"Most Misrepresented Troop Type?" Topic

In my own games, I've started to wonder if some troop types are consistently misrepresented.

For example, in my English Civil War games, I tend to field fairly substantial artillery—impressive-looking gun lines that ought to dominate the battlefield. Yet in practice they often achieve very little. My gun-heavy Royalist armies are regularly beaten by a friend's Parliamentarians with little or no artillery.

That's made me question whether some troop types look more important on the table than they actually play.Or vice versa.

It also got me thinking about other examples:
Skirmishers and light infantry, for instance, are often very free-moving. In rules like 'Black Powder', the Marauder rule lets them operate well beyond normal command constraints. Yet historically they were usually closely tied to formed units and didn't operate independently for long &, to be honest, were rather ineffectual IMO.

Cavalry, too, often feel very decisive—delivering repeated, powerful charges and remaining effective in combat. But at Battle of Waterloo, massed cavalry struggled to break steady infantry, suggesting their real strength was often in disruption, threat and pursuit rather than outright destruction. And does cavalry fatigue carry enough weight in your rules?

Elite units are another case. Many rules give them strong combat and morale advantages, but historically "elite" often meant more reliable rather than dramatically more lethal. Even formations like the Waffen-SS divisions showed very mixed battlefield performance.

And then there are levy or irregular troops—frequently dismissed as brittle or ineffective in rules such as Hail Caesar. Yet forces like the fyrd at Battle of Hastings could hold their ground for long periods and in many armies these troops formed the bulk of the fighting force.

Across all this, I do wonder if we tend to:
overstate killing power
understate disorder, hesitation and command friction

So, what troop type do you think is most misrepresented in wargames—and why?
(Any period or rules set.)

A couple points from my reading
Artillery seems to do little damage until it gets to cannister range.
Seems skirmish troops do get farther from their backing than they should.
And from latest book -A Reasoned Examination of the Properties of the Three Arms – Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery: A Treatise on Lessons from the Napoleonic Wars (1832)
Infantry he says is superior to cavalry as it can stop.it as long as its in order and not caught unaware.

I always appreciate your input, 14Bore.
Don't you find in Napoleonic gaming, infantry squares are broken far more often than history would allow simply because gamers have a sneaking bias for cavalry?
My "thesis" would suggest one troop type misrepresented as overly powerful & another under represented as sometimes easy prey for those "Big Brothers".

There is always that chance or a square broken yet in Empire rules its extremely hard. My games its when the infantry dioes get surprised and doesn't make the formation. Its carnage at that point.

Set and setting, time and place plus the rules.

Cavalry in values 1914 vs 1814. The rules would be similar but the utility value changes. As far as ECW artillery, wait a century and you may be obliterating the enemy formations.

There is also the medium. A tabletop battle plays differently from a board or PC game. Even more so depending on the designer's biases. No Socratic perfection to see here people, just move along…

"There is also the medium. A tabletop battle plays differently from a board or PC game. Even more so depending on the designer's biases. No Socratic perfection to see here people, just move along…"

That may be pretty profound, CptBH. Could you please expand your thoughts?

For me, it's not that much with the cavalry/artillery/infantry discussion but from my observations of WW2 gaming, I would say "German Armor".
I've seen way too many games in which German Armor, (especially towards the last year of the war), was simply almost "super tanks", and more are fielded on the table, than one would realistically see. We know that the MKIV was the main tank one would've seen but guys like the "kewl factor" so you end up getting massed fielded units of Panthers, Tigers, and KT's.

The other issue I think that is often misrepresented is mortars.
In some rules, mortars are basically "Gawd". You can win a game with two mortars and crew depending on the dice rolls. I've seen games take longer to set up than to play due to dice rolling because of how powerful mortars are in the rules.

For my horse and musket stuff, I would say artillery is often underplayed until it's close range/cannister. No one really takes into effect how 3-4 shots of ball whizzing across an open field can cause disruption and disorder as troops break, and lines come apart.

Generally, artillery affects are underrepresented in games to improve gameplay. ECW guns, however, were not very effective.

Most misrepresented figures are the "dead" ones.
In Real Life™️, how many units are wiped out "to the last man"?

Napoleon's Imperial Guard.

They are often given huge bonuses as a unit, but their signficant success was highly situational – being held in reserve, being sent in fresh against a tired enemy, being used as a coupe de grace for an important objective.

Ok as far as games go, the medium used can have a profound effect on how you perceive the situation. A cardboard counter on a hex, a stand of figures or a computer image (usually a cross between the two). Do you di random results with a crt matrix, a percentage role in a pc or 'throw better than a 3'.

Some factors may not be represented due to player workload
while a pc can store a mountain of trivia. These can all skew results. In any case this strays from the core of the thread.
Sorry.

Too many ancients games treat camelry as cavalry kryptonite. Yes, Herodotus and Xenophon tell us Persian camelry routed Lydian cavalry, but if that were reliably repeatable camelry would've been far more popular than it even was.

Cpt Beefheart's "medium" point may be key.

If tabletop rules track casualties more easily than cohesion, are we inevitably overstating shock (cavalry) and understating disruption (artillery)?

So cavalry feels decisive, camels become "secret weapons" and Tigers become common—despite history suggesting otherwise.

Are we designing for drama rather than probability—and giving "cool" troop types more weight than they ever had?

A pet peeve of mine is horse and musket heavy cavalry

Very few rules put penalties on repeated charges – but a charge at full gallop wears out horses quickly and then after a charge cavalry, even well trained cavalry, don't rally on a dime

Medieval heavy knights as I recall often changed horses after a charge, but I don't think that was an option for our horse soldiers in the horse and musket period. We have a house rule where we apply penalties to the charge bonus/combat results after two charges in a row

And further to the sage comment about German armour, if you want to be real you need field a lot of StuG IIIs

Cavalry, too, often feel very decisive—delivering repeated, powerful charges and remaining effective in combat.

OTOH I feel some rulesets overdo the "blown cavalry" mechanism, particularly regarding trained, disciplined regulars. Too often it becomes a one-shot weapon, which may be correct for some ancient and medieval types but really doesn't hold water in later eras. I think it partly stems from depicting regiments (rather than squadrons) as the maneuver unit, something that may also contribute to your point about them being overpowered. Another aspect is that some of the dramatic, battle-ending charges loom too large in designers' imaginations. Since you referenced Waterloo, the fact that some cavalry units conducted a dozen or more charges that day gets lost in a narrative that focuses on the Union and Household Brigades, or Milhaud & company.

Longbows in particular. I myself have fallen for the myth of these as "knight killers" with volley fire tactics. But conversely I find that those who argue the most vociferously against that tend to swing too far the other way— longbows as technically useless except in very rare instances where their opponents made a Really Bad decision. My thinking is that they must have been of some significant value, as the English kings and battlefield commanders relied upon them for centuries. But the attempt elsewhere to mimic the same was limited— a sign that maybe they weren't as good as made out to be, even at the time? The mark of a super-weapon is that everybody either develops it or an effective defense against it; but with the longbow, this never happened. They were obsoleted not by defense or tactic, but simply by a cheaper way of fighting created by new technology— the musket. Henry VIII had longbows in his army.
Elizabeth I did not.

We seem to circle the same type of pattern:
Cavalry charges at full effect repeatedly.
Tigers appear far more often than they did.
Longbows become either "super weapons" or "non-events".

Are our games built around memorable battlefield moments rather than everyday battlefield behaviour? We create the troop type that enables our vision of warfare rather than re-creates it?

Don't forget that some "wonder weapons" are chosen because they are portrayed as battle winners in a set of rules, not what history says they were (unreliable, rare, ineffective, etc). For some players winning is the objective and history runs a really distant 2nd, if not last, place. So they won't worry if the 1809 French light infantry are effectively all armed with Parker-Hale or SR89 sniper rifles, they'll just worry about how many they can squeeze out of the army list.

Artillery is an interestind one. It's rate of fire particularly in the horse and musket period was slow. Perhaps 1 or 2 rounds a minute. Time is required to allow the barrel to cool, even a bucket and mop can only speed the system up so much.

Many cold war Artillery could only achieve a continious rate of 2 rounds a minute. Hence many rules overemphasise the effect, In reality ther are relatively few rounds being fired at any one time, but the desire for some to have "impressive" artillery overides the reality. Certainly as you move later like WW2 the effect is not really correct. Artillery caused much damage in Ww2 but most often by long term shelling of positions where troops are moving in the open not waiting for a final assult.

In the US field manuals it was noted the role of aertillery is to Supress and fix in place, not cause utter destruction. Yes, there are exceptions, one anecdote noted in WW2, a field rendered to dust 6ft deep but it was hit by Very heavy naval artillry. On the Normandy beaches naval gunfire faild to destry many batteries, they were suppressed for a time but started to fire again.

Cavelry, I have not plyed for many years horse and musket and ancients. But even then most army lists allowed far more cavalry in proportion to infantry for many armies not on Steppe. I put this down to the aim for artistic merrit over reality as has been said for Tiger presence.

All manuals talk about suppression of infanrty, and even in the Americal Civil war it was noted that once a side went to ground it was hard to get them up and moving.

Suppression at least to some seems to be a crime against Toy soldiers and hence dowes not appear unlike in the real world. This is again a confict of style ofer substance, choose your side.

I read an account of an americal Civil war battle where there were frequent stoops to redress the line as it advanced to prevent cavalry threats, nowher have I seen rules that accomodate this.

Great post, UshCha.

"All manuals talk about suppression of infanrty, and even in the Americal Civil war it was noted that once a side went to ground it was hard to get them up and moving.

Suppression at least to some seems to be a crime against Toy soldiers and hence dowes not appear unlike in the real world. This is again a confict of style ofer substance, choose your side."

There's a new thread right there.

Picking up on UshCha's point about suppression, I wonder if this comes down to a broader design choice in wargames.

Some rules seem to prioritise what might be called style — visible effects, decisive outcomes, and a steady flow of action on the table.

Others lean more toward substance — modelling behaviour we read about in accounts: troops going to ground, hesitation, difficulty in getting units to advance, and the cumulative effects of pressure rather than immediate destruction.

Neither approach is necessarily "right", but they do lead to very different games.

If suppression, hesitation, and friction were represented more strongly, we might get something closer to historical behaviour — but possibly at the cost of tempo and clarity.

On the other hand, emphasising casualties and decisive effects keeps the game moving and visually satisfying, but may drift away from how battles actually played out.

I will admit that personally, I lean towards "Style" but I tip my hat to the "substance" players (Ush Cha, I think, amongst them).

Ive always struggled with artillery in Horse and Musket and Pike and Shot armies. Real commanders spent huge amounts of time and effort to drag artillery around, and losing them was regarded as a catastrophe.

Yet in games, they generally bang away ineffectively for a couple of turns before being either masked by their own troops or overrun by enemy cavalry. If you do increase their lethality, then both sides just hide behind Grand Batteries and conduct Somme 1916 style bombardments for the entire game while the infantry are blown to pieces or hide.

wrt super tanks, I have no objections whatsoever to Tigers, Panthers, ISIIs or whatever turning up as long as it is historically justified. Panzer Division Munchberg was entirely equipped with Panthers and King Tigers, and it would be a bit odd if it turned up with Panzer IVs. I did once let the Germans field the whole of Grossdeutschland at Kursk including its Panther brigade with 200+ Panther Ds, they weren't even that disgruntled when half of then were disabled by breakdowns and mines before the crossed the start line. It didn't make much difference what kind of tanks they were using in the game as they had to winkle infantry out of fortifications protected by minefields.

WW3 games seem to be the worst offenders where NATO is mysteriously equipped with wall-wall Challengers, Abrams and Leo 2s, wheres for most of the Cold War period the NATO mainstays were M60s, Leo 1s, broken down Chieftans or M48s…. I restrict WW3 to pre 1984 for those reasons.

From Murphy:

In some rules, mortars are basically "Gawd". You can win a game with two mortars and crew depending on the dice rolls. I've seen games take longer to set up than to play due to dice rolling because of how powerful mortars are in the rules.

8 year old boys rolling dice are the Tigers' worst enemy. My son killed 3 Tigers with mortars. He needed 2 on D100, and of course extraordinarily firepower rules. Home rules.

Kids under 10 rolling dice should sort out most anomalies.

Interesting points, UshCha.

Going back to the OP's first post, sometimes poor troops fight well, and sometimes good troops fight poorly. An interesting mechanic to use is that you don't know the morale of your troops until they have to take their first morale test, at which point you roll on whatever table you came up with to see how your troops feel on that day.

@14Bore:

Thanks for sign-posting this:

* OKUNEV, Nikolai c1832: "A Reasoned Examination of the Properties of the Three Arms – Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery – A Treatise on Lessons from the Napoleonic Wars" [Edited by Ned ZUPARKO, and John CURRY c2026]

* History of Wargaming – OKUNEV book c1835

Until postie turns up with my copy, I found this:

* LIPPITT, Francis c1865 "A Treatise on the Tactical Use of the Three Arms: Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry"

* Gutenberg – LIPPITT book c1865

NB1. It'll be interesting to see if Lippitt ripped-off Okunev.

NB2. Lippitt incorporates lessons from Napoleonic times alongside those from the ACW.

The temple forces and Ikkō-ikki of the Sengoku period are overwhelmingly misrepresented thanks to later period imaginings. In addition to the typical visual misrepresentation of all the fighting forces of the period (uniform matching armour and clothing, and everybody with sashimonos which is a visual convenience from movies and video games that carries into a convenience for tabletop gaming as well), the fighting abilities and kit of the temple forces are quite distorted.

There are no contemporary illustrations to go by, and later artistic license has been applied liberally.

The image of fighting monks in flowing robes with white hoods and wielding naginatas was a later Edo period creation, based on images from a large corpus of illustrations of the eleventh century Tale of Genji, and the later Tale of Heike. There is no evidence that the monks dressed for battle like this in the 16th century, nor that they fought in mass with naginata (which had fallen out of general favour as a weapon). And just visually, even if they were fighting in their robes, they would be a wide range of individual colours not just saffron.

The notion of the Ikkō-ikki as peasant mobs armed with sharpened bamboo and farm implements was an even later creation of the Meiji period. Like the images of the Sohei monks, it is the image quite beloved by figure manufacturers, rules writers, and gamers.

The Ikkō-ikki, fighting leagues formed to support the Honganji temples, were drawn from a very wealthy merchant class, lower status farmer-samurai, and even some retainer samurai who defected from their lord to help defend their temples. There is no indication they were less well armoured and equipped as the daimyo forces they were fighting against. Peasants, like with any military force of the period, would be most usefully employed as porters.

It's hard to imagine how a peasant rabble with improvised weapons could hold out for over a decade of intense fighting and sieges against the most powerful and rising daimyos of the period.

The religious fighters were also quite well equipped with muskets, even before the daimyos began adopting them in mass. Some of the temples were manufacturing centers for the guns!

Oda Nobunaga himself, who is famous for being the first daimyo to equip his fighters with large numbers of muskets, learned his lesson the hard way in an attempted siege of Negoroji Temple in 1570 when his forces could not breach the walls in the face of the massed gunfire of the defenders.