Scale and "historical" replay

[arnimlueck]

Hoping I do not repeat anyones posting:

it would be very helpful to have a good translation rule giving the ratio of haw many soldiers/warriors are represented by the units or elements used in the Art of War.
One of the really nice points in wargaming is browsing through todays post-battle analysis and trying to refight specific battles. A lot of research here is done to fix quantities of the opposing forces. Thus for refights a guideline for "translation" would be fine - just like
one Unit of Heavy Infantry Spearman represents e.g. 500 soldiers.
I know that some rough estimates and abstractions have to be made for this but still I advocate a common guideline.

Regards
Arnim

[tilman]

Hi Arnim,
afai see aow simply does not want to make such a relation. Maybe it is not necesary. Rules should work with both
elts. representing companies up to batallions. I do not believe in an elt. representing much more than a battallion, usualy you run into problems with suporting or specialist troops only present in small numbers! Under company per Elt it realy gives a skirmish game.
My own way to come from a battle description to a game is to make up the battle order first, than see how many tin units I can muster,
than divide and than use a scale ratio that uses as many elements as posible (I love big games).
As simple as that
T.

[sergeis64]

Usually games do give a "scale" ratio- I know Warrior and DBM do, however I do not remember exact numbers off hand.
But they are pretty accurate in relationship to tabletop area and figs. It is hard to repeat a historical battle exactly, since number accounts do vary greatly from one chronicler to other ( usually). In our club we did some historic refights, with equal numbers- usually with historically "correct" outcomes too.
Sergei

[honvedseg]

An exact "scale" of men per figure is probably a poor way to balance unit strength for game purposes. Army size varied considerably from battle to battle and culture to culture, and the only way to create a credible comprehensive army list is to have a "vague" size for each element. The only important point is that the matchup between two opponents was generally somewhat close, or else the smaller would have avoided battle in the open, or else surrendered or disbanded without a fight.