Games with no squad coherency?

[Ivan Sorensen]

I am curious:
What games can you think of where:

A: The figures are based individually and represent a single character each
B: They are organised into “squads” or similar.
C: There is no hard coherency rule (meaning no requirement to remain within x inch of each other or the leader).

[Rod Robertson]

Ivan:

Limiting my comments to WWII and Cld War skirmish and platoon plus level tactical games in my response. Do you want other periods like ACW, Franco-Prussian War, or WWI included?

The old game Battleground WWII by Easy Eight Games (late 1990s) allowed players to ‘leave behind’ troops from squads but severely limited what they could do when outside of command and control. They could basically occupy a parcel of terrain, defend themselves by fire against seen enemies, melee in close combat if attacked, attend to heavily winded casualties, watch/guard prisoners and break plus rout if fired at. No manoeuvre, no non-broken movement towards the enemy, no initiating close combat (unless Soviet troops who had gone berserk), no rallying, no passing on information to other units or higher levels of command, etc.

Cheers and good gaming.

Rod Robertson.

 

[ian pillay]

One Hour Skirmish Wargame, fits this bill nicely.

Tally-Ho! Check out my blog at…..
http://steelcitywargaming.wordpress.com/

[Olaf Meys]

Well I suppose Mordheim, Necromunda, Rangers of Shadow Deep, and Frostgrave fit that bill- a “warband” or “squad” of 3-12 or so figures.

http://mainly28s.com
wargames review site...

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

Yeah, I was just thinking that same thing.  I can’t think of any game where squads can break up where you have a platoon to play with.  Fire teams sometimes, but it’s like breaking up battalions in Napoleonics…done sometimes historically (into two “wings”, as at Barrosa, when a big full strength battalion like British guards which is equal in bayonets to 2-3 line battalions who have been on campaign awhile maneuvers as two units) but rarely done in games.  I wouldn’t have a problem with detaching a man or two…but they should become pretty static without  even a corporal nearby to lead them.

Unless of course they are “heroes”!

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[MartinR]

Charles Grants “Battle”, Arc of Fire, Fistful of Lead. To name but a few.

There are plenty of games which like to pretend they use individual figures, but actually they just run around  in a big clump and the individual figures are just strength points.

FFoL actually makes a pretty good WW1 and WW2 skirmish game, we play it a lot.

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[bobm]

Research on combat groupings of small formations generated some interesting outcomes on teams.  The results of the research is used by fire crews, Police and sports teams.

In effect:

• no “team” exceeds 7 members.
• A group of more than 7 will automatically break into subsections in the range of 3-5 members
• the optimum team size is 5
• each team has a leader, but the actual leader is not always the one with the highest “rank” (I think we’ve probably all heard stories of the Sergeant looking after an LT so no surprise here).

Have a friend who was in the fire service.  We were discussing and he was disputing the numbers, he argued that fire service teams were of 7 only because that’s what fitted in their vehicles…I answered perhaps that was why they made the cabin fit 7.

Food for thought when considering splitting down sections of men.

There's 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.....

[Mike]

Whilst Mordheim does not have a rule that says you must stay within X of a friendly model, there are disadvantages to not doing so.

So where possible it is best to.

[Shaun Travers]

FiveCore Skirmish

🙂

[Buck Surdu]

GASLIGHT was designed for VSF, but it works okay for WWII given the no-coherency desire.

[John D Salt]

bobm wrote:

no “team” exceeds 7 members.
A group of more than 7 will automatically break into subsections in the range of 3-5 members

Can you give me a reference for these, please?

Thanks in a basket.

All the best,

John.

[kyoteblue]

D&D ???

[MartinR]

John D Salt wrote:

bobm wrote:

no “team” exceeds 7 members. A group of more than 7 will automatically break into subsections in the range of 3-5 members

Can you give me a reference for these, please? Thanks in a basket. All the best, John.

I’d be interested in that too. All the management stuff I used to do on organisational design emphasised span of control around “two pizza” teams with the maximum around 15.

 

 

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[bobm]

John D Salt wrote:

bobm wrote:

no “team” exceeds 7 members. A group of more than 7 will automatically break into subsections in the range of 3-5 members

Can you give me a reference for these, please? Thanks in a basket. All the best, John.

It dates to the 1990’s, pre-internet and often quoted in more cutting edge wargame rules and articles of the period (Hell By Daylight rings a bell).  However a quick Google search throws up multiple more modern articles that are still making similar conclusions.  Modern militaries using fire teams of 4, sections/squads of 8-9 that are actually two fire teams etc.

There's 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.....

[Guy Farrish]

John, Martin, if there is some solid, objective, real world based analysis about this I apologise to BobM (and Jim if it was Hell by Daylight), but I suspect the current popularity of this comes from a current HR*/Training/Management fad not unrelated to some evangelical Project Management BS about Scrum.

This is a restating of the blindingly obvious that human groups work best in teams around 4 or 5 or 6 or 7. Related to team sport numbers and the idea that in any game the 7, 11, 15 members break into discrete groups of 3-5 in active play at any time.
This seems to derive from research reported in organisational psychologist Richard Hackman and Neil Vidar’s book ‘Leading Teams’ which comes out saying the best team size is 4.6. Bags not be the .6.

A lot of this stems from cognitive psychologist George Miller’s 1956 paper; “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” This isn’t about quite what it has come to be used for, but that’s management theory for you. Even then +/- 2 should give pause for thought about its seriousness.

Military thought around the effectiveness of teams c4 are probably well known – the US Army Personnel Research Branch in Korea found that morale was highest when men were trained in groups of 4 and kept together. ‘Potential Determiners of Infantry Rifle Squad Effectiveness’, PRB Research Memo 54-49 and ‘Effectiveness of small infantry units: parts I-III’ PRB Report 980, September 1952.

Harold Gerard suggested that groups of 5 member groups are the most ‘solid’ psychologically following experiments with groups up to 8 on conformity of opinion about some objective item – eg length of a line. 5 was the sweet spot (not that they were right about the length but they held together under pressure to change opinion from ‘stooges’). ‘Conformity and group size’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology vol 8, 1968 p.70.

The latter two paragraphs are more or less stolen straight from: Peter Watson ‘War on the Mind’( Harmondsworth, Pelican Books, 1980). Which you no doubt have as bedside reading.

(*For my sins I did a very brief stint in an HR Dept of a British Govt agency which shall remain nameless- it was indeed Hell by Daylight. Prior to that horrific experience I managed to drag teams of service personnel around the globe doing stuff and indeed c4 seems a natural tight team number, and bigger units naturally tend to divide into groups around this size, certainly for purposes of drinking, ‘looking after’ each other in bars and running from irate taxi drivers.)

[Ivan Sorensen]

Perhaps a distinction is needed based on the amount of control required.

Back in the older iron age, the aim of the Danish school system was that class sizes should ideally top out around 15-20 (my understanding from teachers today is that average class size is more like 8 billion). But as soon as you moved into what Americans would call “special ed” the optimal size drops pretty markedly to 5-7ish. And of course for really intense tutoring you are down to 1-3.

[Author]

Posts