Mark J Wilson – Interesting. My 1930's house was one of a number built between the wars. They had a "Coal House" i.e a small (circa 4ft by 6ft) building on the side of the house I.e one wall was the house wall. It held the coal and was accessed from outside. As a school kid most folk had coal fires and we had "Pea Soupers" extremely dense fogs caused by particulates in the atmosphere from coal fires causing excessive precipitation of water droplets. Getting off topic here.
And yes in places cellars were not practical. Even my friends coal cellar was prone to flooding but as originally it only stored coal, small amounts of water were not seen as disastrous.
So the idea of marking individual houses depending on configuration is a good one for which we have a solution.
But as has been noted some thought should be had as to plausible places to locate the cellars on the village base.
So the issues raised by our game needed more thought and so I have now done some.
The base rules note that in buildings the vertical height moved must be accounted for, this though out of scale helps to slow movement to some extent with out resorting to more rules which I am never in favor of unless absolutely vital.
Our Trench ADDENDA has not been published (yet) but states for trenches.
"In the event a Fighting position is hit by effective amounts of artillery, any element may attempt to Evade into a Personal bunker in either, Skirmish or Fast Mode. To be successful the element must have sufficient move in the single phase for the nearest base edge of the element evading to the intended Personnel bunker can reach the most distant section of the Personnel bunker in the single phase allowed. Otherwise the evade is unsuccessful and the element remains in the position it achieved in the evade but takes the artillery fire effect. If not into a Personnel Bunker the rear of the element must be outside the Artillery impact area for the Evade to be effective.
So some thought for cellars. Taking an approximation cellars would be about 18/20mm, standardise for simplicity 20mm deep at 1/144. Now while we could take the element length into account in a small building and spread across more than one floor for a section: easier is to define the base as 10mm long" It could be longer or shorter but its a plausible value. This give us a minimum evade of 30mm. As an evade move is 1/2 D20 X10m we get a chance at minimum of 5 on a D20 to evade successfully.
So to evade into a cellar even for a small building (our smallest is 60mm long) and the cellar is immediately accessible we get a min score of 5 so 75% chance of an evade working. High but worth the uncertainty. Hence basic rules can apply using a standardised minimum if required.
What do we do about remote cellars, or even Ice houses of mansions? Actually now no problem as the basic guidelines have now been established.
Designing rules and getting them to work in new circumstances is fun!
You could reasonably ask why such things were not addressed 16 years ago on issue 1. We, even at Issue one we realised how awfully over simplified and in many cases Just wrong rules were back then (some still are). Its taken a long time to shake off firm but wrong assumption's made in many rules. Plus our ability to co-ordinate assaults has got better, we are better tacticians so can anticipate and plan far better than 16 years ago. Plus simply moving to the originally none existent 1/144 scale has provided a more optimum scale to portray more interesting operation's at company battlegroup level.