Slitherine

Do the expansion/contraction movement rules affect your choce on how many stands to have in your BG's? If so, how much and why? - thanx

DAS

It depends on the unit but they do have an impact on the choice of BG size.

For example bow sword cavalry in a BG of 4 bases can switch from 2 by 2 to 4 by 1 with a sigle expansion. As single ranked cavalry can evade this is a very handy trick and it is not available to BGs of 6 cavalry.

BGs of 8 pike when turning 90 degrees retain the same formation they had before (2 wide, 4 deep) BGs of 12 pike don't

There are some other cases where this kind of thing happens but I think these are the main two.

Like bow armed light chariots.

Schnockel wrote:Do the expansion/contraction movement rules affect your choce on how many stands to have in your BG's? If so, how much and why? - thanx

DAS

Not really.

Things like 'risk of being shot at and damaged' influence me more than movement rules. Also troops that suffer more from shallower formations affect size as well.

So, protected troops are in bigger formations than armoured.

Spear and Pike in bigger formations so they can absorb damage without losing efficiency.

hope this helps.

It's certainly a factor for me. For example, drilled MF archers are good in 8s because 2 wide and 4 wide are good formations. 1 wide is too vulnerable to shooting so 1 wide and 3 wide doesn't work so well.

I sometimes prefer to have missile armed troops in sixes working in tandem. This provides a bit of flexibility in manuever. depends on the number of missile armed troops I have available.