"ACW troops and woodlines" Topic

A quick question I've thoght about while working on my figs and terrain…

When ACW troops were defending a woodline, say at the edge of a forest, or the woodline seperating farm fields, would they fight from inside the trees, taking advantage of the cover, or would they fight in front of the trees in order to have straighter lines and a better concentration of firepower? I seems like the former option would make more sense to me, although that might just be my modern mindset talking here….

On a similar note, I've been using my 3mm figs to play 2x2 Napoleonics, somewhat modfied for base size. The game is at the brigade level, and so the actions of the individual regiments are somewhat abstracted. That being said, my question here involves what I've been referring to recently as "micro-terrain." By micro-terrain I mean those terrain features which affect combat but which occur below the level at which the player can "see" when playing brigade level games like 2x2 Naps/ACW or Grande Armee. These might be a low stone wall, or a ditch, or a small creek bed which creates a depression troops can stand in. These are terrain features that both genreals, or one or the other, might be igrnorant of and which can only really be found by the low ranking commadners on the ground, or even by the troops themselves sponteously. Two great examples would be Bloody Lane of the Sunken Road, but there were probably hudnreds or thousands of such events throughout the war. It's impossible to model these on a table top, and doing so is actually a cheat- if the commanders knew about such terrain features when they made thier battle plans they would probably have re-thought thier plans of attack at the outset. For instance, Bloody Lane could have been outflanked from the get-go if its existance had been known by the Union before hand. Same thing with lots of situations. I mean, entire brigades were often put out on the limb accidentally, and sometimes the defenders didn't even know the value of the terrain they held…

Where am I going wiht this. The best way for me to explain it is to use an example from wargaming. Lets take Fast Play Grande Armee. Each unit is a brigade, a square that covers the area the brigade could conceivably operate over during the course of back and forth fighitng, attacking and counter attacking. A set of rules that I think are great, actually. In FPGA each brigade has a certain number, a combat value that, represents its overall soundness on the battlefield, including morale, troop strengths, command efficiency, etc. So a French Line brigade might have a CV of 5, or 6 in a given year. An Old Guard unit might have a CV of 8 or 9 or higher. In combat both sides roll thier number of CV, trying to hit a given number and compare them. Each roll of over 5 is a hit. You comapre the number of hits and the side with the smaller number of hits recoils from the winner.This result can represetn all manner of situations on the ground abstracted out to one die roll.

Terrain that's on the board can play a roll in modfying those combat rolls. But my contention is that any game that uses brigades as units, and maybe even smaller scale games, should also include an element of the unknown as involves the terrain. So, if a brigade is making an attack over an open field towards another unit in the open field, there should probably be an additional die, or more than one, also rolled which will determine if the area of ground is particularly suited to the defense. This could indiceate that the defenders have found one of these "hidden" micro-terrain featrues that the army general (the player) himself would not have known about even, because he might not have had a chance to check that ground for such features. And, if the roll for terrain suitability to the defense does indicate that such a feature or lay of the ground exists, then that result should stay with any unit defending that location from the same spot.

Ok, that was a lengthy explanation, but it's really been on my mind as of late. I'm not aware of any games that allow for something like that, although I'm thinking that I may modify my own games to incorproated these elemts in the future. It would be as easy as rolling extra dice for the defender- although, that being said, its also esy enough for certain pieces of terrain to be very poorly defendable, which is another element. One game that does something like this is VnB, where the defender gets an extra die if they haven't moved that turn, I think. But this only really represents them getting organized on a piece of terrain, so its not quite the same thing.

Has anyone else out there tried anything like this before?

Usuaully using the trees as cover…it only took a few battles for troops to learn that a nice thick oak tree will stop a minie ball from finding it's way into you…

I agree. From just inside the tree line

Thats what I sort of expected to hear. It does make sense. By the same toekn, I'd imagine that two units fighting in the woods would fire with reduced efficiency due to the intervening trees.

Actually, on a similar note, I wonder if concealment, vice cover, actually played muhc of a roll for regiments and brigades during this period. From what I've read in American Kriegspiel the odds of a regiment hitting anything in front of it was mostly determined by the density of troops in the target area and cover, and little else. In a situation of like, where the wall of lead in the most important thing, I wonder if being unable to see your target inside the shade of a woodline, or (more interestingly) in the weeds ona boarder of a farm field or stream bed, would really make any appreciaable difference. For that matter, would a field of full grown wheat or corn really have any effect on the number of casualties a regiment would suffer by fire, even if the shooters can't see any individual soldier?

Maybe try and model it into your CBT ? The VnB mechanic sounds pretty good.

I also agree inside the tree line.

As for crops/thick weeds, provided that a regiment could be aware that a target was close by on the other side, the first massed volley fired usually mowed down the majority of the field, rendering the following volley more accurate, until multiple volleys began to foul the barrels and reduce range and accuracy. Return fire also had a detrimental effect on accuracy.

The problem with VnB is that its automatic and a constant value.

My idea would be something like this.

To use the FPGA example above, but tweaked for Naps…

When a defedning unit unit is attacked it rolls its normal combat dice plus 3 additional dice. If they get a 6 on one of the additional dice that represents the terrain advantage they're fighting on. So if they get 3 sixes that means that there is some feature of that terrain that makes it almost impossible to break through. Like the Sunken Road. This could be modified a few ways to make really killer terrain less commmon. Maybe roll 6 terrain dice and divide the results by three- a roll of 6 6's would represent something legendary, like the above examples.

If you could identify the actual feature with the roll that would be good. Like the commanders then know "OK there's an impenetrable sunken road witha 3 foot stone wall in front of it. We have to do something different or go around it."

That could be achieved with a sub chart if you want to get fancy. It could be a channelization of the land, a particuarly sturdy wall, or lots of things. The idea though is that the terrain feature would be something the attacker wouldn't know about until after the fact. The players decision then, would be does he throw more troops against bad odds in the hopes of acheiving a break through or does he cut his losses and try to find another way around it? This is the exact decision that a lot of ACW commanders, more than Napoleonic ones it seems, were forced to make. It also reflects the demoralization that might set in amongst the troops forced to make repeated attempts against an impregnable position. If you wanted to get really into it, you could even have more aggressive commanders be more likley to send in thier brigades over and over again despite the generals (players) wishes. The Drunken Butcher role. Once again, I'm mostly talking about a very abstracted, brigade set of rules wher the Army commadner cannot physically see the majority of the battle field, and therefore has to make plans over terrain that he doesn't know well. To be fair, such a sytem should allow the defending general some additional advantage of scouting out these same terrain featrues and knowing about some of them, if the scenario allows for that sort of recon.

Your last part was my next question. Would the defending general know about them? The other thing to keep in mind is that I think army commanders knew how to read terrain, and they knew how to visualize it without actually seeing it and its advantages or disadvantages when a experienced officer or scout reported it to them. Army commanders don't need to actually "see" the field to know what's there. I think you may have some plush, lazy aristocrat in mind for an army commander, who really leaves the fighting and the decision making up to someone else or totally ruins the plan when he decides to interject himself :)

For instance, Wellington was IN CHARGE of everything at Waterloo, IMO. He knew the terrain through his own observations, the observations of others and maps which were created depicting the tactically important features. No, he didn't manage every detail, but he paid attention to them all especially things like covered ways, crest lines, hedgerows, LOS and minute, but important tactical details.

Yeah, but wellington was a control freak. You do have a good point though. The thing with the ACW is that you had a bunch of very bad genreals, really great ones, and average ones all thrown together in the same armies. And actually you have a good point. The roll for micro-terrain should incorporate factors like scouting, the physical location of the army commander (player), and such. But I still feel like it should be incorporated. There's too many examples of this sort of thing happening to not think it needs to be included. Also, it adds a degree of the unknown into wargame rules, which all too often reduce a battle field to a rather bland buffet of quanitfiable advantages and disadvantages from which the player gets to pick and choose.

I guess its the price you pay for abstraction in rules were a base = a brigade.

Bloody Lane was a bit of an exception though, as D.H.Hill had two brigades in it. So I would assume two stands could claim cover on that basis?

For what its worth, as far as I recall both sets of Divisional commanders were well aware of its existence and Brigade commanders certainly were!

It's a cool idea but it could get dicy to implement.

Is it a 360 degree position where you get the benefit regardless of the direction of attack?

What if later I only occupy half of it? Do I still get the bonus?

Would the overall terrain make them more or less likely?

Your "roll 3 dice for a 6" means your battlefield will be littered with the things if all you need is a 6.

Here is a way to introduce it that may be much simpler. After any combat in which the defender takes no hits and the attacker takes a lot (I'd need to know your rules to define it) you place a marker to represent such terrain. It is a linear obstacle, conforms to the front of the defending unit (like an entrenched marker), and remains there for the rest of the game. Then just treat as an entrenchment (possibly with a better bonus).

All generals are in command and control of the tactical details. That's the nature of their business… or that was the nature of their business as far as terrain was concerned back in the day. Even Ben Butler knew the tactical details of his job and kept a close eye on them.

Yes, Extra's point is why I was saying it might be good to specify the terrain feature.

Even Ben Butler knew the tactical details of his job and kept a close eye on them

Did the same thing with ladies in New Orleans, as recall! :o)

He pilfered our silver too, the @$&€=+#%

To get back to my original point, it was that there should be some function of terrain below the level of on-board representation in games played at the higher levels of command. I think Extra Crispy has some good ideas. The feature in question would have to be represented on the table somehow, and a basic idea of its characteristics given. However, as I'd said, the effect could also simply be abstracted out because the combat rolls for a game like Grande Armee or 2x2 Napoleonics are already so abstracted, reflecting as they do an unspecified number of attacks and counter attacks occurring over an unspecified, abstracted amount of time. This would just be one more element that is modeled abstractly. The terrain in question wouldn't necessarily have to be large enough for a entire brigade to fit into- it could just be a small fence that a regiment or two out of the brigade could get into. The point is that the overall effect of the terrain will make that point more difficult to attack, easier to defend.

Anyways, I'm going to have to try it out in some games to see how it works. I think the idea is pretty sound and can be added into most games of this sort without too much trouble. The reason for my interest here stems from my working with those 3mm figs and trying to get the battlefields to look exactly right, and my feeling that most wargames boards are not as complex as the actual battlefields themselves were. This is basically an attempt to fix that which also seems to add an interesting amount of the unknown into the games. I do think that the idea of scouting and general knowledge of the battlefield needs to be incorporated somehow. However, it was really not possible for a general to know everything about the lay of the land prior to a battle. And this was especially true in the later HnM period when armies became as large as they did and there were fewer and fewer staged battles. There's no way that an general in the Franco-Prussian war could know every detail of the terrain his troops were going to be fighting through. No one knew they were going to fight a gigantic battle at Gettysburg, and a lot of the key terrain features were realized on the fly, especially the first day, but even on the second. I mean, before the cornfield became the Cornfield it was just a cornfield.

There's one minor note about the Cornfield (in particular). The way corn was planted back then is totally different from how we plant corn now.

Back then, corn was planted in clumps every so far, not like today's nice even rows. A cornfield then was almost an impenetrable scrub-heap, as far as a formed unit was concerned.

Since you mention cornfields, I have to post a gratuitous link and photo of the game we ran at Cold Wars this year:

link