"How many units is enough for one player?" Topic

Obviously this is dependent on what rules are used but I am thinking this could apply to any set of mass combat rules. In my 30 odd year experience in gaming a comfortable number of units for a player is about 4 infantry or cavalry plus maybe some guns or artillery (era dependent).
Too many games have been bogged down with a player controlling a division or even a corp. Fire and Fury I find a division plus some artillery is perfect, In an old school game like WRG then a brigade and a gun or two and maybe a couple units of Cav. Skirmish style games like musket and tomahawk or the sword and the flame is 3-4 units with commander and an attached gun. More 20th century games that I have played I think a platoon at 1:1 is a good-sized force but this period is not my strong point.
I am mainly a horse and musket era gamer so that's where I come from. Really interested to hear your experience and ideas,
Also mainly thinking multiplayer games as that's my main experience as well

FM

Here's my two cents worth regarding The Sword and the Flame.
Back, as a GM, I have set up games where a single player commanded up to 10 units. Or more.

I've also run games where a player commanded no more than 2 units. Guess what? He was much less prone to sacrifice a unit "for the greater good" when he only had 2. 🤔

I usually aim for a minimum of two per player, but sometimes just one. Depends how many units, how many players,, mode of game (pbem, f2f, remote etc) , and what you mean by a 'unit'. A maximum is probably around a dozen per player.

In Midgard, I have found 5 or 6 Units and a 'Hero' sufficient for me to have a good game, but I can happily run a whole army.

As the OP says, it depends a lot on what constitutes a "unit." A single DBA base? Twelve or more. 20-30 individual figures with officers and enlisteds, possibly elites or specialists and capable of multiple formations? Far fewer.

There may be a specific numerical answer--but not without specifying the rules.

I always feel a dozen or so units is optimum; DBA got that right. I went for a similar number in my rules.

I have never liked convention games where the GM tried to allow 10-12 players by giving each person 2-3 units, meaning in real terms that you could sit around for ages only to move twice then sit again for ages. While superficially the GM could think "everyone only has two units" what actually happens is a couple players have their units engaged in meaningful combat while more than half of the players just dance around the periphery of the battle/board.

I think about 12 units per side, divided by the number of players on that side, is a sensible maximum.

It kind of depends on the rules as noted – I think at least for our games with the lads 2 units is too few, eight or ten is probably too many – most mass combat games we have 4 – 6 units per player which given the playing style of some of the guys (a full out frontal charge being considered a subtle tactic) works out just fine

4 units seems pretty meagre to me. I agree with those who say around a dozen. Now if it is a convention game where most players are unfamiliar with the rules I'd pare that back to 7 or 8.

Rule of Twelve: Twelve 'things' per player, where a 'thing' is a group of stands that move together or single stand elements (Commanders, Batteries)

12 being the max I'd expect someone to be comfortable with.

I games that I know very well I can easily handle 20 units.

Factoring …

Ease of rules.
Familiarity of game.
Detail of combat and movement/command.
Time allowed.
Total number of players and total number of units.

I would say it really depends on those factors.

I agree with Martin, Frederick, JM, and others that it depends on the rules – and the level of detail. Suppose I'm "role-playing" a Napoleonic corps commander. What I'm going to do is pin with one division, attack with another supported by the corps artillery and attached light cavalry, and keep my third division in reserve. Some rules will give me 36 separate battalions of infantry to run, others will reduce that to six brigades, and still others may only assign me 3 divisional-sized units; and in practice I'm perfectly comfortable with all three levels of responsibility in terms of numbers of "units" to run. Because in the end, regardless of the level of representation, the fact is that I'm only going to be doing 3 "things": a pinning attack, a decisive attack, and maintaining a reserve.

How much time you got?

For Great War Spearhead, we find a division per player is about the max that's manageable in an evening game.
Robin

If a "unit" is a single DBA/V&B base, say 12, and more with experience. If it can change formation and sustain losses, then we're in Clausewitzian territory--three to ten.

Jim's Rule of Fours says it all.

I think the first thing we have to do is define units. My Div level rules may have 16-24 battalions/squadrons/artillery companies on the field, but they are organised into brigades and regiments so the player doesn't normally make 20+ individual command decisions per turn and that I think is the point. The real question should be 'How many command decisions can a player make in the time taken by a turn' and this controls the number of units. In practice in real armies the rule is 2 levels down and that's with modern communications, so a divisional commander works with his brigades/regiments. Historically this will typically give you a number between 3 and 6.

In a horse and musket game, I'd generally be disappointed and potentially a bit bored if I only had four units to command. That won't give me many decisions to make, and I want a game to give me lots of interesting decisions.

I'd echo the maxim cited by Mark about commanding 2 levels down and add that we care about casualties 3 levels down. Thus, if I'm a division commander, 1st level down is my two or three brigades or regiments; 2nd level down is the 9-12 component battalions (plus arty and a bit of cav); 3rd level down is the battalions' strength points, or base removal, or friction markers, or however else casualties are recorded against them.

I believe the appropriate 'command span' is generally considered to be 8-12 units and that's the number I'm happy to command on the table.

About half way through a long gaming career I was surprised to discover that just 12 stands per player in DBX type games were enough to give challenging and entertaining games.

It depends how long you want a game to last. Using a simple game system where a unit is one stand, if the total number of units is no larger than 100 units, or stands, a game could be completed in 2-3 hours, depending on setup and packup time and playing area size. In this case both players are experienced. The game turn length would be typically be about 12 GT. If player are less experienced, or if the rules are more complex, game length could expand to 6-8 hours. The Spearhead guys did a lot of work in determining optional game size to complete a game. I use as my example board-gaming. However there are a lot of local factors which affect game length. Multi-element units for example do introduce extra complexity. For ancients I like 200 point DBMM games which can last for about 6 hours. I use DBMM army lists for a number of different ancient rules and game length varies a lot based on rules complexity. For example a 200 point game using the old SPI PRESTAGES rules rarely last for more than 2 hours, which did give me a bit of a surprise when I first discovered it. I ended up having 3 games in a day, which was very unusual for myself.

Why should the rules limit the number of units you can command?

If you have a small group of players and they want to do the 2nd Day of Gettysburg with Johnny Reb and only have four players, then your going to be commanding three or more divisions of three brigades and each brigade has 4 or 5 regiments, then your going to be commanding a lot of units. Who are you that says they can't handle it?

JMcCarroll has it, but I would add ,thinking time. With Stargrunt II we limited it to 30 seconds. That is not a practical limit for our current games, they are more credible so have far more options.

50 elements (things to move) is the limit but that assumes minimal thinking time, just moving time. I have played games where player analysis paralysis has made games with mininal (10 elements) sarts in to make the game unplayable, There is a vary wide variation dependent on the JMcCarroll criteria.

@ChrisBBB2 How often do you think commanders had any knowledge of casualties until after a battle. It's one of the reasons I don't do casualty removal in any rules I write. Even in modern warfare people can be 'missing' but still fighting or you're just not getting coms, so are they all dead or not. I strongly suspect that all a Divisional commander in the Napoleonic wars knows is "Two brigades are fighting, one has 'retired' to under my nose and is reorganising".

@Mark J Wilson: The problem with not removing casualties in wargames rules is that it prevents modelling the attritional nature of blackpowder warfare. Formations burned themselves out in skirmishing, firefights, and enduring harassment from cavalry over the course of up to several hours. There must be some track of a formation's ongoing degradation of effectiveness, and unless there is an impartial referee (human or computer) tracking this on a roster there is little substitute for a visual method (casualty markers, stand removal, etc).

Of course you are correct that a divisional commander wouldn't know how many casualties his battalions have taken per se, but he would be able to observe that the skirmish line in front of the First Brigade is being driven in and his artillery chief has had to switch out the initially-committed batteries for the reserve, and would be able to draw the correct conclusions from this evidence. (Compare to the battle experience of a medieval commander who is fighting in the front line and won't know how the battle as a whole is going until the enemy are fleeing or he finds himself captured or killed.)

@Mark J Wilson: if we change 'casualties' to 'combat effectiveness', is that better? (I did mention 'friction markers', for which you can read 'shock', or 'fatigue', or whatever other measure of combat effectiveness you prefer.)

A division commander might not know everything that was going on but he would surely have some idea of which battalions were getting battered. It also depends a bit on the timescale of the game. He won't know instantaneously but he will hear about things eventually.

Why should the rules limit the number of units you can command?

My formula of 50 units/elements for a 4-6 hour game is based on per player. One way of having larger games is to have teams of players per side. I have found there is some friction which reduces efficiency, but its manageable. 2 players per side can manager 100 units/elements, 4 players can manage 200 units/elements. Each game will take longer, for simple physical reasons, but you can still get a game completed within a day. I have never seen a game with more than 4 players per side, but i suspect they may require in a very long game – perhaps 8-12 hours. I am also assuming you want an end with a clear winner or loser, normally determined by objectives, with some impact due to casualties.

A division commander might not know everything that was going on but he would surely have some idea of which battalions were getting battered. It also depends a bit on the timescale of the game. He won't know instantaneously but he will hear about things eventually.

Afterall, we are playing a game in the end (wargaming is not really a simulation.) BBB, like all wargame rules has to make concessions to the principles of game play. I never thought that stand removal in BBB represented actual casualties but, as you say, a degrading of combat effectiveness. It is the fresh and spent status of units that really matters. Stand loss is the way we move from one to the other.

Getting back to the numbers per Fm's original question:

Most rulesets don't limit the number of units a player can command. In principle, given time and space, you could expand as much as you like. To take it to the extreme, OC's example of a Johnny Reb Gettysburg game could mean 50-60 regiments per player, but why stop there? You could use a company-based ruleset so each player has several hundred companies to make decisions for; or a skirmish ruleset where a player manages 30,000-40,000 individual men, rolling their individual reaction tests and tracking their ammunition and recording their wound locations. Who says you can't?

Obviously, practicality says you can't. You'd be using the wrong tool for the job. Personally, I think trying to fight entire ACW or Napoleonic battles using rulesets that require decisions for individual regiments or battalions is also a case of the wrong tool for the job, the wrong level of granularity.

Apart from the time it takes to make and resolve all those myriad decisions, the real problem (I think) is that you can't see the wood for the trees. You need to abstract enough of that lower-level stuff to appreciate the shape of the higher-level stuff. Limiting to 8-12 units per player keeps the decision set manageable and clear enough to be meaningful, while still complex enough to be interesting.

Rambling a bit here but I hope I've made some sense.

The answer is any number!
Why is this the answer? It is because of regulation.
Battalions within brigades, no more than enomotia within phalanxes, were in the habit of making independent combat decisions that differed from the other units and sub-units within their commands or armies.
No end of clever gismos and subtly "elegant" mechanisms will reproduce systems of troop management better than the actual historical methods.
No bag of dice, pile of chits scattered across the table, cards shuffled or tosses of coins will do it any justice whatsoever!
The historical method was simple, it worked for approximately 600 years in the classical period and for around 300 in the early modern.