I happen to like a fast-play American Civil War ruleset published by Little Wars TV. It does not have a lot of detail, being an army-level game with brigades as elements of combat and manuever, but this lack of minutae does allow for some fast action on the tabletop.

Of course, like many, if not most gamers, I enjoy tinkering with rules a bit, to see what else can be made of them.

Which brings me to the content of this post.

I have been working on several variations of my own home-brew rules for my imagi-nations campaign. While I may share these in the future, I want to create a system that I can go into the detail I want, but also go large, meaning that I would be able to take a single system from skirmish to army-level games, from ancients to far-future.

The ratings for brigades in Altar of Freedom, along with their grouping into Divisions inspired me. I want to be able to track individual battalions, but how would one do that using a system that abstracts everything below brigade, but even then there’s some abstraction in the actual rating sytem.

What I have come up with, which remains a work-in-progress, is that I will record the component battalions of my brigades as a roster, which will fit on a 3×5 card, but realistically can be printed in 9pt font and will take up a space smaller than a mini-card, which are 56x87mm (although a 1.75″x2.25″ card) would work.

The battalions would be listed, from top to bottom, in an “order of march,” indicating the order in which battalions would be lost, as the brigade loses strength points (SP) as a result of combat. This order would also show the brigade whose combat value would be used to determine a die roll modifier for combat. So, if a high value battalion was leading the order of march, it would be the first battalion eliminated in combat, but its bonus would affect that combat as well. This would allow myself, but also other potential players, to choose whether to risk a good battalion in return for better combat results probabilities.

I am looking at individual battalions having a rating from -2 to +2, depending upon their quality, with all of the component battalions’ ratings summed, then further adjusted by a brigadier quality die roll.

For example,

• Elite Battalion +2
• Veteran Battalion +1
• Veteran Battalion +1
• Trained Battalion -1
• Raw Battalion -2

The sum of 2+1+1-1-2 = +1 and then the quality of the brigadier is determined, which can be -1, 0-, or +1. In this instance, let’s say the roll went well, resulting in a +1 value.

The total Brigade Combat Rating would then be +2.

Each battalion would be made up of strength points, with hits from combat being applied to the battalions per the order of march. Now, this is not strictly accurate as all battalions, to an extent, would take casualties of some kind, but this would provide a foundation for further adjustment and modification. I could handle fire combat results differently from close combat results, meaning that close combat would effect the lead battalion, but fire combat could be distributed randomly across all battalions in the brigade.

Further, this would encourage a nation to not send raw troops into battle, but rather give them a season training and non-combat experience. Were this to happen, the above brigade’s values would change as per below.

• Elite Battalion +2
• Veteran Battalion +1
• Veteran Battalion +1
• Experienced Battalion +0
• Trained Battalion -1

Now, the BCR would be +4, with that same brigadier.

The increase in troop quality could also be handled via this system, using a d6 roll, modified by the Brigadier Rating.

All battalions, except for mercenaries, are recruited at Raw. After one campaign season of uninterrupted training, they are Trained.

To improve from Trained to Experienced, the battalion must take the field and either fight, and survive, a battle, or serve as a garrison, or just constantly me marching across the campaign map. At the end of that campaign season, the owning player rolls a d6 and on a 4+ the battalion improves to experienced; the die roll is modified by the Brigadier Rating of the parent brigade.

This may encourage training brigades led by quality Brigadiers.

To become an even better fighting battalion, the die roll for a Experienced Battalion to become Veteran would need to be a 5+, and then for Veteran to Elite would be a 6+.

This system allows for characteristics for leaders, providing maybe an aggressive or hesitant trait, or an expert trait that would provide an additional +1 to the Brigadier Rating, and so on and so forth.

More on army construction, combat, and morale later.