Okay, I have seen these rules advertised and looked back at its predecessor rule sets and get the fact that it is intended to 'streamline' playing what could be considered largish battles of the period from 1650-1763 give or take a bit.
Consolidating shooting, melee and morale into simple morale checks is okay, not particularly radical (isn't that what a combat result chart has been doing for ages)?
And once again we bump into the curious notion that a basic unit has to be represented by two stands? Why? It really can't be that people couldn't come up with some arrow, or chit to show that a single stand is "in movement mode" so why bother. If it is a ground scale issue you can always call a single base of troops the X factor for your scale and go from there. Just a pet peeve that I have. Note our previous series on Fontenoy where we had a stand for each infantry battalion and 2 cavalry squadrons on the table and active.
The original morale check list was a list of 30 or so tests long and again very similar to older British rulesets like Gush's renaissance rules where you were trying to track who had dropped lances and resorted to pistols as they trotted into each other. But the newer edition has simplified by consolidating morale tests by Unit Quality and by Unit Type (Infantry, Cavalry or Artillery) which makes it much easier to scan the shorter listings.
The original differences between large, regular and small units was well handled but the introduction of 'tiny' units seems a bit of a miss to me. At the abstraction level the rules call for we aren't expecting to play the stand of the 300 at the gates...
After a quick test game to understand how the mechanisms are supposed to work, we have decided to do a full test run on one of the scenarios for the TWofSK - Kesseldorf and see if the game can be played in a short time period and give believable results for both sides.
Here is the battlefield with the troops in their deployment areas as per the scenario information:
