This week at the Wollongong Wargamers the scheduled genre was 'Horse and Musket'. But there was only one 'horse' show in town - a mishmash game based on Hooker's I Corp's dawn attack at Antietam.
It was a mishmash for several reasons - we were impatient to apply Valour and Fortitude rules to the ACW, before those adaptions have been officially drafted. With V&F rules a lot of the period and army flavour comes with the Fate Cards, and these we made up, relying heavily on Sam Mustafa's action cards from his Longstreet ruleset.
The only significant collection of ACW we have is in Epic scale or smaller, so we were also trialling halving distances and ranges to see if that better suited this diminutive scale, in particular extending artillery ranges considerably - my pet project.
And if I'm honest, my ulterior motive was to stage a Horse and Musket epic to enthuse the group to get painting for the Epic scale Waterloo game I'm planning for the 210 anniversary next year!
So just to be clear, we made up the rules, made up the ranges and distances, and tried to play a Corps level game in an evening - what could possibly go wrong?
There were three objective markers placed: one at the Dunker Church, and two about a foot further North down each of the roads. Also with V&F rules defeat points are acquired each time a brigade fails a Fortitude test.
The northern part of this field of honour is heavily wooded. Despite agreeing that they would all be 'Open Woods', they still halved movement, which together with my halving of all 28mm measurements for Epic scale, meant that movement in line through woodlots would be a measly 2 inches!
Therefore the deploying armies kept to march columns longer than they might otherwise have done.
Luckily for the dense packed columns the artillery had to come up a long way too...
The Union team had superior numbers but deployment was a challenge caused by the bottleneck between East and West Woods.
However things must have looked daunting for the Rebels...
But they managed to deploy their sole Artillery battalion to sweep the Cornfield.
With our home grown Army Lists and Fate Cards I had tried to emphasise Firepower over Melee to reflect the character of the ACW, and in that at least I succeeded in encouraging many firefights, all of which were quickly decisive, some deadly!
On the eastern side of the battlefield brigade activation went fine and the action hummed along, restrained only by crawling through the woodlots! But on the western half both sides struggled to activate their brigades turn after turn. One of Alan 'Doubleday's Brigadiers gave his command a protracted harangue - which got things moving!
So that a general firefight spread right across the table, interrupted by massed artillery over the Cornfield.
With Meade's Division arriving, the Confederates faced a sea of blue, but stuck to their rebel stand!
Locked in protracted firefights, both sides faced the agonising decision about whether to shoot or rally!
Eventually managing to bring their superior numbers to bear, the Union forced a couple of Rebel regiments to rout, inflicting two defeat points on the Confederates.
Given the size of the game and our inexperience with these rules, we called the game after two hours of play. The objectives were still held by the Rebs but with more time the game could have gone either way and the Bluebellies themselves were not far off accruing some Defeat Points themselves.
There were many lessons learnt. The Army Lists and Fate Cards certainly need some work, not least to align the system with the Napoleonic sets - I got a bit carried away! But these will probably be superseded by the official ones before too long... (All V&F rules and supporting material is available on the Perry Miniatures website).
A greater challenge is how best to adapt the distances and ranges for the Epic scale. V&F is clearly, and very effectively, written for playing 28mm figures on a large table. As recounted, my knee-jerk was to halve the 28mm ranges, but as well as causing some confusion, it also slowed the 'advance to contact'. More thought required here - one idea was to simply stick to the 28mm ones!
Despite these shortcomings, it was an enjoyable game and hopefully provided some inspiration for what is possible with these rules in the Epic universe!
Yes, thinking about it with the changes to the ground-scale and the large set-up designed to fit all those troops on the table we were playing on what would be the equivalent of a 10' x 14' table. That's a lot of distance for units to cover.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the relative frontage of one of your ACW units in line compared to a 12-wide line of 28mm figures? I usually allow that to drive my thoughts on how a game should be scaled.
Very little difference I would think - and even less compared to a Napoleonic unit of 32 figures in a two deep line. And yes, keeping the 28mm distances would not only speed up contact. I just feel uneasy about artillery only having four times the range of musketry...
DeleteIn theory 28mm ground scale should work well with Epic Napoleonics. It will be a dynamic game at the very least!
DeleteYes lets try it for the next Horse and Musket evening - Epic Napoleonics!
DeleteAn awe inspiring sight to see those Union divisions marching into the attack. Lots of units really plays to the strength of the epic figures. I compared a 15mm ACW unit with an Epic ACW unit recently and I feel the epics look so much better. (60 figures compared to 24 in the same space!). Well done sir.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much mate and completely agree about the visual impact of Epic scale.
DeleteIt was a great first effort at using Epic Warlord figures with the Valour & Fortitude rules, along with an American Civil War theme. Ambitious, lots of lessons learned and it looked terrific!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much Caesar!
DeleteA great game visually, that's for sure. As always when trying something new, you will invariable hit problems, that can only be resolved by play testing. I've found with my 10mm figures and 80mm-100m frontages, then using inches halved works fine, but also reducing the table size down to 3' x 2', thus equivalent to a standard 6' x 4'. Quite often I up this a bit to 3 1/2' x 2 1/2' just for a bit more space to manouevre.
ReplyDeleteThanks Steve! Yes we will definitely have to correlate ground scale and table size - obvious in hindsight!
DeleteReally enjoyed thanks, great looking table and as always, a well presented post. Interesting to see V&F amended to ACW and I think firepower over melee was a goo choice. 2” in woods is painfully slow and There does seem a need to speeding up movement to contact. There is good argument for going to full 28mm measurement, but it does allow artillery to dominate and I felt it needs a lot of terrain / obstacle to tame the artillery. On a more open battlefield (less likely for ACW), halving measurements is a good option.
ReplyDeletePerhaps staying with halving, but having an opening phase of army manoeuvre at more generous rates, but with more penalising activations might work to get the armies close and deployed and then go over to proper V&F.
Regardless, a fine looking game.
Thanks Norm for your encouraging comments. To be fair to V&F there is a double movement option when out of tactical range of enemy units, but on this occasion both sides moved artfully to prevent much doubling!
ReplyDeleteHave you thought of trying a 3/4 movement rate. It would require re-working the QRS, or having a conversion chart, but having tried it with 15mm Napoleonic's, is does seem to strike a balance between the scale of the troops and the speed of movement on the table top?
ReplyDeleteHi Anthony yes we have considered a range of options, we have adopted 2/3rds range for 15mm Naps which seems to work well, but a more recent trial of Epic scale ACW, as per my latest blog post, indicates that full scale works well for ACW in this scale.
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