Neil Thomas ACW

 

 

 

I played a game last week using the ACW rules from the Neil Thomas Introduction to Wargaming book.  I have played a lot of his rules from the other books and really like them but I had never played a game using this book.

The rules are "odd", they are very loosely defined (even for Neil Thomas) and have some quirks that made the game feel rather flat.  You can rally back bases to units if they can't be fired upon.

In practise this means you knock a base off a unit, it fails a moral test and retires behind another unit and gets all its bases back.  It is more likely to retire if Militia and thus more likely to get out of the action and get some bases back (admittedly only on a 6).

It also uses saving throws and possibly we had too much cover in the game but it was really hard to kill a unit!

I have spent some time today rewriting the rules to not use saving throws or base rallying, added things like disorder, etc and added minus to hit factors for cover instead of saves.

The original RAW rules were two pages retyped, the new version is three and a half pages but a lot clearer - the QRS is one page.

I always try to play rules as written for an initial game but even part way into this game both my opponent and I felt they weren't working...

Hopefully we will try these out soon and see how they work.  I'm looking for a set of rules for fairly fast games that let me use all my collection.

I have considered Rank and File which a lot of people like or possibly Field of Battle 3.

I have also just bought the Carmage and Glory II computer moderated rules which I have been thinking about for solo games for a number of years.  Not had chance to look at them yet...