ADF Designer’s Notes – The Design Concept
The design concept for Across a Deadly Field (ADF) was developed jointly by Osprey and I, over numerous emails back and forth. We jointly worked to the conclusion that the regimental ACW miniature games – and there were many good ones — had the advantage of tactical detail while the brigade games treated the brigade as the maneuver element so that bigger games could be played – but, at a cost of much of the regimental flavor. For example, in a brigade game it would be impossible to show the gallant charge of the 20th Maine at Little Round Top. So, we worked through many concepts and we came to the idea that if the regiments were reduced to two or three stands we could still have a lot of regimental detail and still have grand tactical battles. For sake of easy conversion, it was decided that we would go with roughly twice the Johnny Reb III scale and so one inch would roughly equal 100 yards rather than 50 yards and that each figure would equal 60 men instead of 30 and that one ADF turn would be stretched from 20 minutes to 30 minutes. A key design element was that the gamers should not be required to remount their figures – they could play with whatever figures and gaming stands they had.
However, that left the issue of how to accommodate the different figure sizes, from 6mm to 28mm and the fact that some gamers like to mount their figures on square stands to show a double rank, while others prefer a rectangular stand with a single rank. That could mean that two identical 720 man regiments (12 figures) – one mounted in double rank and one mounted in a single rank – might well have very different frontages depending on exactly how the figures were mounted. And depending on the figure size, the frontage discrepancies might be larger yet. To deal with both of these issues, we came up with three different ground scales that seem to work for the each of the three major figure sizes. They are:
For 6mm/10mm figures one inch would equal roughly 100 to 120 yards.
For 15mm/20mm figures one inch would equal roughly 80 to 100 yards.
For 25mm/28mm figures one inch would equal roughly 60 to 80 yards.
For 15mm/20mm figures one inch would equal roughly 80 to 100 yards.
For 25mm/28mm figures one inch would equal roughly 60 to 80 yards.
Since these would mean that to maintain correct ranges and movement distances, three complete Reference Charts would be required and, yes, all three will be provided in the book. That left the issue of square stands versus rectangular ones as some gamers prefer square while others prefer rectangular and we still wanted to maintain correct relative frontages for either mounting preference. The solution to that conundrum was simpler than it might seem at first. For a battle line with square stands each regiment would be modeled with three stands – but, the gamer that used rectangular stands would use only two stands for his units. The included graphic shows how this would be modeled with a 12 figure, 720 man regiment deployed with three square stands or two rectangular stands. A simple chart was developed that showed the morale degradation per stand lost for either two or three stand regiments. We feel that with this approach we have offered a regimental mounting system that would be usable with whatever figure size and whatever mounting you prefer.
