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Post by Mike Lewis on Jun 13, 2019 17:35:23 GMT
For our test game with 8 units a side we had one general and one officer a side. I think that a 1:2 ratio for officers to units would make command too easy. I would only normally add one officer to the General for an 8 unit army - it still means the player has to think about officer and general placement.
Mike
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Post by spiritofethandune on Jun 14, 2019 7:42:15 GMT
I'm with Mike here. A Corps of eight units led by a general and four brigadiers would give you five officers for eight units...
Anthony
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Post by v on Jun 14, 2019 8:25:40 GMT
We've used 'one hour wargame' rules in battles with over Forty battalions a side with no problem, except you need a lot of dice! KISS principle... white dice 1-5 hits, red 5-10 then the black dice of death to 15. Dead ( ) easy to count yer dead that way. As for Generals we let 'em join a unit, rally a D6 in hits off, then they have to stay with said unit to the bitter end. If the General isn't slotted(D6, needing 6 to kill him every round of shooting/fighting) he can gallop off and join another unit when the one he was with is eliminated. Our little gang has found keeping it simple works great combating the inexorable march toward old fartdom!
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Post by jimmn on Jun 14, 2019 11:43:45 GMT
How do you manage breaching the walls of a fort with artillery? How many shots does it take? And when the Forlorn Hope leads the infantry rush through the breech, do any special rules apply?
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Post by jimmn on Jun 14, 2019 12:36:56 GMT
davel I've played the rules a few times as well and found they offered some interesting decision points, but were just a leeetle too abstracted for my taste. Plus I found it hard to keep track of 15 hits per unit (my dice don't go that high!). Duck, i have the same problem keeping track of hits. The obvious solution is to use fifteen individually based figures per unit. Then you can remove one figure per hit until all are gone. But the table gets crowded and moving a unit takes longer because you have to move all fifteen individually. Also, when i have fifteen figures in a unit my brain insists on thinking of the unit as a platoon. Thinking of regiments is too abstract for me. When advancing the unit, i want to spread them out as a double scrimmage line, but that might violate the rules, which call for a four inch front, if I remember correctly. Sharpe’s Rifles were spread out. Note: in the One Hour Wargame book, Thomas writes that a small game will have less than one hundred figures per side. Well, six units times fifteen figures is ninety, so maybe he was using individual figures also.
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Post by aducknamedjoe on Jun 29, 2019 5:58:46 GMT
I do like largeish, Charge!-esque unit sizes, but for some reason the OHW rules just seem too abstracted for that and my brain rejects it and wants smaller units.
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Post by jimmn on Jun 29, 2019 11:53:40 GMT
Maybe this is nit-picky, but talking about larger units that are abstract representations seems inaccurate to me. A platoon might be 15-30 soldiers, a company might be 100, a battalion might be 300, a brigade might be 1000...before you know it you are up to 10,000 soldiers in a 'unit'. And yet they are all supposed to fit on a small battlefield. My brain boggles.
So, I am sticking to the one-figure equals one-soldier system. When 15 soldiers are in a group, that is a platoon, etc. The net result of this decision is that my wargames are all engagements rather than actual battles. By definition, engagements are smaller in scale and scope than battles. Trying to put Waterloo or Gettysburg on one table is too much when using 54mm figures. Or so I feel at this point in time.
The good news about engagements is that they lend themselves to gaming unconventional warfare (UW). The majority of the wars fought by the USA have been UW. US or European forces ended up providing security, stabilizing, pursuing insurgents, etc. Insurgents attempted ambushes, sabotage, and other mayhem with smaller groups of irregulars. Their goal was to apply their weaker forces to points of temporary numerical advantage, then fade away. I think this (engagements involving local irregulars) is an underdeveloped aspect of wargaming. The Men Who Would Be Kings rules fill this gap to some extent but they focus on colonial scenarios. Going 'behind the lines' with small units was important in other times and places as well. In order to game this well, I need to understand the security function of occupying forces, to include patrolling, use of hidden observers, sentries, intelligence gathering.....there is a lot to learn.
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