"Second attempt at Belmont... and a mandatory rant" Topic

Last weekend I run once again the Belmont battle with 'They Couldn't Hit an Elephant' rules and now I have posted the AAR. Yepp, the rant that follows is far to detailed and too long, but since I wrote it, I may just as well post it. :-)

link

Cheers
Minondas

A very good review and rant…I can see your quandry. I think that the issue with the overrun battery should be cleared up or it's a field day for rules lawyers.

I like the pics…what scale are you playing, 6mm?

Thanks, Murphy. Actually, once the section concerining assaults is being read very carefully, one can arrive to an almost definite answer. But in the middle of the game, when this situation occured for the first time, it was something of a nightmare.

Yepp, it's 6mm Adler and GHQ hexagon tiles for terrain.

Your disatisfaction with the ease of rallying from rout seems easy enough to fix. What do you recommend?

I would ignore the caveat under 13.1 (p20) that the first thing a commander must do is to move units in rout and pursuit *unless* he intends to spend PIPs doing so.

Stick rigidly to the turn sequence (10.1) so that units routing and in pursuit must move first regardless.

Plus you must remember that when they recover from Routed they become "Defeated" and still can't shoot at the enemy as well as suffer other negative effects in combat. The commander will still need to spend another pip to get them out of "defeated" status.

And further, defeated troops are just waiting to rout again.

Very true, and defeated ones will retreat a minimum of 3" if fired upon and casualties are taken so keep pushing and exploit the weakness.

First of all, thanks for all the comments. You are all correct and I already decided to apply Fat Wally's advice regarding the turn sequence. I don't think however that it's enough. Our game gave indication of the fact that punching permanent holes in a line is very difficult, because of 100 percent certainty af recovery to 'Defeated' status, as long as the cards come up in right sequence. Of course I agree about the observation that 'Defeated' units is a rout waiting to happen, but they still present an obstacle that needs to be dealt with and players can do it over and over again.

I am by no means an ACW expert, but from what I read so far I get the impression that routed units kept on running. First Bull Run, Chickamauga, subsequent Missionary Ridge… examples of routed units running for their lives seem to be far more frequent than rallying and returning to the fight.

In other words, in addition to mandatory "first" rout movement, I am thinking about adding a unit morale check when player attempts to recover a unit back to "Defeated" status. Such check is already defined in the ruleset, but one of its main negative modifiers is amount of losses taken immidiately before that check. Since it's probable that a routed unit will not be suffering from additional casualties, I feel that this modifier needs to be exchanged with something else. In this case unit quality seems the logical choice – -3 for raw units, -2 for average and -1 for veterans. It may seem high, but my goal is to ensure rather high failure probability.

I know what you're saying, and agree to some extent. We've found that games can last a long time due to units ability to rally from routs, and breakthroughs don't occur often.

Maybe rallying routers should cost 2 PIPs per unit?

That is an excellent idea and much more within the spirit of TCHAE than my suggestion.

Or house rule: a unit routed a second time is gone.

I must admit it usually costs me 2 PIPs to rally anyhow as the routed unit is usually further than 8" away from the Brigade Commander.

…Such is the level of my ineptitude.