To Richmond rules, which are grand tactical in scope. When I constructed the random generation table I joined a number of the weapon classes given in the book into general groupings more appropriate for these rules. However, those of you who use tactical rules such as Johnny Reb should still find the table of use. On To Richmond players will have noticed that although I have included smoothbore muskets in the random generation table, Mr. Koch does not cover them in his rules. I do not know if he has ignored them, considering their use minor, or whether he has factored their effect into the rifled musket class. However, the numbers given in the table indicate smoothbores were rather prevalent, especially in the early years of the war. They should be taken into account. I suggest that you can incorporate smoothbore muskets into On To Richmond by giving them a range of 6", but treat them like rifled muskets otherwise. The table also indicates that only a small percentage of repeating and breechloading rifles were used during the war. If you use the table to generate your armament then you are less likely to see a disproportionate number of units armed with such powerful weapons and more likely to see an historical balance. Hopefully, this will add to the realism of the simulation. Back to The Zouave Vol IV No. 3 Table of Contents Back to The Zouave List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1990 The American Civil War Society 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