All fair points, and your opinion is always worth listening to NYC..The battlefield is a dangerous place. Fighting at a distance is better than fighting at close quarters.
In the civil war it was very dangerous to charge a battery, but infantry men did it. Why would men charge a battery knowing the dangers? What is more amazing is that it happened a lot. Maybe the infantry man was tired of sitting under artillery fire and waiting. I have read that it was a hard thing to endure an artillery barrage. Maybe that is why it was better to charge the guns than just sit under its punishment.
If infantry cannot successfully attack a position with artillery because of fatigue then fatigue has gone too far the other way. I find it hard to attack positions especially with artillery with current stock fatigue. I will argue that GCM fatigue is more realistic and more playable.
I also will argue that this game is good at historically representing a civil war battle. The more that historical situations are followed the more playable the game will be. This is my own personal opinion.
I could be wrong. I would like to see fatigue and disorganization treated separate because they are. I see no need to manipulate fatigue in order to find a dis organizational element.
Again, it is my own opinion.
I'm sure you agree that in warfare there are never any absolutes.
Meless did take place and charges against batteries did take place. I didn't say they didn't, and the theme of this discussion is that they did, BUT THAT THEY WERE RARE. This is what we're talking about, that the instances of melees and the means by which peopl ein MP games can bring them about are too numerous and easy.
More fatigue is needed, stronger morale effects for tiredness and incoming fire and the threat of hand-to-hand contact, and more damage to unit cohesion for massing great clumps of regiments on top of each other and other fantasy stuff like that. Certain players refuse to not do this on the basis that the game lets them do it. I (and many others) have tried to get people to use their troops in a more historical manner by way of Gentlemens Agreements and House Rules (which work perfectly in other gaming groups I've played in over the years) but since you get ultra-competitive types in a game they won't stop, so the game has to be tweaked to encourage and reward historical play and punish fantasy play, with the result that, as you correctly said NYC, we get a game that is more historically accurate, not just in its game mechanisms but in how a player is rewarded for best playing it.
What I would still argue for is stronger morale effects on taking fire and a harsher morale check system when closing to melee. That and an auto-avoid instead of an auto-charge mechanism would fix pretty much all the ahistorical events.
