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No clue why he doesn’t sell printed versions anymore.
I'm no expert, but I'd say 20 or so units per player would be OK. We were using small 'divisions' (of about a dozen units each) and rattled through 9 turns per player in two hours - with neither of us having played before, and only I had read the rules.Again, I'm no expert, but:There is little 'command friction' as such, though the upside down move sequence means that the outcome of your decisions are carried out in your opponents 'turn', throwing a slight advantage to the defender: Sequence: 1) Player A makes reactions to enemy moving to contact, and shoots. 2) Melee is carried out. 3) Normal moves, charges and rallies. 4) End of turn stuff (including army morale checks and off table arrivals). - Over to player B.Overall, the game we had ran very smoothly and everything was very logical. Having read some reviews since playing, there seems to be some misgiving in the ability of players being able to get two on one odds too often in melee, making massed attack columns overly powerful. That didn't happen in our game, but I could see column becoming the formation of choice. If this starts to happen it will not be much of a Peninsular game - more play required at this end to tell for sure - but a 'Peninsular War house rule' to make lines stronger (the go to formation) would not be beyond the wit of man. As with all the best rule sets, the basic mechanism is strong enough to have tweaks made to suit. Does anyone play rules without house rule tweaks?
We use a house rule to get round this; in fact it is similar to the way Shako handles it.A line fires at *all* of the units in its arc at full effect; so if you attack with two columns, you are effectively doubling the firepower of the line.A more historical rule would be that if a column suffers any disorder due to fire it must deploy into line. If there are friends in the way, then both units get another disorder. This is the real reason columns didn't pack together, but it is more fiddly, so we tend to go with the simpler rule above.