..and now to cofuse the topic with some facts.
From a booklet by Paddy Griffith, "Battle in the Civil War". A fire fight in 1864 of 400 rebs attacking 400 yanks, reasoanbly open terrain. Rebs had 30 rounds of ammo each, yanks had 50. (If accurate, I don't think the games model this very well at all)
Yanks open up with defensive fire at 250 yards (that's 2 hexes in these games).
Rebs begin to reply at 150 yards.
Rebs halt at 50 yards.
Fight lasts for 2 hours (6 turns in these games - I think one of the Roundtop scenarios is about 6 turns and I bet the rebs melee at least 4 times in that one).
Rebs take 110 hits (27.5%); yanks take 90 (22.5%) (The booklet also has some stats on losses in 21 battles and on the average the winner lost 15% and the loser 20%: the losers casualties were also about 1.3 times that of the winner -- there are numerous exceptions to the averages)
Now I think it is pretty obvious our games would not model the above fire fight very well. Casualty rates are higher and we rarely just shoot at each other for 6 turns.
If you had 2 units of 400 men fire at each other at 3 hexes for 6 turns, you would see about 95 casualties - although the range of results could be about 35 to 160. While the overall result is close to the numbers it would be a pretty boring game.
If you had one unit of 400 men march up, fire and melee a 400 man unit in one turn, you should see about 60 casualties to the attacker and 40 to the defender, with C-quality defender having about a 15% chance of routing. There's also a pretty wide range around those numbers. Assume a turn to recover and do it again, that would be roughly twice as bloody as the historical example in 6 turns.
If you delayed the melee by one turn (Commander Best's proposal)and had another round of fire that should end up around 95 and 75 casualties, which is also close but in 1/2 the time (I assume you would need the next turn to recover to do it again). (Note in 6 turns this would produce roughly 190 and 150 casualties, 70% more then the example, but the ratio of attacker losses to defender losses is just about the same 1.26 vs 1.2)
I also took a look at what would happen if the units closed at 1 hex over 5 turns and meleed on the 5th turn. If I did the calculations correctly, that resulted in about 125 casualties to the attacker and 80 to the defender, with a C-qualtiy defender having about a 15% chance of routing. Again lot's of variation around the numbers. Now this is also close to the fire-fight and suggests the idea of an even simpler rule for a more "historical game" , you can only move one hex toward a visible enemy. Now this could also be an unintereting game, but perhaps a 2 hex rule would be playable.
Interesting topic. There's lots of factors I did not include -- probablity of disrutping from fire, probablity of recovering from disruption, impact of fatigue etc. If you play without the optional fire and melee tables you also get a lot of variation from the "averages" I used -- anywhere from 35% to 165% of the averages).
Lt Gen Bob Breen
Commanding XIX Corps, AoS
"Defenders of the Right"
|