Questions about Fields of Battle

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guileus
Henchman
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Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:09 am

Questions about Fields of Battle

Post by guileus »

I'm playing a homebrew version of the Kingmaker Adventure Path, using Iron Heroes as the ruleset. Basically, it's a mix between low fantasy and weird fantasy (I don't like the crunchy high fantasy of PF that much so modified it a lot). The thing is that I want to make use of a wargame ruleset that's compatible with D&D in order to play the battles, since the rules used in the AP are more like the War Machine from D&D (more abstract and solving battles with some rolls, but not actually moving your troops on the battlefield etc.).

After perusing Warpath, Fields of Blood and other products, I settled on Fields of Battle because it has several things I like: you can use PCs as heroes within or outside units, you can convert creatures from D&D into units and it's scalable.

Now, after reading the rules I still have some questions so I was wondering if there was anyone who played FoB and could help me figure them out:

1) I understand that units are formed of "squads", or if you scale the ratio of troops represented in each chit/miniature, each chit or miniature would be a "platoon" or any of the other larger representations. However, when scaling up: do you also "scale up" the distance they are supposed to represent?

For example if you use squads as the basic unit, 1 inch = 10 feet. So if a human moves 60 feet in his turn, he would move 6 inches, right? But if you use platoon as the basic unit, do you scale up the distance, so that 1 inch = 50 feet and so a human would only move barely more than 1 inch? That would make it very difficult to play using the largest unit sizes, for each inch in a brigade scale battle would be 2,500 feet, how do you move troops in that scenario? Or does time also scale up (so that it's considered that each movement takes place in a longer time span)?

2) Regarding combat: do you also scale up the damage and UHP of each unit? For example if instead of squads I'm using platoons as the basic unit, so that each chit/mini represents 25 human sized creatures, should I multiply its UHP and the damage it deals for 25 instead of for 5? I'm asking because if I multiply *all* units it would be easier to not multiply any and just use the basic "squad" multiplier for convenience, even though for roleplaying purposes each mini represents more creatures.
For example my squad of 5 soldiers has 25 UHP. It gets dealt 4 damage points, multiplied five times, 20 damage points. If instead it was a platoon it would have 125 UHP. Dealt 4 damage points multiplied for for 25, it would receive 100 damage points. Isn't it easier to use the smaller scale (to do the math in your head etc), even if you imagine it to be a bigger scale battle?

3) How do formations affect how each unit's squads/platoons/etc. can attack and which cannot? In an example they give in the rulebook of a combat, it says that after the first round of attack by some elves on orcs, the orcs "Regrouping and moving into position so that more of their units are
in contact with the elf front, the 11 remaining orc squads assault theelves"
So I don't understand how each unit is supposed to have its squads arranged, how to "move" them during combat to get more of them to reach the enemy etc. What would the benefit of having several rows of troops be, if it's only going to limit your ability to attack a wider enemy unit (as some of them will be "behind" the front line, and I'm assuming no polearms are involved)?

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