Artillery blues

[ravenflight]

Carrying on from the other threads that talk about the semi-broken 'enemy capturing guns' rules...

I've put this in the 'rules' section because, I guess it is a rules question as well as a comment.

At CanCon I had an issue where I captured an enemy's artillery. I contacted unguarded guns with the left corner of my BG touching the left corner of the enemy Artillery. The enemy had mounted troops behind the artillery about 1MU off their artillery's right hand rear corner.

Now I'm pretty sure I played out the artillery capture rules fairly correctly. I touch them they are mine. The trouble came with the re-capture.

According to the rules I keep them until such time as the enemy break my troops. The trouble is, it was nearly impossible for him to get to me. In essence, so long as I kept SOMETHING in contact with the artillery, his enemy couldn't attack me without a massive amount of re-deployment.

This seemed fairly silly to me. I'm starting to go toward the 'artillery removed' option as I think to keep to the historically acuracy situation could be covered by campaign/scenario rules.

Thoughts?

[quackstheking]

If your troops were off to the side and not defending the guns, then to recapture the guns all the enemy has to do is move any unit into contact with the guns to recapture them. See p127 2nsd bullet.

The 1st bullet relates to the example shown in the picture above the bullets, whereby if an artillery BG is not fully supported/defended and is captured but both units are effectively in melee, then to recapture the artillery the defenders (already in contact) have to rout all the capturing BG's to recapture the artillery.

However this can result still in a game of artillery tag!

Don

[ravenflight]

If your troops were off to the side and not defending the guns, then to recapture the guns all the enemy has to do is move any unit into contact with the guns to recapture them. See p127 2nsd bullet.

The 1st bullet relates to the example shown in the picture above the bullets, whereby if an artillery BG is not fully supported/defended and is captured but both units are effectively in melee, then to recapture the artillery the defenders (already in contact) have to rout all the capturing BG's to recapture the artillery.

However this can result still in a game of artillery tag!

Don

Yeah, fair enough, I was reading the first bullet point and by contacting the artillery you would not rout all of the enemy, but after re-reading, agree with what you say. It seems very odd though that my foot would be forever safe from the enemy mounted because of the impassible terrain feature called 'artillery'.