Scourge of War Boards

How much research goes into the regimental level info in the OOBs?

Info such as the type of rifle issued or the headcount at a certain battle?

How do you decide the experience level?

Are the sources publicly available?

The availability of such information varies wildly by war, side and time. In some cases we know that information exactly. In some cases we might have information only to the brigade or division level. Experience levels are decided by looking at the previous battle experience of that unit for shooters or for the officer at command levels. We have a general formula for experience that sometimes gets tweaked for better game play. Essentially all of the base information is from published books. We integrate the research efforts across the book collections of the entire team so it might be a bit expensive to get everything at once. We also take advantage of a variety of online resources as well.

-Jim

I helped the design guys make the OOB for a few regiments and generals in Chancellorsville, I was amazed at the detail that goes into rating every unit.

Could anyone recommend a reference regarding what rifle types were issued to specific regiments?

Are there books, or is this a National Archive type of research?

Depends on which years and for which part of the country. CS documentation is usually quite missing. Union documentation is better but still spotty. After 1862, essentially all Eastern theater Union troops had Springfield RM where the CS troops had mostly captured US Springfields along with some Enfields. In the west it took longer for the CS to get good weapons as Grant lost fewer battles. There are some books that are useful for specific time periods but no good overall reference exists to my knowledge.

-Jim

For a start you can get "Ready...Aim...Fire! Small Arms Ammunition in the Battle of Gettysburg" by Dean S. Thomas. It will give you the type of weapon carried by each Union regiment at Gettysburg. In summary, these were the major types of long arms in Federal hands at GB as listed in the book:
1855 or 1861 Springfield .58 caliber
Austrian .54 caliber
Austrian .58 caliber
Enfield .577 caliber
French .577 caliber
.69 caliber rifled
.69 caliber smoothbore
.69 caliber English smoothbore
Sharps rifles
Merrill rifles
French .58 caliber

There are separate listings for cavalry carbines and sidearms.

http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Small-Ammun ... an+thomas]

Finding the specific "active" headcount for a battle is very difficult. Rosters fluctuated greatly as wounded men mustered back in and epidemics mustered some out in preparation for battles. I've been looking to create an GB OOB for Pickett's Charge that included the brigades of Jenkins and Coarse---nice "what if" scenario---but have hit many walls (the most significant being that I live in California). It takes A LOT of research to create an accurate OOB.

When in doubt, how does the SOW team derive at a specific headcount for a regiment when not specifically stated? Estimate, or a well-considered guess? I'm trying to build a couple of OOBs, but not sure if I could ever get to a perfectly accurate figure. I don't want to put anything up without being sure, but being "sure" isn't always possible. What level of scrutiny need I use?

We make our best educated guess based on the best available information. For example, we might have a good number for a division but no info on the individual regiments. We will check available sources to see if any of the regiments are described in qualitative terms. Example would be 'the 99th NC was a large regiment that had just joined the ANV from garrison duty'. Based on this information (if any) we will make a reasonable estimate of sizes for each regiment. Note that we may also look at information from the next battle to see if that is informative. If there is really nothing, we will divide the division strength by the number of regiments and add a little random variation to make it less obviously artificial.

-Jim

Jim's post above describes exactly how I work. When I began researching the armies for my Peninsular campaign there was extremely good data available on the British army but surprisingly little on the French - as the losers of this campaign French authors have produced a very limited body of work. As for the Spanish armies I had to rely almost completely on one source in the end as data was pretty much just not there.

Is there some effect in the game to the differences in small arms other than effective range?