Black Powder Salem Church

Started by Norm, 05 September 2019, 02:45:26 PM

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Dave Fielder

So I used the ORBAT and scenario and played out the game with another human! Quite weird in this environment. Anyway, it was a close run affair , the Rebels aggression saw the School House fall to Hoke by turn 3 and Eustis was hard pressed with most of his Brigade being pulled apart piecemeal, but Salem Church did hold to turn 7. Semmes and Kershaw took on the three Union brigades, on paper it looked uneven but the Union command kept failing meaning they dropped CR to 7 making any movement difficult. A hard fought firefight with a few moments of bayonets crossing saw the Unions becoming largely spent but at great cost to the Rebels. It was a well balanced scenario with a tactical Rebel victory but the Unions held onto the Church up to nightfall, probably making this a strategic victory because they held the central position with the roads still open. The game took about 2.5 hours to get to a conclusion and is a well recommended scenario. It can be bath-tubbed to fit for ANY ACW ruleset and all figure scales, although the table size might have to be adjusted to fit ground and figure scale.
Romeo and Juliet is a Verona Crisis

Norm

Dave, Thanks for running and recommending it. I find it interesting to see how scenarios that work can fall out of a situation created from within a boardgame setting, which creates a loose association with the historical encounter. I think the only thing that I wondered about this, was whether Salem Church was too strong under the Black Powder rules.

Steve J

Great to see you have been able to get some FtF gaming in Dave :).

As for the church Norm, you could give it only a marginal save against musket/rifle fire, but not against artillery. I remember a 'photo on a fellow Bloggers site, with an ACW wooden building absolutely riddled with bullet holes, so not as much protection as one might think.

Norm

Steve, that would probably be the best way to go.

steve_holmes_11

Quote from: Steve J on 06 August 2020, 06:40:52 AM
Great to see you have been able to get some FtF gaming in Dave :).

As for the church Norm, you could give it only a marginal save against musket/rifle fire, but not against artillery. I remember a 'photo on a fellow Bloggers site, with an ACW wooden building absolutely riddled with bullet holes, so not as much protection as one might think.

One of my gripes against Black Powder fundamentalists+ are the buildings rules.
As written a +2 save against musketry (and I think +1 against artillery).
This is the sort of protection you might expect fomr a brick and rammed earth fort.

I play Napoleonics where the artillery were well equipped to set buildings ablaze, and in Eastern and Central Europe most rural buildings were wood construction.
A town might feature a solid church and some stone buildings at its centre, but again tended to be a firetrap around its edges (Smolensk, Moscow)..
With the exception of a few very solid buildings (Waterloo), or big cities (Dresden, Leipzeig), troops tended to not garrison chains of BUA, but deployed in a linear manner.
The greatest protection offered by a village was security for shaky troops against cavalry.

The rules are, of course, a toolkit, adapt as you wish.
I recommend seriously nerfing the defensive power of buildings, especially wooden ones.


+ Fundamentalists, those who insist it must be played as written.

Dave Fielder

BP is a toolset, which is its advantage - my opponent was a 40K devotee who had never played a Horse and Musket game but the mechanisms were familiar enough for him to understand the rules quickly, the QRS was more than enough. Fundamentalists will implode with a such a ruleset, it's too vanilla and needs tweaking with scenarios and specific periods, but frankly who doesn't do that with every set of rules. In the scenario we didn't play the 7th turn so the assault on Salem Church never actually occurred, but we assumed it would have taken at least two turns, 1st turn to weaken the troops with firepower (muskets) and 2nd turn an assault by the whole of Hoke's Brigade - which might not have broken in. The concept of ACW troops being 'Whipped' (i.e Broken but still on the table) and hence cluttering the battlefield with their broken presence played out nicely ... the battlefield remained busy with flotsam and jetsam, with good ordered troops trying to get around them.
Romeo and Juliet is a Verona Crisis