Caleb Hines Presents: The Battle of Morristown

Here's a clinic on how to move from the campaign game to the tabletop game.  Caleb Hines walks the reader through the entire process, and shows how easy it can be to translate the messiness of real-world terrain onto your table.  He even includes his thoughts on how and why the commanders of the two armies would select their deployment zones - which should influence the precise location of the battle - and how the terrain would affect their strategic and tactical choices.

Knoxville's hand is forced. They must drive Kingsport from the field today. This gives Kingsport a bit of latitude as to where they set up for battle. These assumptions make sense, but are mostly to justify avoiding odd scenarios that I don’t want to play out on my table (shoot ‘em off a a bridge, heavy urban warfare, or a drawn out siege respectively). Let's say the battle starts around 10:00 am or so (the morning being occupied with crossing the bridge, or marching up from the south). Then we can say the day should be limited to 10 hours (or 20 turns). That should be more than enough to reach an outcome.

So where does Kingsport set up? What are their goals, strengths, and constraints?

  Go read his blog post by clicking here.

In this case, neither commander is exactly happy with the terrain, nor his troop's ability get into position both where and when he would like.  However, both commanders can take solace in the fact that they did as well as can be expected in such challenging conditions.