Assaults and Batteries
While bundling volley and melee into a single outcome does help game play by a lot, it carries some extra responsibility for making sure the outcome is very convincing. Fortunately we had a clear starting point for our perspective; that of a corps or army level leader. An early discovery was that the dynamics of a Napoleonic battle could be reflected better by continuing to resolve assaults within a turn, so long as the attacker for the turn was within assault range of an opponent. This simple leap injected a whole new and - in my opinion - necessary dynamic to the action. I had repeatedly read in eyewitness accounts of formations being "swept" out of their positions, and of entire corps gaining a mile of ground due to some major push. The "assault to full resolution" opened the door for those sorts of events, while still allowing for the instance of the slow grind due to fierce resistance.
The competitive die roll method we use is an old system, made more well known by its inclusion in the 1990s Fire & Fury rules for the American Civil War. Their elegant text-driven results were easy to use and gave a good variety of results. Republique uses the competitive die roll system for assault resolution, with a slightly different spin on the results. Rather than have all of the impact on a unit come from the one table, we split the results by interpreting the one die roll (for each side) two different ways - one result is from the modified roll and combat table, and another result is from the natural die roll points themselves (unmodified). Both results apply, providing a much larger range of assault outcomes. So for example, a unit might lose an assault and be pushed back, but not be particularly upset by it. More likely though, units that lose an assault will typically be negatively affected. But the extra possibility gained for minimal extra work is definitely worth it.
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