Blake wrote:
Column Melee House Rules
If I had to guess, and this might be confirmed by some old timers like Ned Simms, DW Mallory, or Mark Nelms, but I bet that when the HPS version of the games was released that many people played the game in Turns. This is poorly named, I know! But in "Turns" each player moves, fires, and melees all in the same turn. You can move, melee, fire, move, melee, fire, fire, melee, move, fire... and so on as long as you have Movement Points and units available. This allowed people the opportunity to utilize blitz tactics. They could then melee back a few units and punch a hole in the enemy line. Then, in the same turn, move more units into the breech and melee some more to widen the hole. Then, if they were really good, they would send cavalry riding through the hole to capture generals, wagons, and artillery in the rear. A single turn might spell total disaster for a player!
To prevent this, my guess, is that people instituted the "no melee in column" rule to prevent people from marching along roads to really exploit a gap made during the turn. You might set up column infantry units 8 hexes away from the enemy behind a hill along a road, then march down the road and melee mercilessly in column. You'd probably never see it coming.
......
Does melee in column really help someone all that much in phased play vs. turn play? Depends who you ask. 
No melee in column actually goes back to the Battleground days.
I had been a club member for about a year although I had been playing the BG ACW games hot seat with a local gamer for about 5 years and was pretty good at the yanks.
I had never lost a game of the full battle of Shiloh while Gen. Jim Thomas had won several as a reb.
He challenged anyone to beat him and I took him up on it, the only game of the full battle I have ever lost at BG Shiloh.
He moved his rebs in column around the fixed yank units having memorized their positions, surrounded, isolated, meleed in column and eliminated them.
Lost nearly all of the fixed units and refused to play a game without the no melee in column house rule after that.
Originally most players allowed Column Melee in Towns in BG but when the HPS system came out that stopped because of the poor defensive fire, no automatic Morale checks and using road movement.
In BG playing in phases with full defensive fire and automatic Morale Check if hit often results in phasing player's units getting D'd.
This prevented them from being able to melee and provided the historical advantage to the defense.
In the early HPS Turn Mode the poor chance of Opportunity Fire and the 50% effect along with the poor chance of a Morale Check being made produced a Blitzkrieg situation.
It gave the advantage to the attacker, especially when combined with the higher Morale Rating given the rebs to make up for the lack of a good command control system.
The current WDS Turn Mode works ok for me with the Limited Column Melee House rule I use.
The use of the separate Melee Phase and Full Melee Defensive Fire along with improvements to the code have reduced the advantage for the attacker.
The one thing lacking IMHO is a good Command Control system where how far units can move is dependent upon the ability of the officers.
A system like this was used in the old SSI ACW games, the rebels often moved full Movement Allowance while the Yank often got 3/4 or 1/2 movement.
I found it worked so well I mentioned it to my miniature group and we adopted a similar system for our miniature games.
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