[VariousRen]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Since I've been running a Mass Combat game for a while, I've been evolving my own spreadsheet which is here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...7HKWsvxU2LiMY/

Couple of notes, and why I think it is superior:
* The Element List Page lets you add special element types with non-standard rules. For instance, in my game, orc troops cost $2K less per month to maintain but are all Night troops, and I just added them as separate troops in the tracker. But the force rosters do lookups from the Element List, so you only have to type in the values one time.
* The individual subforce listings (ie, Trahaern Force or Skyler force) are linked back to the Full Order of Battle and to each other, so you can split forces up by adjusting the Count column on one page and have it automatically tell you how many elements of that type are Unused. You can also use this to record casualties: reduce the number of elements assigned to the Trahaern force, and it shows up as Unused on the Full Order of Battle, and you can then reduce the count there.
* You can copy, or even link, a subforce listing to another subforce list, on line 8, and then lines 9 and 10 will automatically calculate TS and Class superiority bonuses for EACH force, including (class) modifiers. You said you had trouble in play calculating that stuff and my sheet offers a solution.
* If you put the word "siege" in cell A4, it calculates TS and Class superiority for a siege, ignoring cavalry bonuses and calculating engineering bonuses instead.

I suggest you take a look at it and see if you can leverage it for your campaign.

As far as your battle goes, I'm surprised the enemy passed up the opportunity to take you by surprise. An encounter battle would have probably worked in their favor, and forcing you to Rally on the first turn would have kept you from gaining PB if you had won the Strategy contest.

The rest of your experiences mostly match ours, though "each force commander ... must choose a Risk Modifier" (MC p 33), so the enemy commander should have had to choose. But he could have just chosen 0.

I have seen a PC commander get knocked out of a fight due to Misfortune, but it's only happened once in the about 30 rounds of battle that have played out through the campaign, so it's pretty low risk.

Session notes from my own Fantasy Mass Combat game are written up here: http://noschoolgrognard.blogspot.com...bel/New%20Dawn

Looks like a nice sheet, I'll have to pull some of your features into mine! I wrote up a special one for my own group because we're using a modified version of the logistics rules, and it does the calculations for which town we're drawing supplies from and at what distance. It's worked out really well, and let us use Mass Combat to represent static defensive forces (like our own guard force) as well as armies marching far away from any supply.

I think the enemy failing to commit to an encounter battle was just a lack of understanding what it was. There isn't a good description of the differences in Mass Combat, so he went with a pitched battle because it seemed to be a full engagement rather than just skirmishing.

Risk modifiers are so huge that I think we'll be seeing our commander cap out their risk every time, unless we already have a huge edge over the enemy. For individual PC's it's less important, because even with max risk and all the bonuses, you're rolling at a 10 to give a +1 to the commander.

How have you dealt with important NPC's in your games? Are they able to take significant actions as well, or do you limit that to PC's only?