Germantown - offside report

Low Roller aka Wargames Amateur has posted a report of the game over on his blog. The five base units and the same -2 for column gave me cause for concern.

 Looking at my original calculations for firing, etc. and how they related to outcomes I used 7 as the baseline target for 2d6 which gave a 58% chance of a hit, a -2 for column/half line unit should have 29% and a minus 2 on the dice gave 28% so quite close.

Over years of playing I had become concerned that the rules have really reflected a assault column in firing/combats but a march column for movement/flexibility and it still reflects Charlie Wissencrafts original ACW rules used at COW back in the 80s rather than general practice in the AWI, excluding the French who were experimenting with assault columns.  (Also ignoring the cases where a line has to split fire between two units)

The move to larger based units used by Steve gives an opportunity to address this somewhat. The 2d6 system works well for 4 base units with modifiers. Taking the base line of 58% with four base units the factors for 4/3/2/1 should be 58%/44%/29%/15%, now using -1 for each missing base gives 58%/42%/28%/17%, which is pretty close.

Changing over to 5 base units should give 58%/47%/35%/23%/12%, which is quite difficult to match on a 2d6 roll. It would mean moving to a 3d6 roll say targeting 10 gives a base hit of 63% (note it is higher than before) and the reduction for each base should be 63%/50%/38%/25%/13% and applying -1 per missing base gives 63%/50%/38%/26%/16% so quite a close fit.

Just working through this highlights how the balance of play can be affected by what seem small changes and could result in a change of mechanism. personally I would use 2d6 and -1 per missing base as the lower effectiveness should better reflect the less effective fighting formation being used in addition to the smaller number of muskets deployed