Are the BG Games too Bloody?

[Capt Cliff]

I've played the Borodino game a number of times and holy cow by 9:00 am or 10:00 am I am out of troops (Basically the same causualites as the all day battle historically), that's with either side! It kills in increments of 25 men! Why 25? Why not 5? While they got the hood up on these puppies how about fixing the combat system! This applies to the Civil War games too, same combat engine. Please don't just do a re-release!

[pyguinard]

My opinion on the matter is that it is too easy for the attacker to push the ennemy backward on melées. In NiR, you could assault and gain control of the Flèches (as an example) in the first two turns so it was worth committing many soldiers to gain such strategic locations.

Back in those years, commanders were much more hesitant to risk those high casualty levels because of this and also because the war was not over at the end of a specific battle (read scenario)

[HMSWarspite]

Are you playing with stock OB? Because IIRC the Russians have a +5 morale bonus, which puts the casualties up on both sides. There is a body of opinion that says lose this, and play with most of the morale bonuses off (rout limiting, flank morale benefitr etc). This will cause units to be much for fragile, and wont stick around with high losses.

[1NWCG]

It normally is a bloody affair yes, and is very costly, but some fixes are in order and the kills at 25 is how it was designed. It takes a while to build a whole new engine if that is Matrix's intent.

Nice to see you Pierre-Yves, I hope you are doing well!!

[rhondabrwn]

ORIGINAL: 1NWCG

It normally is a bloody affair yes, and is very costly, but some fixes are in order and the kills at 25 is how it was designed. It takes a while to build a whole new engine if that is Matrix's intent.

Nice to see you Pierre-Yves, I hope you are doing well!!

The HPS redesigns (Campaign Gettysburg, Shiloh, Penninsula etc)allow variable casualties from 1 to ???? (not sure if there is an upper limit - I've seen 34 men killed in one action and as few as 1).

It would seem to be a reasonably easy fix to make and I concur that BG casualties are way too high as it stands now. Of course, the HPS campaign games also tend to limit losses because casualties are carried over to the next battle in the campaign and the commander who wastes troops in the initial rounds will be hurting later.

Perhaps a rout threshold could be added beyond which recovery is impossible once unit casualties reach a certain level.

[1NWCG]

Yup HPS accounts for some of those issues. [:D]

[Caranorn]

Just checking up on this part of the forum.

I've been doing some research for a civil war tactical game, from that I draw the conclusion that BG indeed has much too high casualty rates (bother fire and melee tables). On the other hand that is true for the GBoACW board games (all 4 editions) on which the BG system seems to be based.

[julia1003]

I think that the numbers are not all KIA, just numbers no longer there to fight, a portion of them is WIA or just ran away

[Caranorn]

Yes agreed, those casualties must represent killed, wounded, captured and stragglers. But that's less then ideal as stragglers could (and regularly did) return to their units during a battle. So I'd prefer either a system treating stragglers separatelly, or ignore them entirely (as fatigue in a way already represents those). This is one improvement I think that could be made to BG.

On the other hand, casualties less then 25 would be hard (as 25 = 1 strength point (the first edition of Gettysburg even displayed unit strength in SP not men)), I expect the easiest way to do that would be to make every single man a SP (which is not realistic), then change the combat tables (raising casualties a lot) and orders of battle (and of course stacking and I expect many other areas of play). But I don't think doing this would be necessary or helpfull, for the physical casualties (dead/wounded/captured) slightly tweaking the tables would be all that's necessary (which can be done by any player already, though an official modification would be much better).

[rhondabrwn]

ORIGINAL: julia1003

I think that the numbers are not all KIA, just numbers no longer there to fight, a portion of them is WIA or just ran away

True, but losing casualties 25 men at a time really does produce completely unrealistic results. I greatly prefer the HPS Civil War Campaign series with their variable individual losses. I'm completely hooked on Campaign Gettysburg at the moment though so I'm somewhat beyond objective thought.

Oh... and welcome to the forum Julia, it's a pleasure to find other female gamers around here (we're a rare bird, indeed!).