Our game continued the other day and we got some action on the map! The British army was pushing hard to engage some French troops that were trying to buy time to allow last minute entrenchments built on the heights of Carillon. The die rolls seemed to mostly go against the British and their casualties kept mounting.
Head-on attacks were conducted just to see how combat works 🙂 Morale loss due to casualties is not yet factored in, so the British & American troops just kept coming. Maybe not so ahistorical, after all…
While I am generally quite satisfied how the game plays overall, I will make small tweaks here and there to factor in for more historical feeling although some will undoubtedly argue just the opposite to be the case 🙂 I’ll try to limit the complexity and make the information easily available that is needed frequently, whether it is e.g. movement multipliers or combat modifiers. Another topic I am quite mindful of, is the clutter on the map – are there too many counters and if yes, what can I do to alleviate this?
The counters we use are actually rather old, I am still missing (test) art for some types completely and none of the ones we play with are in any way final. Nevertheless, I have been able to pick up many improvement ideas for clarity, whether being a bigger font size or some marker to separate combat values from leadership valuers. Truly golden feedfack so far!
It is quite tedious to create new counters manually, but looks like I have no choice as it will give us a much improved test environment when we can play using semi-realistic (final) counters. Final does not mean like the art is final but more like these are the elements I expect to see in the final product.
One of the mechanics that I am still trying to validate is the casualties. At the moment, I have made a compromise with the larger units by making a step loss in some cases to mean losing two strength points (SP), instead of just one. So, first of all, in most games a step loss flips the counter over to its weaker side and a second step loss eliminates it. Not so here. Each SP is about a hundred men and typically a hit in combat is one step loss equaling to the loss of one SP. To keep the number of counters a bit more manageable, I decided to have some of the step losses in large units as two SP. So instead of losing ~100 men, a large unit loses ~200 men. There are multiple counters for a given unit to represent this and their sizes go roughly like this: 9-7, 6-5, and 4-2 indicating there are three individual counters for the unit. The largest one is 9 (front) and 7 (back). If the unit suffers a single step loss being 9 SP strong, it will flip over to the backside with 7 SP and thus suffers a 2 SP loss.
Non-Indian infantry losses are marked on the “initial casualties track” by keeping track of the actual SP losses – 4 SP means 400 men. All of them are not permanent losses as some stragglers will return to the unit, or are mentally shaken or just lightly wounded. Once your losses reach 4 SP on the track for e.g. the regulars, the next day you can bring 1 SP back as reinforcements for that unit type. The remaining 3 SP will move to the “permanent casualties track” and will be included in the victory point calculations. However, each SP returning to combat is just a single SP and you’ll need two of those to flip that 7 SP counter back to the full 9 strength points.
Rangers, grenadiers or Highlanders cannot receive replacements. You need a computer to keep track of their casualties!
The current art is indeed a bit different from the above-seen test map. I definitely like it better as it has a more historical feel! Coloring is not final until it actually goes to print…
