My 28mm collection is organized on 16 figure infantry and 8 figure cavalry units. For the War Game I combine these into 32 and 16 figure units respectively.
The problem is there are no officers to remove which makes morale a bit harder to work out.
Well I have come up with the following ideas.
Infantry and cavalry units are based upon the number 8. Units will therefore be 8, 16, 24, 32 etc
Unit strength loses for Morale are as follows
1/8 lost -1
1/4 lost -2
3/8 lost -3
1/2 lost -4
The 50% rule still applies
Sounds complex but actually for a 32 man unit mounted 4 on a base this equals a base per increment. 2 base lost is - 2 on a morale test.
For 16 cavalry mounted 2 to a base it equals, yes you guessed it, a base a increment
Officer losses. When ever a unit loses 1/8 of its strength roll a d6. If a 6 is rolled the unit loses an officer and suffers a -1 morale penalty. For each officer lost roll another D6 and if it's a another 6 it's the Colonel that is Iost. I mark the unit with a small dice showing officers lost.
An oprtional rule is to lose an officer on a 5 or 6 in a Melee.
Infantry firing get 1 dice per complete base of 4 figures firing. Use the standard rules for firing except to reduce the casualties I have introduced saving throws.
For each hit, except Officer loses, caused by Infantry volleys throw a d6 saving on a 5 or 6. This applies to all target types.
As Light Infantry fires individually I don't propose to make any changes to light infantry firing. Light Infantry can still target enemy officers.
3 comments:
I reckon you have a good compromise, here, but much depends upon how many 'officer figures' you have in your organisation.
I've headed in much the same direction as you have with my Napoleonics, my 27-figure infantry units (6 coys of 4 plus HQ of officer, flag and musician)being recused to 24 (and thus generating new units. My organisation used to be inconsistent in this respect, my cavalry (mostly) being 12 figures all up.
Going back to the Chas Grant handling of officer casualties, it seemed to me that there need not be any change, there.
I think I feel a posting coming in in my own blog on this subject, so I'll enlarge upon it there.
Cheers,
Ion
Interesting ideas !
I read 'The War Game' (the book that definitively 'hooked' me to the hobby, to mid-18th C. wargaming and to Imagi-Nations) in late '71 and immediately started to play (at first with labelled rectangles of cardboard to represent the individual bases, since I didn't have minis yet. I also changed the scale -using 1cm instead of 1"- which allowed me to play my first battles on a kitchen table).
I progressively made some changes to the rules, and have to confess I was far less faithful to the original set than you!
First I used dice (à la Young's 'Charge!') to assess artillery fire -I was not happy with templates, and it was more consistent with musketry.
The major change I made at the same time here and to WRG Ancients 5th ed. was to have all minis permanently glued to collective bases (standardized 'elements' of 6 on 2 rks for infantry, 4 on 2 rks for cavalry) and not removing the casualties. The rationale (as used later by Phil Barker in Ancients 7th) being that men of rear ranks step forward to fill the holes in the front one and keep the frontage of the unit constant). This implied to have the 'officers' included in the elements.
To record casualties was extremely simple and fast: each unit was allocated a line on a sheet of squared paper and a square ticked for each casualty; the line was 'scaled' to show when the unit loose a 'fighting element', reached a certain number of casualties… Loss of 'command points' was recorded on 2nd line for the morale test. The process took much less time than moving the figurines individually, and was less boring. To determine if a casualty was an officer (and whom as long as as the '2 pts colonel' was still alive was a simple matter of dice throwing.
For light infantry in 'loose' order the elements were placed in staggered rows 'manipular fashion', leaving the frontage of the unit unchanged and doubling its depth.
Then when the WRG 1685-1835 set appeared in '77 I was seduced by the Old School 'feeling' of its 'Bang! You're dead!' dice -indeed I soon perceived it as a 'steamlined' version of Charles Grant's rules, so I switched to it with 2 major changes:
- to keep 'big battalions', doubling the number of mini (ie the number of ranks) in each 'element', and the number of elements in each 'regiment': infantry remained at 48 and cavalry at 32. It was only a matter of doubling the number of 'to hit' dice / element (more for models such as artillery, since their number was unchanged, and giving them a saving throw).
- all minis permanently in 'elements' ('companies) and casualties recording as above…..
Post a Comment