First of all, a big shoutout to @brennon for the MERCS reference, Err on the side of carnage! Good times.

In general, I don’t like rank and flank games. That being said, Runewars with its hidden orders and X-Wing style movement and order of activations really intrigued me and it remains a favorite game. Too bad it’s virtually disappeared.

I’ve got virtually no interest in mass battle games simply because of time. I hate it when people want to inflate a game and put even more stuff on the table. I want to play the same game multiple times so I can try alternative forces, try different scenarios or strategies and in general, just get more games in. Mass battles just means boring, long slogs with no resolution and immense amounts of just waiting around. It’s just not for me.

Ok, now on to something @avernos mentioned regarding the American Cuvil War. The Union army had two types of units. The regular army and the state volunteers. The state forces were raised by the governors of the various states and the governors appointed the officers of the respective regiments. This allowed them to spread out the political patronage so raising more regiments or fulfilling the higher quotas that were levied on the states became increasingly more important because the governors could spread that patronage around even more. The practical effect was that as the war ran on and units took casualties, the regiments didn’t get replacements. So a Union regiment might start out with around 1000 soldiers but by the end of the war might be down to around 200. So taking the Iron Brigade as an example, it had three regiments when initially formed but by the end of the the Gettysburg campaign was down to around 700 men in the whole brigade. After Gettysburg two new regiments got added so it at least had some soldiers in it but it was still under strength. One state, and I don’t remember which one, possibly Indiana?, did have a policy of sending new troops to old regiments to bring them back up to strength. Most Union generals preferred to have these regiments as part of their formations as it effectively gave them more troops.

@warzan there was a turn based computer game covering the American Civil War In the late 90s? that had an interesting pre-battle feature where you could change the weapons of your units on a unit by unit basis, issue the units more food or pay them. You could potentially do all three but the effects of those decisions varied by the time frame and the army. Generally speaking if you were playing a Confederate army, paying your army didn’t help a lot because the Confederate money was essentially worthless. You also had more limitations on what weapons you could trade out. Feeding your army generally had a good effect on morale ( the game assumed they were still getting feed but your decision was to concentrate on providing above average food). If you played the Union army, your units had a bewildering variety of weapons, all of different calibers and capabilities. So trying to decide how much effort you should put into standardizing your units became a real challenge. I say all this to say, I didn’t have to worry about any of that during the game. That was all stuff I could do a few clicks of the mouse with before the scenario started and then the computer handled all that in the background.

This particular game had many multi day battles so fighting ended at night but you could rest units, move them around or have them entrench overnight, so you were in a real sense altering the conditions of battle. One really intriguing aspect of the game was that in addition to the scenario defined objectives and victory conditions, new ones were generated wherever the highest number of casualties occurred. So particularly bloody assaults or stubborn defenses took on a life of their own as those geographic features now started to be worth an ever increasing amount of victory points. Now, the only board game I know of that had a similar feature was Chitin 1.

Chitin 1 was an old Metagaming Concepts Microgame. It was a sci fi hex and counter game where two different hives of intelligent insects battled for resources, food being the predominant one. The board had specific areas where crops could be harvested you had to protect your workers from enemy fighters so they could harvest the food. What was interesting was as units died, both yours and the enemies, it increased the value of the harvest because the workers gathered up the corpses too, because it was all biomass. This game came out in the mid 70s so well before the Tyranids made an appearance.

And finally, Cerveza Cristal!