Prettier Orders of Battle for Crossfire

For convenience I use indented lists for my orders of battle in my Crossfire scenarios. But, inspired by those of Flames of War, I have wondered whether I should move to a prettier format. Okay, not with silhouettes of troops or whatnot, but a bit more graphic. This is what I came up with.

The order or battle for a company looks quite nice:

Crossfire Company Order of Battle
Crossfire Company Order of Battle

There are several advantages to the image format:

  • Prettier
  • Easier to understand as each stand is represented

Here is the equivalent in my usual list style:

Rifle Company

  • 1 x CC (+1)
  • 2 x HMG
  • 1 x on-table 50 mm Mortar (12 FM)
  • 1 x FO for off-table 81 mm Mortar (12 FM)
  • 3 x Rifle Platoons: PC (+1); 3 x Rifle Squads; One with IAT

The list format has advantages:

  • Very easy to generate – it is just text
  • Very easy to change if I want to tweak the order of battle
  • Very short

On balance I’m not sure it is worth changing for my website. For printed work it might be worth the added effort to do the images.

I’m interested to know what other people think.

4 thoughts on “Prettier Orders of Battle for Crossfire”

  1. The graphical approach is far superior and exactly what I do when planning new wargames armies.

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  2. When I first started playing WWII wargames (Crossfire and Rapid Fire), I found the orders of battle very confusing and had to spend some time breaking it down each time I read one until it made sense to me. Your visual version would have eliminated almost all of that (just the unfamiliar acronyms would remain). With that in mind, if you’re presenting a scenario to newbies, especially at a show, I think the visual depiction is really worth the effort. If it’s for experienced players, it’s not so worthwhile.

    In fact, the way I’d be tempted to do it is make the boxes the same size as the actual stands and put the text just below each box. That way, you can lay out the models on top of the sheet, ready for deployment.

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  3. I make something similar for all the units in a game and actually place the stands in position on the layout. Thus there can be no mistake for novices (and for some experienced players who should know better)to pick the correct stand for placement on the table!

    Dick Bryant
    Tournament players occupy a hill not because it has a tactical advantage but because the rules give it a +1

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  4. Ok, that seems fairly universal: Graphic is better. My problem is it is much more time consuming to generate these. I can type up the text version without thinking about it. The graphic, being a graphic, is more fiddly. But, given Ross’s point about ease of understanding for newbies, I might give it a go for my Scenario for Novices.

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