Sounds like an entertaining system. A pity that I don't have a few buckets of nappy miniatures lying around.
I have a problem with giving a +2 to Ney though: If Reenacting the waterloo campaign Ney should get a +2 or a -2, as selected by his opponent. Ney's lethargic advance at Quatre Bras was just as impressive as his traditional foolish bravery.
I've actually played a similar system, and one of the problems is that the probabilities are still all known. If a commander is aggressive, you know he's got an X% chance to go nuts if you don't spend Y command points. This doesn't really seem that much more realistic than many other solutions, since you're never really surprised by the actions of your subordinates, it's just a risk you took (by not spending the command points) that you got burned by.
I like the "fog of war" that as it's portrayed in the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War games, like Grant Takes Command. At any instant in time you have an order you'd like to give. But you don't know if you'll get the initiative or how many initiatives you'll get in a row or how far the units are going to move, and things rapidly become very complicated, so the odds are very hard to work out. So you're sitting there screaming at one of the less-than-brilliant Union corps commanders to go fill that hole in the line while the Confederates win initiative after initiative and pour through, or your commander rolls a 1 for his movement allowance. Everything is simple enough, but nuanced enough and beyond the reach of reasonable computation, that it really feels like you're operating in the frustrating and murky command and control conditions presented to ACW army commanders. And this despite the fact that there is absolutely no hidden information in the game! No cards, no nothing.
The blocks are great at this sort of thing too.
Some of the card games work better than others. Hannibal and We the People are terrific. Later games like Paths of Glory added other tensions, but lost a lot of the fog-of-war edginess that earlier games had.
Commenting by HaloScan
