Slitherine

As a long time miniatures gamer, I find FOG addictive, intuitive, fun and mostly accurate. The large variability in combat results is surprising. I am surprised by, for example, high quality pike units being bested by average medium foot on occasion.

One question that I am sure must have been asked relates to the apparent lack of a specific ground scale. This seems to have been abstracted; however, it seems important to create accurate historical battles. A pike unit of 300 could represent a syntagma of 256 (16x16). This unit would take up much less frontage than 300 Cretan archer skirmishing foot. A Roman unit of 300 could be assumed to be about half a strong cohort, but would be twice the width of the pike unit, as usually would be only half the depth.

I noticed in trying to create a scenario of the Granicus, that the Tharcian units had a strength of 1,000. When I matched a Thracian cav unit against the Persian average cavalry with a strength of 300, the Thracians did not seem to have any advantage in combat. Does the strength of a unit matter in combat or does the system only consider the quality and armour? Can you change strength in the scenario editor? If so, I could use this feature to properly construct the historical armies. I would use pike units of 1,000 and keep Cretans at 300. I would use Roman units of 500 and have more of them.

Thanks for any replies.

Unit personnel strength is purely cosmetic and has no effect on combat calculations.

Chris

One of the difficult abstracts of FoG is the unit strengths. The number of troops has no affect on the game mechanics. The troops strengths are there for historical or esthetic reasons. All losses are related to percentage losses of original strength. That's why some large units attacking smaller units may seem to lose more troops but still win the melee. The sequence of disrupted to fragmented to routed is what is important and these are based on percentage losses. You should use the option to show battle results as percentages instead of numbers lost. Numbers of troops lost in battle doesn't really tell you anything but percentage lost does. This was hard for me to grasp at first but once I got used to it it makes perfect sense.

Yes, you can assign any strength you want in the scenario editor.

mceochaidh wrote:Can you change strength in the scenario editor?

Yep: right click -> Hist Strength

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