"sharp practice 'army' lists" Topic

Could someone please explain in simpleton terms how to.understand the table for sorting forces out and how many bigmen are required to make a game please. I'm very confused.

Well.. they are not really army lists if you are talking about section 17 "Balancing your forces".
The objective of that table is to let you know roughly how many and what level of Big Men you should include in your force based on the quality of the force you are trying to represent.. not balance against the opponent as you would do with points and army list…

As an example if you have a force of 4 groups of regular troops they recommend you include 4 big men, one level 3 , one level 2, and two level 1s.. and that you include 2 grasp the nettle cards which according to the recommendations on 17.1 would probably be a level 3 or 2 card and a level 1.

The idea is that if you were to include many more big men you would have a force that is more active than what would be expected from "regular troops"…

But the objective of all this is so that once you decide on the scenario and you figure out what forces you will include, maybe a scenario of your own creation of something you read about in a historical account or novel, you can correctly represent that force on the table.

It is up to you as scenario creator to define how balance or unbalanced the opposing armies will be depending on your scenario…

Just on Sunday I ran a game of Mexican American war, the american forces had one less group than the mexicans, their groups were 8 while mexicans were 10s. Although both sides had roughly the same big men the americans had a few cards increasing the fire discipline of some special troops ( Texas Rangers ) while the Mexicans had some conscript troops suffering from poor fire discipline…

Overall I thought eh game was pretty balanced.. it was planned to be a very standard encounter scenario since it was the introductory game for my group.. It went for the Mexicans and it was a fun game..

I have the MAW expansion but didn't use it since I wanted to go through basic SP first before increasing the complexity level..

Also I decided that I was running a figure ratio of 1 to 5-6 men so that my groups would be companies.. that way players could choose to deploy some of them together as understrength battalions or move them around freely..

I hope this helps a bit, although it is probably not the answer you were hoping for..

cheers
Francisco

That's one of the bits of the rules that I struggled with most of all when I first bought SP.

First, forget any idea of points-driven 'balanced' games – SP is all about interesting, challenging and fun scenarios rather than two evenly-matched sides. If you feel nervous about coming up with your own, look at the scenarios in the various supplements – even if designed for AWI, ACW or MAW, they are very adaptable to other periods. And, of course, there's the 'Fondler' supplement as well.

And don't worry that there are various minor changes to the rules in every one of the supplements, and not just period-specific ones either!

BUT the best guide I've seen to balancing troops (which is a combination of group size, Big Men and GTN cards) is in either the ACW or the (as yet unpublished) Indian Mutiny supplement: basically, you should have one Big Man for every two Groups, and the total number of Status Points should be about the same as the number of Groups.

A veteran force will have slightly more, and a poor force slightly less, than these norms.

Hope this helps!

It all helps but best of all too fat lardies have a YouTube page and they play through a sharp practice game explaining things which really helped. Thanks you guys for taking time to explain to me :)

Ha Francisco! Can't believe there's anyone else but me in Tejas that would play and likes SP2. We should put on a game or three at MCon this year! I've got tons of 54mm AWI and Napoleonics. LMK if interested!

Steve Miller
DFW Irregulars-Southern Front