"Why Does Black Powder Require So Many Figures?" Topic

Aside from the aesthetics of the game, which I agree, are important, do you really need 24-30 figure battalions to play Black Powder? I recently played a Zulu War game using Black Powder and, once the Zulu units took a couple of casualties above their stamina (typically a "3")they were out of the game. Perhaps that's historical, but it seemed like a waste of painted figures for a unit to quit the table with a quarter or fewer of its number killed or wounded. Because I play with 54mm figures, my units are typically between 12 and 10 figures. Does anyone else play with fewer than recommended figures and, aside from "the look of the thing" does it really effect game play?

From pg 10: The number of models in each unit is not strictly defined… Instead we simply divide…units into…arbitrary sizes.

So no. Theoretically you could have a regiment represented by 3 figs if you wanted to.

You can easily play BP with 12 or 16 figure battalions. You can use your 54s for BP if you want to.

It doesn't.

Because the writers like putting all the toys on the table.

And it does look pretty impressive in the pictures.

When we first started playing we used 12 figure battalions (on four stands) as normal units; eight figures were small units and sixteen were large. (We used six figure regiments for cavalry, on three stands.) Since then, for appearance purposes, we've gone to 24 figure "standard" units, but we haven't noticed any difference in play.

Our games often have units of varying figure counts but so long as we know if they are small, medium or large, it's all good.

This is an Austrian army I made for Black Powder. It's two full corps at Wagram. This didn't require any models!!

Squares are batteries, rectangles with chevrons are cav. Circles are officers. White blocks are battalions color coded to regiment, brigade, div, and corps.

This is how I did it:

link

For me it varies-
for the WSS I use infantry battalions of 12 figures.
for the '45 I use infantry battalions of 16 figures
for the Penninsular war I used infantry battalions of 30 figures
and for the AZW I use infantry battalions of 24 figures (double that for the zulus obviously)

So really its hardly any figures!

Mostly for the spectacle. But since it is the unit frontage that matters, you can use as much/little as you want as long as it's consistent. My group has even talked about using only bases temporarily until we can assemble our collections.

The hardest part for me as a newbie to historical gaming, let alone Napoleonics, is how every game has its own suggested basing and sizes, and nearly all have the "As long as everyone uses roughly the same it doesn't matter" clause. So like my group is going to use the BP standard but we may want to also play other games and aren't sure then if it will matter there or not.

I personally plan to use the recommended 24 figures per unit (6 stands of 4 figures) that BP suggests for 28mm figures, but that's because I have to pick something and since we aren't sure what other games we might play, it beats each of us using different basing or trying to argue what other rules we *might* pick up before we've even played Black Powder!

Don't forget that in the rule book most the units use two ranks of figures which doubles the numbers of figures. I play in 15mm with single rank of figures on short frontages and it works well.

Regards

Garry

For AZW I use 16 figs for British companies, 36 figures for Zulu regiments. I like lots of miniatures on the table.

I use 4 figures for tiny units, 8 figures for small units, 16 figures standard units and 24 figures large units. All mounted 4 per base. It was driven by table size and # of figures I have.

I suppose the people who were involved with the rules had large collections and wanted to use them in a game that lasted an evening rather than much longer with the existing rules that were around at the time. They also wanted to use their existing bases without having to rebase them. The Perry's for example didn't adopt a standard basing system.

This basically was stated by RP during a video of the game.