Okay time for me to pitch in. I'll be doing the battles. As you can see from the Unit Statistics they willbe quite different form previous yaks
Much of the stuff i have just posted may seem a lot to take in but lets break it down. I won't start writing down every nuance of the mechanics, because quite honestly most of it is not so interesting and irrelevant.
First of all: the different stats of the units:
WS, BS, Health, Armor, Moral
are hopefully quite obvious but ill explain them anyway:
Weapon Skill - means how good your guys hit close in
Ballistic Skil - is how good your guys shoot others
Health - represents the Number of Men still active in the regiment
Armor - is armor. the more the better
Morale - if this drops to 0 your regiment will break and run and potentially be captured, on the other hand you can make prisoners too.
Movement - determines how many hexes your units can move.
Now, as you ahve seen the battlefield looks quite diverse and that will have a major impact on shooting firing and line of sight.
There are free ranges:
Melee Range - when you can kiss your enemy...or gut him happens if two units stand next to each other
Close Range - Shooting Range basically. That is for everything that is not artillery or has the (Far Range) Trait.
Usually close range is reached when enemies are two hexes away from your units, that mean optimally you can give a charging enemy two volleys of fire before he closes in.
However height different plays a major role. The larger the Height Difference the farther your guys can shoot.
Even Footing - 2 Hexes
1 Height Difference - 3 Hexes
2 Height Difference - 4 Hexes
However there is no penalty for shooting uphills
Finally there is Far Range. That is everything beyond Close Range, and applies to artillery. You can basically fire anywhere with them.
Line of Sight
Now that is where things get tricky. You cant shoot at units behind buildings or hills, since you can simply not see them or hit them. Height is the rescue here again. If you are on higher ground you can see beyond buildings/hills and attack units behind them.
Finally Personal Combat. While we are in an Age in the Game were a general is not charging into battle at the front anymore, you can still do that, at high personal risk.
However don't expect entire regiments to fall before you. While you can still participate in battles directly you will ahve only minor influence on your men, however even that tiny influence might tip the balance of battle in your favour.
If you are performing particularly good on the battlefield the enemy regiment will get a morale drop and the one you are attached to will get a bonus on it. However if your regiment gets killed during the fighting or decides to flee, you might get captured. Or even worse die during the fighting.
Finally Command of the Army itself. As you can see there are a lot of guys in the field and giving orders each turn would drag this out into all eternity. Therefore you will only get to send orders every five battle turns, representing the time it takes for a messenger to reach your regiment and give new orders. This makes the game run much smoother (at least hopefully), however should it work out as ungainly i will remove the five turn system and instead let you give frehs orders whenever i deem that things might warrant new orders.
That should roughly sum up the Battle System, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.