Incident at Square Crossroad

As the Dominion column moved down the road towards their objective, the silence was broken by the roar and pom-pom-pom of the Oerberg artillery. 

The armoured car halted and poured forth a hail of machine gun bullets in attempt to silence the enemy but their cavalry escort was cut to pieces with the dazed survivors forced to gallop to the rear to reform. Behind them, the infantry began to deploy at the double.

 

As the infantry advanced, they were met with a hail of rifle and artillery fire but the Dominion artillery was soon in action, silencing the Oerburg guns and driving the defenders back from the fence line at least.

The Orberg artillery withdrew their gun behind the crest and redeployed in time to open a murderous fire on the Dominion infantry advancing on the village. At the same time, the deadly accurate rifle fire from the rocky hills had Ross's Rifles pinned in the open. 

If the Dominion had had another battalion of infantry or a full regiment of cavalry, they might yet have cleared the way to the vital crossroad but as the sun dipped towards the horizon, it seem wiser to maintain their force in being and try again in the morning if indeed, the enemy did not slip away in the night.

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Notes

When reading about the sort of late 19thC, early 20thC engagements that interest me, especially when reading first hand accounts, it is hard not to notice that it was common for infantry under a heavy and accurate fire to go to ground and return fire. Periodically they might make short rushes towards the enemy if well led and of good morale, often to be pinned again but were sometimes able to work close enough to eventually close with cold steel. 

Ever since I started using the Square Brigadier for such engagements, I have usually included some sort of "pin" result, something often used in WWII games, but always the games ended up being long, indecisive, and all too often, as boring as lying on the Prairie or Veldt as bullets whizzed over your head. This became a real issue when I was preparing my centennial WWI game for Huzzah 2018. Eventually, I ended up giving up a "pin" result and resurrecting a "rally" action for units not closely engaged. This allowed players to try to remove a hit as their action instead of moving or shooting. It had the right result as far as stalling an advance but was heavily dice dependent and so wasn't as attractive or effective as it might have been. The same could be said for die modifiers for cover and for saving throws, sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't, all depending on the dice. Lawford & Young's Charge! used a simple 1/2 casualties in cover, a technique as old as Kriegspiel. However, they were dealing with big units and lots of hits and weren't afraid of a bit of mid-game arithmetic (A company of 13 infantry shooting at a close range enemy in cover roll 1 die plus 5/8ths of a 2nd die, divided by 1/2 for cover with fractions rounded off then carried over. )

For some decades now, I have tended to use die modifiers instead. These reduce the probability of any given die hitting but not the maximum number of possible hits. A few lucky rolls can easily convert cover to completely irrelevant, especially if rolling small numbers of dice. Recently (say 3-5 years), inspired by Battlecry, I have instead experimented with subtracting dice for things like cover and it seems to be working for Square Brigadier variants at least. This does not affect the odds of any one die scoring a hit but does reduce the possible maximum number of hits regardless of how lucky you are that day. 

When it comes to being pinned, I have decided to let the player decide. Once per turn he can cancel 1 hit by going to ground (being pinned), and this being unable to move or shoot next turn. Units with higher morale can risk taking the hits while rather shaky units will tend to stall easily. 

It seemed to work well in this game as in a few others recently played with a version of the Square Brigadier from a few years back. It lacks a lot of the hedging of bets that tend to creep into my rules when I get lax, but seems to give the best games. It does, however, mean that one must careful about having too many modifiers leading to no chance of any hit or even more deadly fire against targets without modifiers. Its a balancing act.

Since my recent reductions, I only have two remaining collections for the late 19th and early 20thC period (say 1870-1910) (ie the shiny 54mm toys and these 40's) so the tentative plan is to chuck all the other tentative SB variants and alternative rules, and just revert to this latest variant of The Square Brigadier (link) as my rules for this period, which is where these collections all started! I'll need to ensure that all the relevant troop types are covered but keeping in mind that the later period are balancing magazine rifles with drab uniforms to get a similar effect.  

That will of course mean playing more games to confirm the decision. Oh well...needs must!