Disorder, Casualties, and Rallying in "The Far Side of the World"

 In reading/playing wargame rules, one of the key abstractions is how to handle unit cohesion and casualties.  For me striking a balance between providing some degradation as casualties increase and keeping the amount of bookkeeping down is key.  A unit that has been fighting for its life in a long melee should be disadvantaged against a fresh unit from the reserves, but a pile of wound markers following around the unit or an accountant's ledger for a roster aren't appealing solutions to me.  I wanted to implement something that could provide players with a sense of their forces withering away but isn't too fiddley.

The other end of the spectrum for handling morale/unit cohesion/casualties by implementing an all or nothing mindset.  The unit is either on the field fighting or it has quit. This is an abstraction that allows games to be very compact.  No additional markers are needed.  Its downside is that the game can't show the very real effects of fatigue, disorder, and casualties.  It also provides the players no sense of how much longer they can expect their forces to stick around.  

I wanted a system in "The Far Side of the World" that used the best of granular system of hit/strength points and the simplicity of the all-or-nothing alternative.  What I developed was a system by which units can have two statuses applied to them to represent the chaos (disorder) and casualties (bloodied).  Disorder reduces a units resolve by 1.  It is applied to every time the unit attempts an action that would compare its resolve to a baseline (activation & rally) or compares its resolve to a hostile unit (attacked from range).  Luckily, the player's leader can rally away disorder.  The elite/inferior unit traits impact resolve.  Elite troops are expected to have a tougher mindset and better training to withstand the chaos around them.  The bloodied status, however, is permanent.  It is applied after the unit has been in significant combat and experienced casualties.  With fewer men still capable of carrying on, it makes sense that their combat ability is reduced.

If three different marker colors are available disordered, bloodied, or the combination of both can easily be represented by a unique marker.  Ordered and unbloodied units would have no marker following them.  Of course if players prefer an even-less cluttered board, they could still very easily create a roster for their units and mark bloodied/disordered boxes with markers or pen as appropriate.  I think this is a suitable solution for what can be a complicated problem.

How to Perform a Rally:

For the sake of this explanation let's assume that blue's regular infantry in the open (in front of the brown-horsed cavalry) is disordered.  It has taken fire from red's artillery in prior turns.  Blue has the initiative and successfully activates his leader's unit, the black-horsed cavalry.  He checks that the disordered infantry is in command radius.  It is (command radius default is 2. Distance between the two units in question is 2).  Because no enemy units are adjacent to the disordered unit, and the leader is not adjacent to the disordered unit, no modifiers can be applied. The leader's unit rolls 2D6 (leadership dice only apply to combat) and subtract the baseline modifier 3 from the regular infantry's resolve 2 (reduced due to disorder).  The result is 8.  The disorder state is removed.  The leader's activation ends and blue selects his next unit for activation.