Adjustments to Mass Combat

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Coinage

I have been reading GURPS: Mass Combat, as I was wondering if it could be used to simulate large armies fighting each other.

I was hoping to see if it was possible to have battles with roughly thousands. I was hoping to have a sort of fantasy battles, with wizards and zombies and whatnot featuring in the battle. I was hoping to use GURPS for the "Generic Universal" part of GURPS.

In my Fantasy Mass Combat game, the largest battles had 5,000 to 8,000 combatants per side, and if the game hadn't ended early, we would have battles that were at least 3 times that large. Mass Combat scales very well on the high end, and the biggest issue with battles with hundreds of thousands of combatants is that you probably have too many specialty units to make it easy to keep track of what's going on.

But if a typical orc company in my game was:
1 element of Good/Average Heavy Calvary (TS 7.5 Cav, Mounted) [Orc Knights]
1 element of Good/Average Horse Archers (TS 3 Cav, F, Rec, Mounted) [Goblin Wolfrider Scouts]
4 elements of Good/Average Heavy Infantry (TS 24, Foot) [Orc Soldiers]
2 elements of Good/Average Bowmen (TS 6, F, Foot) [Orc Crossbowmen]
2 elements of Good/Average Light Infantry (TS 6 Rec, Foot) [Goblin Scouts]
1 element of Good/Average Spellcasters (TS 7.5 Art, C3I, F, Rec, Foot) [Orc Priests]

for a total of TS 54 (7.5 Art, 7.5 C3I, 10.5 Cav, 22.5 F, 16.5 Rec),

then it was pretty straightforward to figure out that an Orc Legion of 10 regiments of 10 companies was:
TS 5400 (750 Art, 750 C3I, 1050 Cav, 2250 F, 1650 Rec)

It was the special snowflake PC armies that were a problem, because a PC legion of 100 elements would have 25 different types of units with different gear, training, and troop type.

Still, the Mass Combat Fantasy game was a lot of fun and I definitely recommend running one.

[Emerikol]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

In my Fantasy Mass Combat game, the largest battles had 5,000 to 8,000 combatants per side, and if the game hadn't ended early, we would have battles that were at least 3 times that large. Mass Combat scales very well on the high end, and the biggest issue with battles with hundreds of thousands of combatants is that you probably have too many specialty units to make it easy to keep track of what's going on.

I play a computer game from John Tiller Software that represents the Battle of Leipzig. This was a battle in the Napoleonic Era (early 1800's) and I know it pretty well at this point.

So I bought mass combat and received it in the mail this week and was wondering if I could simulate that battle. I think setting things up would take a good bit of time because there are 100s of thousands of troops but after setup I think you could carry out the battle fairly easily.

The only variation to mass combat that I might make in that situation is to break it into several theatres and treat each as a separate battle. Still simulating that sort of game with mass combat could be computed and carried out in an hour I'm sure if you know mass combat well. Not sure I know it cold just yet but if I did I think I could do it.

Whereas playing the actual game of Leipzig is something I will do in one hour increments twice a week over many many months as I email files back and forth. So I think it does the job that it was designed to do on that front.