Scourge of War Boards

You are certainly correct that the Gettysburg average of 125 yards did not mean a "real world" maximum of 125. In the OR data that went into my compilation of opening firefight engagement ranges, the max recorded was "300 to 500 yards" with a number of others being recorded at 200 yards or greater (the closest was 19 yards in a night ambush). My firm impression is that terrain, smoke, ground cover, weapons type, etc., were generally the factors that determined at what range fire was opened, although sometimes tactical considerations (holding fire until able to maximize the shock of the first impact) also played a role at times.

My Gettysburg data yielded a somewhat lower average than 1863 as a whole, as Larry noted, but I am not inclined to attribute this to anything special about the Gettysburg battle in itself, beyond the nature of the terrain and plain data randomness.

In actual game play, I would say the average is around 100 yards. Of course this isn't documented. Just from my playing the game there is some engaging at 160 yds, but most fights are closer.



Harmon

I played the game tonight, Div. vs. Div., and moved around and monitored opening engagement ranges. They were, in yards: 99, 139, 156, 139, 119, 68, 110, and 135. The average is 121 yards.
The average is pretty close to perfect, historically. And the distribution is pretty nice, too. Excellent showing by the game.
Playing as the corps commander, I gave my division commander "All Out Attack" stance. That may have influenced the engagement ranges. I'll have to try the scenario with other Stance orders, and see if the engagement ranges differ from these.

My last post got deleted. It ran something like this:

I played more games closely monitoring the opening engagement ranges of the infantry regiments, with different Stances--on "None," and "Hold to the Last," for example--and the engagement ranges looked pretty much like the ones described in my last post: from 68 to 159 yards, averaging right on the historical opening engagement ranges at Gettysburg at about 120-125 yards.
I'm reinforced in my thinking that the engagement ranges for the game are good, but could perhaps use some shorter engagement ranges and some longer engagement ranges.

Hi all,

A bit off the side of topic, but I was wondering if anyone could help me with a design issue of my own.

Apart from playing SOW, I'm also a miniature wargamer. I have a collection of Baccus's 6mm ACW, based in 6cmx3cm elements of 28 figures each. The problem is that I haven't found a rules system which would both cater to my basing convention (the "regiment" isn't divided into smaller elemets and the formation cannot be changed to line with single regiments) and be entertaining. I've tried the Polemos ruleset available from Baccus but I'm not entirely happy with it. So I decided to take some elements from that ruleset and design my own homebrew system.

The scale I was thinking was that since I have all these 6cm x 3cm blocks, a brigade would consist of two elements. This would allow me to represent a brigade in line by two bases side-by-side, a 12cm x 3 cm block, or by one after another, signifying a column formation.

Now the question I have is that what would the ground scale be should the brigade frontage be 12 centimeters? How long would the frontage of an average acw brigade-in-line be?

Of course, I know the brigade sizes varied greatly, but I'm looking for a suitably abstract size that'll give me an entertaining yet plausible gaming experience.

for the figures we're looking at, go here: http://www.baccus6mm.com/includes/polem ... w_text.php

EDIT: To clarify a bit, I intended that each brigade, apart from the two elements, would have a record of a combat value, morale level and weapon type. The combat value would be dependent on the amount and grade of men, say for example, a point per 100 men plus some modifier for grade or superior weaponry. The weapon type would dictate range in a simple smoothbore/rifle categorization and the morale level would indicate the leadership, experience, determination and elan the brigade has.
This being the case, would it be unrealistic to assume that brigades with lots of men and as such, high combat rating, could be assumed to be in a double line formation and as such having a frontage roughly equal to a smaller brigade in a single line? It's because I want the smoothbore range to be a bit more than a couple of centimeters as it would look silly

-Mikko A

Wow how awesome where do you get these units just curious?

My study was drawn directly from the battle reports in the ORs -- all units in all theaters of the war, for the entire war.