[Consim-l] Stonewall at Cedar Mountain (was: At all Hazards)

[Markus Stumptner]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Mike NotSpecified wrote:
> "the division
> commander must move all his infantry brigades at least 1 hex
> towards the enemy Leader or the enemy's side of the map,"
>
> Sounds like a granularity problem.  Pity the poor division commander who can 
> only issue "one size fits all" orders

Well, note that it's not the division commander who's giving that order. 
Rather, it's the division commander being told where to go, and having to 
comply.  It is an acceptable abstraction that the corps commander would 
send the division off as a whole, and the division commander then has to 
work out what to do with his units to make it fit.

So, I might quibble with order definition, but that the order applies to 
the whole division is IMO ok. I think what is the issue here is that the 
set of order types is very limited, and tying the movement direction to 
enemy units may occasionally become a problem.

> On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 13:45:35 -0500
> bieksza at erols.com wrote:
>> On 14 Feb 2007 at 14:50, Markus Stumptner wrote:
>> 
>>> Very interesting (no, really :-).  Can you explain the problems in more 
>>> detail?
>> 
>> For example, an order to Advance requires that "the division commander must 
>> move all his infantry brigades at least 1 hex towards the enemy Leader or 
>> the enemy's side of the map," and similarly an order to Retreat requires 
>> that "the division commander must move all his infantry brigades at least 1 
>> hex towards the friendly edge of the map."  Here's some situations that 
>> struck me as odd, copied from my solitaire notebooks:
>> 
>> 1) "Eventually Williams took position on the division's right and Augur on 
>> the left.  Against such a defense the South decided to wait for Hill.  A 
>> 'hold' order went to Winder to establish a position around objective B and 
>> a 'retreat' order to Ewell in order to move to Cedar Mountain and capture 
>> objective D."

Yes, I admit that retreating to capture an objective is strange. :-)

>> 2) "Two optional rules were in effect for this game, a bonus for artillery 
>> fire into the target's flank (which never occurred) and the requirement for 
>> a routed unit which failed to rally to retreat. . . . The other side of the 
>> coin was that repeated failures would sent the unit out of command control 
>> range.  This also put Williams' Division in a dilemma:  one brigade 
>> occupied a key position in the front lines and the other rallied well to 
>> the rear.  An 'advance' order for the benefit of the latter would have 
>> required the former to stick its neck out!"

Though if it had been rallying well to the rear, at least it would stick 
its neck out well to the rear of the other unit, right?  It's not that it 
would be forced to overtake the other unit.

>> 3) "Once Ewell had seized objective C it let Hill's Division continue the 
>> pressure on the Bluecoats, aiming instead for objective D.  That was a 
>> tricky maneuver.  First Ewell had to use a 'retreat' order to reach the 
>> South Fork.  Then, because Bayard's cavalry occupied the objective, it had 
>> to switch to an 'attack' order.  But the Bayard chit was pulled first, and 
>> the horsemen retired to the other side of the mountain.  That meant the 
>> 'attack' order would have to be treated as an 'advance' order and the 
>> division would have to head northwards!  However, Gen. Ewell was able to 
>> roll his initiative and the objective was captured after all."

I assume the 'northwards' was necessary because the closest enemy unit was 
now in a different direction?  Yes, that's also strange. Generally I think 
that geographical objectives work better than enemy units as targets. (The 
Gamers/MMP CWB prohibits using units as targets and requires to put 
descriptions in terms of geography.)

However, the rolling the initiative bit is ok. Essentially it means that 
good subordinates will be better able to deal with conflicting 
requirements or obsolete orders.  And if they're not able to, they'll 
occasionally be forced to do something stupid. That's arguably not an 
anomaly, but the point of an order system - that your command control may 
lag behind what's happening on the field.

When I started playing the second At all Hazards scenario I had a similar 
experience to the above. My copy came with a draft order system similar to 
the one in the brigade games.  The orders were Attack, Advance (as above), 
Hold, and Retreat.  The problem that I experienced was when I wanted to 
reinforce a flank attack.  Like Ewell in your case 3) above, I had to 
finagle an Advance into something that went justifiably sideways.  I've 
since heard that the next game (which didn't get published anymore) made 
exactly that change.

My experience is that if you have a somewhat larger vocabulary of order 
types, then you can actually make the individual orders more restrictive 
("you have to move one hex closer to the enemy" is not really a strong 
attack order). But either way, working out ahead of time how to make your 
subordinates do your will works generally to the benefit of the game's 
feel, even with the rather simpler orders here.

Reminds me of GDW's Command Decision WW2 miniatures rules.  They had an 
order chit system that became Frank Chadwick's favourite replacement for 
the rather intricate command point system of Assault and the simpler one 
in Sands of War.   There were one or two orders more but not that many; 
Chadwick was apparently very happy with how it worked.

Thanks for digging these passages out. Very interesting.

Markus

Last 3 games played: Gunslinger, ASLSK, At all Hazards
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