American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

I don't think it's that easy to mount a 1000 men melee not to speak of achieving this always, depending on his regiments size the attacker could or could not be able to add units left and right of his center attack unit to do that, he can very well end up with units too large to do that and as the flank units have to take more fire they might not be available at all.

The defender might not be able to answer this in melee but again he has the chance to answer this in fire combat, lets say I do a brigade attack 3 hexes wide then the defender will be able to fire with more than just 3 units at it, at least 5 or more depending on the range of the defender weapons and his position.
Again the key is not to let the attacker get in contact with your line but even if he achieves that he should already lost some feathers.
Also the melee calculation is in favor of the defender, to achieve 1:1 odds you have to assault 100 defenders with 166 attackers, so even when pilling up a melee with 1000, the defender could achieve even odds with about 602 men, and that ignore any terrain or hexside benefits the defender might have.

The defender has the flexibility to put weak units in advantageous hexes and strong units in disadvantageous hexes, there is not need to constantly pile up 1000 men per hex not even 600 men per hex.
But yes the attacker has some degree of flexibility, maybe some form of C&C rules should keep the attacker from altering an order assault but just pull it off or fall back.

Thanks for pointing out that a hex can only be meleed once.

From the rules:
"Density Fire Modifier to have fire against a target hex with more than
2/3 of the maximum stacking increased. This increase is proportional to the
stacking value up to a maximum of 150% at maximum stacking. "
So any attack close to 1000 men takes almost 50% more fire casualties, assuming the defender mounts about 500 men per hex and uses muskets the casualties should be so high that 2 out of 3 times it should be enough to trigger a moral check.


I think I have not enough experience to judge that but I doubt looking at the numbers that an attacker has it generally easy to get into a melee and succeed with it.
With a good field of fire the attacker should have trouble getting in contact with his attack force because of the defenders fire, those units that reach the line might be further decimated & turned back by the defenders fire, those that are left will likely have to melee a defender in an advantageous position, but even if they would successful melee the defender and push him back there could/should be some kind of reserve to plug that hole.
And if the terrain gives no free field of fire the attacker is likely not able to spot a weakness in the defensive line and might simply make contact in an disadvantageous area, he might take less fire and be more capable of conducting a melee but if the terrain has its obstacles like hexsides or higher elevations he will again likely be in an disadvantageous area.

I think what also adds to the melee "problem" is the overall attitude, not only in the CW series but all HPS/JTS games, that players are more likely to throw there forces away like there is no tomorrow, if we could add a factor that compares the result of the battle in detail(that could start by distinguishing between VPs for hexes and VPs for casualties) to the overall strategic situation it could make players less likely to act this way as the final result could be a victorious battle but a lost campaign what is is Pyrrhic victory what should be counted as major defeat.

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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."

A lot of good information in this thread.

A couple of other points.

In turn play, which I almost never use, you have the option of full defensive fire against a melee. Also, if you attack from more than one hex, you risk full defensive fire more than once. So if a unit in your attacking stack gets disrupted, adding a unit from another stack could draw
more fire.

Another new feature in Overland is the -1 morale penalty for mixing units from different brigades. Hopefully this option will become available in the other games. I'm assuming that could affect melee bonuses and penalties.

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MG Mike Mihalik
Forrest's Cavalry Corps
AoWest/CSA

I checked my changes.txt file for one of the HPS version 2.0 updates (Campaign Atlanta to be precise), and it has the above option. From what I was told, the plan was to get the Napoleonics' series updates out of the way before addressing the CWB series. I don't know this for a fact, but I also imagine that the titles that were updated last year (Campaign Atlanta being one of those), might be in line for this round as well, since they never received the updated graphics like the recent Campaign Antietam one did -the one with the elevation hexsides etc.

Anyway I don't know the schedule with any of these just that the BPW update candidate was put out awhile ago and I don't think ever actually got finalised and added to the JTS site. (The only reason it is relevant is as a progress measurement.).

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~Retired~