"Pike units in plastic mesh: ranks?" Topic

I'm making a bunch of plastic mesh armies for some quick play games -simple to make, about 5mm I guess, very little detail- and would like to make some generic 17th century pike units. My thought is to use them for 9 years War Ireland, williamite War, maybe ECW. So keeping in mind the very geneic nature of these 3d counters more than real models, how many ranks should I make? For American Civil War I do 12 men across in two ranks. Maybe 12 across 4 ranks?

I got the plastic mesh army idea from the Penny Whistle wargame blog. Easy and cheap, the wyI like it!

For ECW the usual depth was six ranks for infantry and a good sized regiment would be 600 or so men, so around 100 files across. The pike and shot had equal numbers of ranks. On the battlefield the smaller regiments were usually brigaded together into 'battalions' of 400-600 or so.

For wargames units most do 2 or 3 ranks deep in 15mm or 28mm, four sounds reasonable for your scale.

Strong regiments often fought in two identical grand divisions, each composed of a central pike block flanked by 'sleeves' of musketeers.
For exchanges of musketry, especially for a final salvo before closing to push of pike, the comand was often given for musketeers to 'double their files' – form twice as wide, half as deep – so you might want to make your musketeer sleeves as two bases, one behind the other normally, but beside each other when files doubled.