Artillery Batteries In My Rules System

 

Union battery section of two William Britain 54mm cannons: 3-inch ordnance rifles

Click Pictures to Enlarge

The William Britain company make a very nice set of moderately priced Deetail ACW artillery and crew sets. I have some of their 12-pound Napoleons and 3-inch ordnance rifles in my Union and Confederate artillery contingent. My arrangement is to have two gun models with four crew plus two helpers/gun in each battery. Batteries will have two guns of the same type, so I will not be mixing Napoleons and 3-inch rifles in the same battery. The Britains sets come with 4 crew, so I will paint two extra crewmen as "helpers" for each cannon. In my rules, we throw one D10 for each crew figure up to a maximum of four dice at long range and double dice (8) at short range. When a crewman is removed then one of the helpers can be added to the crew for the purpose of the number of D10s to be used.

Confederate battery of three 12-pound Napoleons plus limbers.
The two guns on the left are Britains and the one cannon on the right is
from the Americana range. The limbers are also from Americana.

Just for grins (and because I like the picture), here is a picture of the ACW game table and terrain. It is starting to fill up all of the space. I have 8 Union infantry regiments and 5 Confederate regiments. I will have a sixth Confederate regiment finished this weekend, giving me 6 Confederate regiments. I will keep painting Confederates until I have either 8 or 9 regiments, and then I will go back to painting Union blue figures. My infantry brigades will have three infantry regiments and there will be five brigades per side, or 15 regiments per side. That gives me 5 players per side, or 10 players total. I think that I will also have separate commands for each side's artillery arm. That will bring the game up to 12 players.

Fritz's ACW game tables. The one in the foreground is a 6ft by 12ft table and
the back table on the right is 5ft by 10ft.

I am using Cigar Box Battle Mats on my tables. Cigar Box is my "go to" provider or game mats in all of my games now. They are easy to transport to conventions and they fold up nicely. They look very very nice too.

I will have to make all of my own snake rail and post/rail turnpike fencing to fit with the 54mm figures that I am using in my Pickett's Charge Project for Historicon 2024.

My GMB Designs flags arrived the other day and so soon I will be painting the standard bearers and gluing the flags onto the flag staffs. To my eye, it looks like the 28mm GMB flags will work with my 54mm figures.

PS: please click on the pictures to enlarge the image. The pictures look so much better when they are enlarged in this manner.