The Battle of Latoilette; Some afterthoughts - Like most

of battles we've fought over the past few years, Latoilette was a variation of the ever popular DBA, long a favorate of ancients gamers. The beauty of this system is it's speed of resolution. Movement is strait forward, combat is well defined, and it allows to aging wargamers the opportunity to resolve a rather large game (about 1700 figures total) in something just over four hours. That said, I like to think of this mechanism as a work in progress, and we most certainly have a little cleaning up yet to do. Cavalry vs artillery combats should be fairly strait forward following some determination as to whether the guns are able to fire round shot at a distance or cannister at close range (or possibly not fire at all!). The combat in the village actually went quite well. We opted to treat all combats as infantry in line with appropriate positives for assault and negatives for potential artillery targets. There may still be more for the light infantry to do in this situation, but if so, it will take more thought and practice.
At my request, we opted for a variation in command and control in this game also. Normally, we dice at the outset to determine who will go first, with the winner making the determination. After this is done, the moving side rolls a die for each brigade, with the number of pips indicating the number of active units for that turn. Ardoberg-Holstein held to this rule. St. Maurice, however, opted to roll one die for each command; left, center and right. This created a situation where, while as strong as A-H, St. Maurice was hampered with serious control problems which limited the effectiveness of any potential attack (for similar results see the 1870-71 war between France and Prussia). The right wing, for example, with seven units in it's command, was never able to activate all of it's units in a single move. Given the history and character of St. Maurice, I kind of liked it. Well, I really didn't like it, but it did seem to accurately portray my glittering, but inept, general staff.