American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

If JTS were to install a change to their Civil War Campaign series involving the ability to break cavalry regiments into smaller battalions or squadrons, what would you consider to be the smallest size acceptable and why? Or, if you feel the present system needs no change, why not?

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General Jos. C. Meyer, ACWGC
Union Army Chief of Staff
Commander, Army of the Shenandoah
Commander, Army of the Tennessee
(2011-2014 UA CoA/GinC)

All that would be required for that to happen would be the insertion of a couple of command levels into OOBs. Currently, they are A C D B. Modern warfare games have several more. I have requested such a change. If you mean the ability to split up a regiment during play, which is also a feature of Modern games, that probably would be a harder nut to crack.
To answer your question, ten companies could split into as many as five squadrons.
I would discourage the measure, as it just affords players the ability to spread out forces even more, which had practical limits in real life that we can't simulate, unless unrealistically or by mutual agreement between players.
In Overland, the monster scenarios do not have squadrons because depleted regiments get a replacement up from the repple depple, effectively making a 2-squadron regiment. Many of the smaller and medium scenarios have two squadrons in a cavalry regiment, but without the additional command level four regiments end up being eight squadrons lumped in a brigade.
John Ferry
Overland co-designer

In general I seems nice to be able to split large cavalry into smaller units to be able to do recon.
But the correct size is likely what works within a scenario, in late war scenario with Confederate cavalry regiments so much depleted that they are just companies it don't seem to make sense to be able to split them as you would end up with ridiculous small units.

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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."

One has to be very careful about adding small cavalry units to a scenario. You can always do it through the OOB and really don't need to add command levels.

But the gotcha is that HPS/JT games don't have a specialized unit category for squad/company size cavalry. It can still act just like 400 man units to help surround and isolate enemy units, block roads, overrun supply wagons, etc.

While I would like to see scenarios designed with "recon" size cavalry units combined with LOS dropped from its current 70 hex to something more appropriate like 15-20 hex, I also see the serious miss use of those small cavalry units.

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

But the rules (the code) can be changed!

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Civil War Battles Lead Programmer, https://wargameds.com
Panzer Battles & Panzer Campaigns Lead Programmer, https://wargameds.com
Campaign Series Lead Programmer, https://cslegion.com

Unless a new company takes up this series, like Wargame Design Studio did for Panzer Battles and Panzer Campaign, I doubt that we'll see changes.

I would rather try to work with house rules so that these small units are not used in a gamey way.

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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."

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Civil War Battles Lead Programmer, https://wargameds.com
Panzer Battles & Panzer Campaigns Lead Programmer, https://wargameds.com
Campaign Series Lead Programmer, https://cslegion.com

The code base for HPS/JT games certainly needs an update. A lot has changed both in the capacity of the home computers to run these games and the design of CW games especially in the board game side of the simulations. The series needs more than an update. It needs a major upgrade to the game engine to make it a viable platform for the next decade.

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