Slitherine

I am reading John Keegan's history of WW1 at the moment and he talks about Reserve Divisions a lot. But in the game we just have regular infantry and "garrison" units, although the second type of unit is very often deployed outside of towns and forts. So are the garrison units meant to represent reserve divisions, or are they a different type of unit? Given the absolute carnage during the war I am not actually sure how meaningful these distinctions might be anyway. At the Somme, newly-formed "pals" divisions were sent over the top without having had any battle experience at all.

Yes, the 'garrison' units are meant to represent exactly that. They represent units which are capable of holding the line, and are decent defensively, but not your first choice for an attack. In hindsight, they might have been better named Reserves.

Myrddraal wrote:Yes, the 'garrison' units are meant to represent exactly that. They represent units which are capable of holding the line, and are decent defensively, but not your first choice for an attack. In hindsight, they might have been better named Reserves.

Yes, that would be better - do you think you might change it at some point, or would it involve a lot of tedious work? Because the garrison units have fewer figures depicted on them they always make me think they are actually smaller units, but they wouldn't be, would they? I wonder - what if you still had two types of infantry units ("infantry" and "reserves") but they had the same number of figures depicted, but with the depiction for the regular infantry being more aggressive (maybe one or two of the figures charging with bayonets fixed) and the depiction for the reserve divisions being more passive/defensive? I think it might look quite good on the map.

The motivation behind putting less figures for the reserve or 'garrison' units is to make them distinctive. It's very frustrating if you can distinguish between the two at a glance. I'm not sure different poses would be enough...

Myrddraal wrote:The motivation behind putting less figures for the reserve or 'garrison' units is to make them distinctive. It's very frustrating if you can distinguish between the two at a glance. I'm not sure different poses would be enough...

Yes - and that does work very well at the moment.

I think I could mod a change from garrison to reserve. I'll give it a shot later tonight.