Friday, May 28, 2010

Unit Organisation Updated

Peter Barkworth pointed out to me in a very useful post on the OSW Yahoo Group  what might be a later set of unit organisations for the Grant ACW Rules.

I reproduce them here:

Infantry 3 officers and 24 men (just like his light infantry units in THE WARGAME)
Cavalry 3 officers and 12 men
Artillery batteries 2 guns (all smoothbores - I suspect he didn't bother with rifled pieces), 3 officers and 8 men.

From this one could easily guess that a gun crew was four gunners and an officer; a battery was two pieces with an additional officer as a command figure. One might also guess that with the greater officer establishments that Grant had started using his officers as morale factors or as morale markers.

On officers, I mentioned the role of the Major- and Brigadier-General figures that Grant would use to staff his Divisional organisation*.

According to a snippet on p23 of The War Game Companion, their falling in action would cause their Brigade or Division to stall for one move until the next in command could pick up the reins. The rule did not apply to troops in combat as Grant considered at that point the general became unable to influence the outcome.

I've since purchased Wargame Tactics on line and am waiting on its' delivery with some anticipation as it seems to hold a fair old bit of information.

* two Brigades each of two Regiments.

2 comments:

Archduke Piccolo said...

Very similar to mine. About the guns. Years ago I discovered that on the whole, the Union favoured 6-gun batteries, the Cofederates 4-gun batteries (there was some variation, but this seems to have been the standard).
So I decided to go for 2-gun units (9 figures) for the Confederates and 3-guns (13 figs) for the Union.

This led to certain problems with scaling. As I used a 1:25 figure:man scale, that gave a 4-gun battery 225 men (or thereabouts), a number more in keeping with 8 guns (and of the the Union batteries were correspondingly 'out of scale').

As I didn't like a different scale for artillery from the others, I decided that indeed 1 model gun represented 4; and that a battery represented two real ones. Having two such batteries representing an artillery battalion gave me appropriate sized battalions, at any rate!

Terry Wise got around this problem by having his Union guns on a bigger base with (I think) more crewmen. I rather like this solution, but I don't generally base my artillery! At that, for this solution I have too many guns and not enough figures...

There's always something, eh? They call it logistics...

samrrye said...

Keep in mind the propensity for rifled artillery to burrow into the ground and not kill anyone.