Scaled Damage in Mass Combat

By vastrix, in Rogue Trader Rules Questions

I recall someone posted this, but for the life of me I can't seem to find it. It goes a ways in adjusting to the fact that the power of a unit is unchanged by the number of soldiers in a unit. So my hundred man band of soldiers has the same power as my thousand man band of soldiers. The only difference here would be the strength of the unit.

Does anyone know where this post was or have a method of scaling damage due to different sizes of troops?

No first time i read this.

My suggestion is to cut down all troops to comparable levels.

Everybody gets divisions of 10k troops in all out wars, small brushfires have everybody fighting with companies of 150 men etc.

Otherwise the canny player will split his troops until he is fighting with hundreds of squads with 10 men inside.....Overexaggerated example.

Hmm. There's this thread which includes a lot of discussion on the subject.

A couple suggestions I spotted ...

From Millandson: Make damage tiered to unit sizes (e.g. Companies = 2d10 + Power, Battalions = 3d10 + Power, etc).

From VonTodkopf: Use multipliers for personnel numbers (incorporates the potential to scale down a unit's firepower based on losses).

From SanderJK: Use logarithms such as "10log(unit strength) = number of d10+1 increased by first number/2 (rounded down)".

Voronesh said:

My suggestion is to cut down all troops to comparable levels.

I'd even go as far as to think that this is the intended way - though it certainly would've been helpful to add this sentence somewhere...

Yeah I had considered allowing each company deal out damage on it's own, or when several companies are masses. Roll once for damage, minus the armor, and then multiply by the number of companies.

Voronesh said:

No first time i read this.

My suggestion is to cut down all troops to comparable levels.

Everybody gets divisions of 10k troops in all out wars, small brushfires have everybody fighting with companies of 150 men etc.

Otherwise the canny player will split his troops until he is fighting with hundreds of squads with 10 men inside.....Overexaggerated example.

As a note, every player who tries this will have his troops completely wiped out by artillery fire in short order.

Many small troops are much more suspectible to artillery strikes and orbital bombardments than single large units.

If attacked by lots of small units, having artillery shoot your own position actually becomes a viable tactic.