Inspiration comes from funny places. So does dissatisfaction.

Ever looked closely at orders of battle for a series of historical conflicts? Even the same army, fighting several battles over a period of time, is a living thing, constantly growing or shrinking. It's never completely the same, even from one battle to the next in the same campaign. Units are raised or disbanded, are attached or detached, or lose troops to sickness or casualties.

So, in our own campaigns, why field a carbon-copy army every time out? The same units reappear time after time, in a way that is completely unhistorical. How about a little variety? Well. that's the dissatisfaction for me. I muster, for example, two finely organized ACW armies, one Union, one Confederate. When I painted them, each and every infantry regiment consisted of twenty figures Ð each an independent battalion of twelve. I fought some battles and enjoyed them very much, until the above dissatisfaction crept in. This organization was just too clean and predictable.

Then, I read an article by Paul Koch, author of the On to Richmond rules. In the article, Koch explained how he deployed some methods of fighting Òsecond day battles,Ó or conflicts that came to the table in the middle of a battle, with a day's fighting already having occurred, though not in the actual game.

The trick was to whittle down the units involved (fairly) to reflect the casualties they'd suffered the day before, then to take command of them on the morning of the second day and to game away!

Inspiration

That concept gave me the inspiration to move away from the carbon-copy armies with which I'd been gaming. The time-honored solution was obvious: Roll the bones. Get the dice involved. My home-grown rules are different from On To Richmond, so the following concept won't necessarily apply directly to On To Richmond or any other rules set. But I think the concept can be customized to match any set of rules or armies and can put some unpredictability into a battle (or especially a campaign) setup.

For this example, I will refer to my own ACW armies, whose basic units remain individual regiments and battalions. Those units are, of course, organized into brigades and the brigades are organized into divisions.

I made the arbitrary decision that my Union brigades would muster from two to five regiments and Confederate brigades would have four to seven regiments. To decide how many regiments are in each brigade, I use the following charts:

U.S.A.: 2 regiments on a 6D roll of 1; 3 regiments on a 6D roll of 2 or 3; 4 regiments on a 6D roll of 4 or 5; 5 regiments on a 6D roll of 6.

C.S.A.: 4 regiments on a 6D roll of 1; 5 regiments on a 6D roll of 2 or 3; 6 regiments on a 6D roll of 4 or 5; 7 regiments on a 6D roll of 6.

After some experimentation, I devised the following chart for rolling 2D6 and fixing the number of stands per regiment (or battalion.) This chart applies to both the U.S. and Rebel armies, the only difference in their overall organization being the size of their brigades, which was already addressed in the previous chart.

Roll	Number of Stands
2	2
3	8
4	3
5	4
6	6
7	4
8	7
9	4
10	3
11	9
12	10

Depending on the type of battle I am fighting, a unit of two stands is invariably an understrength battalion, but a three-stand unit can be either a full-strength battalion or a reduced strength (usually veteran) regiment. Larger units are regiments. Each unit gets its own command stand and the appropriate number of other stands to bring it to the strength noted on the chart above. For those who are interested, the average unit size using the above chart is five stands. The most common number of stand s that will come up on the chart, however, is four, which should appear about twenty-two percent of the time. Units of two and ten stands appear only about three percent of the time each. The other unit sizes are spread percentage-wise between those high and low figures.

When I use these charts for my infantry units, I get brigades of varying numbers of regiments and regiments of varying numbers of stands. I can dice up a Union brigade of three units, consisting of seven, five, and three stands, for example. That could easily be a green brigade of two good-sized regiments and a full-strength battalion.

Campaigning

In campaigning, I usually field twice as many brigades as I have stands to represent on the table and enter half of them at the beginning of the game, the others entering as the game develops. If a situation occurs in which more stands are engaged than I can represent, I simply shift the scale.

Usually, each of my stands represents 100 infantry. But I can have them represent 200 easily by doubling all the distance scales (100 yards becomes 200) and doubling the time scale (one hour becomes two hours). Movement lengths thus remain the same, but ranges are halved. Charts based on the same principles as those above can be easily developed to set the size of your cavalry units and the number of your artillery batteries. You can also use such a system to randomly select the morale level of each unit, adding even more diversity to your Civil War armies.

After that, all you need is a method to keep track of these brigades as they campaign. Your original units will lose stands to casualties and perhaps gain them through reinforcement. Their morale level also can change depending on their battle experience.

But, whatever happens, you will be fighting battles or campaigns with highly-individualized units, none of them quite like any other. No carbon copies anywhere.