On matters of scale and rules

As I am happily building the campaign background for Gondor, I struck a minor hurdle.  It seems that when Faramir was appointed Prince of Ithilien, he established a bodyguard unit called 'The White Company' led by Beregond, formerly a member of the Citadel Guard.  Excellent, a nice little backstory for a small elite unit that, along with the Rangers of Ithilien, are likely to form the nucleus of Faramir's force to reclaim Ithilien for Gondor.

So far so good.  But how big is the White Company?  It will have to be formed of volunteers, probably taken from the existing Minas Tirith garrison and even from the Citadel Guard, both of which have been sorely depleted by the War of the Ring.

Is the White Company 100 men, 200 men or 300 men?  What is a company anyway?  And how will the White Company be represented on the tabletop?  Why ask so many rhetorical questions?

The campaign will be big enough and detailed enough without changing the military organization from faction to faction too much, and it all has to fit into my existing rule sets anyway.  So I need a fairly basic military organisation that will both give m simple numbers of men for accounting and recruiting purposes, but which will also be readily represented on the tabletop.

I am going to trial a few different rule sets as the campaign develops, but in the beginning I am going to use Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game (SBG) for skirmishes with up to 50 28mm models a side (100 men/other races on the field at one time).  Skirmishes like this are 1:1 scale and terrain is a WYSISWG approach.  I really like the SBG  rules; they give an enjoyable game in about 2 hours, represent heroes and captains well (movie style), and I am not endlessly looking up the rules.  They also have a good system for morale when a side 'breaks'.  Good troops tend to hang around with a leader whilst poor or leaderless troops melt away very quickly.  BUT I find these rules very tedious when two large shieldwalls clash and there are endless rolls to hit and to wound.  Any more than 25 or 30 models a side can also begin to drag and just go on too long.

For medium sized clashes I intend to use GW's War of the Ring, at least initially.  I have only played it a couple of times.  I found it enjoyable to have larger forces moving around the table, but found myself consulting the rules a very great deal.  The rules also seem to suffer from the GW obsession with special abilities for units.  The abilities have interesting names that I either completely forget to use or have to keep looking up to remember what they mean. 

Anyway, I will give WotR a go.  As the smallest unit of manoeuvre is a 'company', comprising a base of 8 figures, that gives me a start on the matter of scale.  8 figures to a company base, I think a scale of 1 fig to 12.5 men gives a nice round 100 men to the company.  As a formation is comprised of several companies, usually 3, then a 'unit' becomes about 300 men.  Cavalry is similar, with 2 figures to the base, representing a troop of about 25 cavalry.  Formed into a unit of 3 or 4 bases gives about 75 or 100 cavalry.

That scale also articulates nicely to the skirmish scale, with a half-company of 50 men and a half troop of 12 cavalry being about the biggest I want for a skirmish.

That will mean that a typical 1000 point battle using the WotR would have about 2000 men a side, or about 20 companies of 100 men, and that feels about right to me.

For truly large battles I will use the Battle of Five Armies rules (BoFA), which is simply a variant of Warmaster.  I will use 10mm figures based about 10 or 12 to the 40x20mm base.  I am toying with the idea of using Hail Caesar instead (Hail Elessar?), but that is a bit down the track.  The scale difference should still work well, as a 3 company unit in WotR (300 men) now becomes a single base, and a BoFA unit of 3 bases comprises about 900-1000 men; called a regiment perhaps?

Then an army of say 15 x 3 base regiments is an army of about 15000 men, and again that feels about right in terms of scale.

So to recap:

Skirmish scale - SBG Rules 1 figure = 1 man
Intermediate scale - WotR Rules - 1 figure = 12.5 men; 8 figures = 1 base; 3 bases is a 'company' of 300 men (cavalry 75 men)
Grand scale - BoFA Rules - 1 figure = 25-30 men; 10-12 figures = 1 base (a WotR Company); 3 bases = a 'regiment' of 1000 men (250 cavalry).

So what does that mean for the White Company?  I think it means that we start in skirmish mode with a half-company.  If successful, then more volunteers might join, warranting a WotR base, and maybe, with time, even a single base of 300 men in BoFA scale.

There are other rule sets I want to try, especially Dux Britannica by Too Fat Lardies and also Dux Bellorum published by Osprey.  But as always, one has to start at the beginning.