American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

Well after some special games I have the feeling that a more detailed setting of the automated defensive fire is needed.
I'm talking about setting the ranges as hexes instead of Min/Max for Infantry and Min/Med/Max for artillery like it is now.
In 3 Lexington scenarios (from Campaign Ozark) I had to witness that despite Min settings for both branches, artillery fire happily away all ammunition and that not only for the besieged Union side but also for the Confederates that after running out of ammo started moving their artillery away from the scene, likely to make sure there is no chance of capture. Infantry did the same although both sides were in the last scenario better dug in so that this fire was especially for the Confederates simply a waste of ammo
Of course Lexington is a very special scenario but nonetheless there is a general problem with the armies when they are so close that the automated fire is always triggered but is ineffective, and that gets even worse when you have to watch your ammo what in most cases I assume will be the Confederate side.

So what does the community think about this?

I have a bit hope that such a change if it would make sense could really make it into the engine as we already have a system to set the range, all that has to be done is change it from the rough settings that seem to even have some randomness in it to hexes and here even a setting of zero would be good so fire could deliberately be held back to save ammunition.

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Lieutenant General Christian Hecht
Commander I Corps, Army of the Potomac

"Where to stop? I don't know. At Hell, I expect."

I fear there is little chance of major changes to the HPS game engine but one can hope. Maybe it is possible for them to add multiple hex range setting to both infantry and artillery defensive fire without any serious recoding of the game.

But you are correct, the game badly needs finer control over ammo expenditure. Medium for Artillery is really random defensive fire. I am not sure it takes range into the calculations as to whether it will fire other than maybe will always fire at minimum range. I haven't really tested this but my observation is that Medium setting just causes it to make some type of die roll check before firing at ranges up to maximum.

Infantry of course only has two settings which is pretty poor. The games really should not have ammo restrictions if the player isn't given any way to control the use of ammo except in offensive fire. Turn play is particularly a problem because of the halving of defensive fire. Most defensive fire at artillery ranges over three hexes and infantry ranges over two are a waste of ammo.

One alternative if they can't give us more control over defensive fire is to make all defensive fire not use ammo.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)

A not practical way to avoid waisting artillery ammo is to limber it.

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BG David Guégan
XIV Corps Commander

Brittany Volunteers,
Army of the Cumberland

Unfortunately, limbering the guns is the most effective way to manage artillery ammo use. For the Rebel player who usually has the ammo limitations it means limbering all of its short range guns which are pretty ineffective relative to the rifled guns so the guns with better range values are the only ones that can fire. The other tactic is to find positions that the terrain limits the guns fire range.

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General Kennon Whitehead
Chatham Grays
AoT II/1/3 (CSA)