Unit size

[irondog]

I know for the most part it does not matter, but how many men are in a unit? I like do do historical battles and the ECW is perfect since there are so many fairly small actions. If I got a rough idea how large a unit it was I could add small units into large units and possibly really large units (2000+) broken up into 2 units. The large and small bonus works most of the time but, not always.

[Sandinista]

I would think small 400ish, standard 600ish and large 1000ish. And for late war royalists more officers than troops

[David Horaist]

I am trying to understand the unit sizes. I found in "Black Powder" that, I could standardize units, with bases, making them the same as their hand-to-hand dice (ie. std. units had six bases and fought with six dice). It made looking at the charts less necessary. Pike & Shot seems to simply identify units and give dice factors, as opposed to using the unit characteristics to achieve the same end. Why is this?

[irondog]

That is how I am running my ECW. a unit has 2 shot sleeves and 1 pike block. A standard 2:1 shot/pike unit has a melee of 6 firepower of 4. A 1:1 or 3:2 has a melee of 7 shot of 3 or 2. I am keeping track of the whole regiment, not the separate parts. Like in the sun king part of the rules. stamina I am starting with is 4.
Trying it this Monday and then again Friday. I will let you know how it works.

[David Horaist]

Sorry, I also wanted to say that, I put or say that 2 infantry figures equal a base. Using the 20x20mm base per figure, or 40x20mm per base. Haven't thought of making regiments of pike and shot and combining their factors some how.

[irondog]

My units are 3 60x60mm bases. 2 shot, 3 pike. Shot are 6 to a base, pike are 9 to a base (just because I was brought up on deeper pike units). All bases should be 6 to 9 figs but it does not matter. That also makes my foot units standard size and my cavalry a standeard unit size of 6. The only thing I am really doing is adding firepower to a pike stand or the otherway around how ever you want to look at it.

I treat all 3 bases as a unit (Regiment per say). I use the stats from the Sunk king. A unit has a 6 melee and a 3 firepower

[HobbitMiles]

In large field actions it was common to group infantry into tactical bodies of about 1,000-1,200 so that "standard" sized battalia could be formed. Units from several regiments could be grouped in this way. These battalia could then be re-divided into the battalia's constituant parts of say 1 main pike block and 2 wings of shot each about 3-400 strong. In this sense the named regments that we think of were really only administrative units. I've also seen illustrations suggesting that our 1,200 might be divided into 3 smaller pike blocks, each with its own 2 wings of shot giving about 100 - 120 men per block.

In smaller local actions then it is possible that units were formed into company sized bodies - ie about 100 men or just went into action as was.

As always there are lots of opinions on this.

[Cuchulann]

Before Pike & Shotte I used BP for playing my ECW games, I first used separate sub units of pike & shot as per the new rules and this worked really well. Then I changed to using complete units of mixed pike & shot to see how that worked, again it played really well but obviously gave a different feel to the game. The difference between ratios of pike & shot within a unit I did by adjusting dice numbers for melee and firing but I decided not to state the exact ratio of pike to shot as I felt this fixated too much upon actual numbers and different people have very different ideas about this. My own idea was; more pike = 7 - 2, average pike 6 - 3, less pike = 5 - 4, with the first number being melee dice and the second number being firing dice. Obviously you can read into these any actual ratios you want but without the need to worry whether 2 musket for each pike or so on. My overall impression is that the separate units of pike and shot are better for games depicting grand skirmishes or small battles, and the mixed units of pike and shot are better for games depicting larger battles.

[irondog]

Funny,
That is how I run it and think of the rules. I just played the first battle of Braddock Down. I treated all units as 1. Since everyone was short of muskets, I made all the foot units 7 hth, 3 shooting. I figure this would work for the Scots and Irish also since they were low on muskets. A standard 2 to 1 pike/shot unit would be a 6hth/4 shooting. And maybe for that rare almost 100% shot unit it would be 4 hth/5 shot. Or maybe just 4/4. I have not played enough to see if something with 5 shooting would be to scary.

Irondog

[Cuchulann]

Just a thought, but for representing different ratios of pike to shot for the separate unit version of the rules, you could always have one standard sized pike unit to 2 small sized shot units or even 2 large sized shot units. Whilst keeping the fairly normal pike unit with two sleeves of shot, it also allows the variety that some players might want in their games.