Battle group sizes

[lawrenceg]

8 Protected Average Undrilled Medium Foot Xbowmen (48 points)

or

4 Protected Average Drilled Cavalry with Bow, L/Spear & Sword (48 Points)

I already have one unit of each in the army.

Just trying to put together a Britcon list with no games using the army and no games anyway in the last 2 months.

I suspect you won't go to far wrong if you take whichever would be better in DBM (8 Irr BwO or 4 Reg Cv O).

[jre]

Ressurrecting an old thread, just to comment on our last experience with BG sizes.

As we have fought very little games with strong infantry armies we played a classical Greek (Phokian with Spartan ally) agains a Middle Republican Roman.

Most Hoplite BGs and javelinmen BGs were 8 strong (the army has only hoplites and psilois, 7 BGs of each), except for the Spartans. The Romans were in 6 strong BGs, including the legion, the velites, the cavalry and the allies, Thracians and Spanish.

The end result was that except for the legions, the strong Greek shooting disorganized most of the Roman army, even breaking both a light horse BG and the Spanish BG. On the other side, the 8 strong BGs ignored all the Roman shooting, though it certainly takes some practice to manoeuvre such big blocks when you spend half your time evading and facing up again. The one melee between javelinmen went to the bigger BG.

In the legion/hoplite fights, numbers counted less because the Spartans were 6 strong and most of the fight was decided at impact, so there was no numerical advantage and the lines were more or less aligned so the overlap was from a disrupted BG. The hoplites won 2 out of five matches (1 out of 2 for the Spartiates) by keeping steady at impact. A protected hoplite BG did win through numbers in an isolated melee on the side, as the even melee went down to the side with more dice.

So for 32 or 40 points each, I am a convert to the school of big LF groups, if there is good HF to hide behind.

José