Modeling in War Games

I've been thinking about taking David's Crimean War system and adapting it to what I think American Civil War gaming should be. Many people would just "re-theme" the rules but I have one issue with that - there are distinct differences that are both subtle and important. One of those problems is that during the Crimea there were many professional artillery batteries. In fact the majority of them were this way. In the Civil War the Union had professional batteries as well with the varieties being 6 rifles, 6 smoothbores or 4 riles and 2 howitzers. These would all be of fairly uniform type. The South, however, had to struggle to maintain this type of constancy. In fact they often didn't and composed battiers of odd mixes including obsolete guns AND the bleeding edge in high tech (I'm looking right at you Whitworth Cannon!)

The usual hand waving that authors do is to just give the Confederates a -1 modifier and to be done with it. Egads. Not ALL Confederate batteries were mixed! In the 90's when I wrote Bonnie Blue Flag I did the work and calculated composite batteries depending on what was in them. This was pretty good but had two problems. The first is the records are incomplete, incorrect and sometimes non-existant. You might see a battery listed but then never able to find a single document stating what was in the battery. The other problem is I had to abstact the results of hits by just reducing the effectiveness of the battery across ranges. In reality if you lost your rifles you lost your ability to fire at long range.

From My Wonderful World of Gaming

Composite batteries have some random performance between the min-max of non-composites. They are not as good as smoothbores up close and not as good as rifles at long range. It is actually psuedo random because if we knew what exactly was in the battery and could recalculate the effectiveness given specific loses we'd have near-perfect information. However for gaming purpose we can't know that so instead we have need for some sort of constrained random function. In the end the system has to work on the table top and not require a lot of work or attention. When you are pushing a corp or larger sized formation it becomes necessary to hide details. However hiding too many details leads to non-sensical solutions such as a blanket -1 on Confederate artillery.

As of yet I haven't come up with the solution but I do intend on continuing to work the problem. So hopefully I'll come up with something and present it here. I haven't done serious game design in ages but I was very inspired by David Raybin's fantastic design. The light of his intellect has reawoken in me a desire to get back to writing!

***Update from Gerald***
Pete, there is a couple of additional considerations with Confederate artillery vs. Union. None – or virtually none – of the members of the artillery in the regular U.S. Army resigned and went South. This gave the Northern armies a well-trained core of artillerists to draw on and certainly gave their regular Army batteries (as opposed to volunteer) a distinct edge in duels with the Confederates.

Also, the mixed batteries of the Confederacy weren't just a mix of smoothbore and rifle. Most of the batteries at Shiloh had an even mix of 6- and 12-lb guns, which would affect range. Just a little something more for you to puzzle your puzzler over.

Gerald