TWTUD Answers

I have been emailing Bernard Ganley, one of the authors of The World Turned Upside Down, and asked him to look at my blog entries, and especially the questions, about TWTUD, and see where I went "wrong". Rather than give the specific questions and their answers, I thought I would summarize each of the areas where I had difficulties.

The first part addressed was regarding basing. Yes, they base their figures in single ranks, so firing with two ranks means firing two bases deep. That also means that the units are half the frontage than I originally thought, as I surmised later. Here are his suggestions if you don't have basing like they recommend:

First thing is basing. It is the bane of the wargames world and we are never dogmatic about this as some like big tables and big bases while our emphasis has always been to try and do a game on a 6 x 4ft table. So please no rebasing as you might want to use them for other sets of rules – we see you are fond of the DBA stable for instance. Just so long as it looks right and gives the right feel. For the larger scales you might need to do a label or something to show the quality distinctions of morale and ability rather than using flag and officer bases.

Personally, I will probably use four bases to a unit and a roster. (I doubt the frontage difference between a 300 man unit and a 200 man unit is much, given that units tended to adjust the spacing of the files to 'fit' into the space they were assigned.) At this point I am 'stuck' with 15mm for the AWI and I am not going to switch to 6mm or 10mm just to be able to get enough troops together for this system.

On the issue of a General's ability, Bernard indicated that they could have had multiple characteristics, but chose to keep it simple and boil it all down to one.

Troop composition is determined each time there is a battle and only the number of men are tracked.

Combat at locations was discussed and (somewhat) resolved. When it comes to Close Range Firefight, it is a bit of 'one or the other', not as I had played it. What that means is if you roll to order your units into a Close Range Firefight and only some make it, you have a choice of either:

1. Conducting Skirmish Combat with all units in the location, or
2. Only the unit(s) that succeeded in entering Close Range Firefight, and their attached artillery, will engage the defender, and if successful, optionally engage in Melee.

So, it is one or the other. Either everyone skirmishes or only the successful ones fight at close range with all the others in support.