My preferred set of rules is Command Decision by Frank Chadwick and published by TestofBattle.com, but for me it presents a few problems in representing the period.
The basic unit represents a platoon which is fine most of the time except for representing units in the Great War. The next unit up from the platoon is the company and at the start of the war literally everybody is organized into 240-250 man companies. The majority of those consist of four platoons the Germans are in three platoons and in games tuns this means four stands versus three. This gives the Germans a significant reduction in combat power compared to everybody else. Within the context of a game where you can have upto a full corp on each side it is a trivial boost to the allies but it is one of those things that annoy the anal retentive in me.
Next there is the great increase in firepower that occurs during the course of the war. Initially through direct fire with machine guns and later through indirect fire.
At the start of the war the standard is two machine guns per battalion by the end of the war it is upto two per section overall a very big increase in firepower. To put it another way an infantry stand in command decision has a ROF of 1 or 1 Machine gun per section. A company of 250 rifles has roughly the same firepower as 1-2 machine guns. This equates to a firepower value of 5, 1 per company plus 1 for the machine gun section in 1914, by 1918 a platoon with with sections each with two light machine guns has a firepower value of 4. So during the course there is a considerable changes in how the infantry is organised. For the Hundred Days campaign of 1918 on the Western Front its World War II in all but name. In 1914 you it could almost be Napoleonic in nature.
So how to represent it all. My first suggestion is to use company level stands instead of platoons. This has the advantage of compatibility with great war spearhead, but it is not not the primary reason. I think it fits well with the mobile battles of 1914 with masses of troops manoeuvring in close proximity. The same logic fits well for the Eastern front and anywhere mobile operations are occurring. On the Western front it can also apply to the attacker as they are essentially trying to fit a lot of troops into a small area. Now for some special rules, a company stand will have a reduced ROF compared to 3-4 platoon stands so a ROF of 2 should work except in close assaults when the companies full ROF of 3-4 should apply. As a target one hit will kill but it should be more robust than a platoon so a -1 on the hit result table will make tougher but not too much.
The defender in his trenches can still break down into platoons as per traditional Command Decision. This gives the defender a chance to thin out so as to garrison more trench lines. As well as a small increase in firepower to represent the bonus of defending fixed positions.
The first weapon to influence the Great War is the machine gun, most armies start the war with two tripod mounted heavy machine guns per battalion. This is represented by one machine gun stand with a ROF of 1 which rises to 2 in 1915, then depending upon your army the ROF went up or you got more stands or even both. The addition on concrete would morph the defenders into static pillboxes while the attackers would have move his forward to secure any gains. An interesting feature of both Great War Spearhead and Over the Top was how machine gun units increased in firepower during the war. This idea can extended at least for the defender into a pool arrangement of machine guns to be allocated as required, so a battalion with 16 machine guns with a ROF of 8 can divided them into 8 separate machine guns nests, 4 larger strong points or almost every other combination they need.
In the middle of the war the light machine gun appears. At first they are used interchangeably with the heavies but they do offer the possibility of improved mobility so new tactics evolve. This linked with increasing numbers of them led to their eventual allocation to infantry companies and modern platoons are created but more on that later. The heavies in some armies as a result migrate to specialist units such as the British machine gun corp. This enabled the combination of artillery tactics with machine guns moves us outside the self-imposed limits of this article which is the infantry battalion.
With everybody hiding in trenches the bullets used by all of the above weapons lose a lot of their effectiveness, though they do help keep every-bodies head down. What was required was an indirect fire weapon that could get out of your trench and into the enemies without the firer getting shot at.. Grenades had existed prior to the start of the war and were quickly manufactured and put into service. Indeed they were among the first specialist platoons to appear in the infantry company. But the grenade is a short ranged weapon dependent upon the throwers arm for range. So the grenade is soon being propelled by a variety of home made launchers that are straight out of the middle ages and before. Soon the boffin's get involved and official responses appear. Rifle grenades are attached to the end of rifles and propelled by a blank charge into the enemy lines. Larger grenade launchers appear such as the Granatwerfer appear that provide greater range to the humble grenade. Mortars expand the principle both by range and explosive effect.
Grenadier platoons are specialist close assault platoons which would gives them a higher ROF in close assaults. Now because of their emphasis on the close assault they may not have any ranged combat values. Some troops carried all sorts of close combat weapons such as cudgeols and clubs others such as German storm troopers usually carried lighter weapons such as carbines and eventually SMG's or the Americans with shotguns. There is a certain overlap with trench raiders and storm troopers and in most armies each battalion had a platoon dedicated to this function that was formed as required or function as a battalion reserve. In an offensive situation they would be more common at about one per company. The defender perhaps one per battalion, though a reserve counter attack group would look similar to the attacker in their organization.
Rifle grenade platoons also appear to be a purely offensive weapon allowing a single indirect shot out to 300 metres. It would be tempting to make the player call fire with them as they appear to be sort of weapon you use when you have nothing else to get at the enemy.Though I will freely admit that I need to know more about them before making too many pronouncements about them.
Grenade throwers and mortars soldier carry on into the Second World War so I won't carry on about them. Though if you can't find them look at the Italian 45mm Mortar as an example of a grenade thrower.
Finally there are a couple of different supporting troop types that maybe useful on the battlefield. The first are porters, the British several times converted follow-up battalions to porters so that supplies could be brought forward into captured trenches. I am not certain if other nations adopted similar measures but if you were attacking you all had the problem of getting supplies forward. From a game perspective it does open up a can of worms of tracking supplies. Now the mechanism used in command decision are quite simple but apply only to tanks and artillery. With the right numbers it should work for infantry weapons, though I would restrict it to Machine gun and grenadier stands as they are the larger users of ammunition that move forward in the attack. Supply checks should only to those troop that the attacker is moving into the enemy lines as you can assume that the trenches are acting as a supply source. Porters once they get their supplies forward convert to normal infantry.
The final troop type that you could introduce is an outpost stand. Think of a patrol stand that cannot move and can barely fight. Though it does have one important ability as it is armed with signal rockets that call down artillery fire. This gives the defender the chance to provide a garrison for the empty zone before his main line of resistance.
The biggest problem with all this is the requirement to that the same unit can be structured differently whether it is attacking or defending. Thereby increasing the number of figures that need to collected, not good if you are on a budget.
Now that's about it for the moment. All I need to do now is rebase some of my figures based on my current plan which is Cambrai and see if it all works. But that is another article and another time.
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