Jeff: I am also not a neutral here so I won't comment and hope others will. But also ask on the yahoo group if you want a (totally biased) answer on this.
Lord Hollier:
a: I am not sure what you are after here on the play sequence? The sequence is fairly conventional for the most part. You declare charges, fire, move, melee, morale. There is no card activation or similar. Everyone who can fire and has a target fires in the same phase & doesn't need activation.
At the start of the turn the commanders generate 'command points' which they use to perform various actions. This includes issuing orders to units/brigades, which is a kind of activation. But in theory once a unit has some orders it could continue with this for the rest of the game without further orders. Better commanders get more command points but also some commanders are good at doing certain things – so if a commander is aggressive he can issue charge orders cheaply.
Has this answered you?
b: You get disorder (varying numbers of 'disorder points') from terrain/movement, friends running/retreating nearby and combat.
You can get rid of the disorder by having commanders spend command points but there are never enough of these to go round. So a key advantage of high quality units is that they can get rid of these themselves and/or get rid of more of them – obviously under certain circumstances. Higher quality units also have higher saving rolls from getting some sources of disorder and other benefits. For example units get less disorder from a friendly unit running near them if they are higher quality. So generally the higher quality units also get less disorder.
Unit quality is very important because of the above.
Having disorder points reduces you fighting ability in many ways. Shooting is done by one dice per base with the score you need to hit varying depending on the musket/pike ratio. Units vary considerably in size but 5 or 6 bases is perhaps typical. So a 6 base unit would roll 6 dice to hit normally but it loses 1 dice for each disorder. So if it has 4 disorder it will roll just 2 dice for firing. Disorder similarly gives a negative minus in charges (they are treated as a kind of combat), meleeing, etc.
So the disorder has a big impact on any kind of fighting but even worse if you have 5 any more you get mean you lose bases. This is the way you get losses – so if the unit above with 4 disorder gets 2 more then it goes to 5 disorder and loses 1 base.
Disorder is a key concept and comes from a set of rules for the AWI. These are online on the clubs website here – link The details in these rules are different in WWAE but the general idea is the same.
c and d: Yes of course but remember that these rules are very much for smaller actions. So your 'army' might actually be just a brigade.
I hope this helps.
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