Named units

Hello Lads

Joining a new game has made me aware of a different approach regarding named units.

Playing only one game I had inherit a nation were previous player (if existing) choose to not give a name to any military unit. Thus those are listed ad

3 horse sqd
3 infantry battalions

Sometimes, elements we all are aware of exist, like morale notations, drilling or particular equipment.

Joining a new game I have discovered that some units had their name (or example Regimental name) alongside with a listed commander and notes on clothing ( colours, badges, etc).

That is nice but if you haha e a huge army the order list is going to be 200 pages I think. I also always thought that this would have caused Richard extra job.

What is your opinion regarding that? Do you use extremely simple list. Or. Like to add details? Has anything regarding this proved useful?

Do you name ships also?

Nexus06 wrote:Hello Lads

Joining a new game has made me aware of a different approach regarding named units.

Playing only one game I had inherit a nation were previous player (if existing) choose to not give a name to any military unit. Thus those are listed ad

3 horse sqd
3 infantry battalions

Sometimes, elements we all are aware of exist, like morale notations, drilling or particular equipment.

Joining a new game I have discovered that some units had their name (or example Regimental name) alongside with a listed commander and notes on clothing ( colours, badges, etc).

That is nice but if you haha e a huge army the order list is going to be 200 pages I think. I also always thought that this would have caused Richard extra job.

What is your opinion regarding that? Do you use extremely simple list. Or. Like to add details? Has anything regarding this proved useful?

Do you name ships also?

I go for a half way approach in that I name the Admiral and his flag ship but not the other X number of ships in the fleet.

Think this makes it easier for Richard to write an account of how "Lord Nelson in his mighty hundred gun flagship the Victory lead an English English fleet of 30 lineships to Victory over Franco-Spanish Fleet."

Basically King George, PM Pitt and the Press are aware that the other 29 English Lineships have names and so do their captains etc. But they could probably not name them off the top of their head and the press reports would probably only mention them by name if they did something really good (or bad).

I take same position with Army in that I have an Army commander and sometimes a named cavalry commander and/or an artillery commander. While standing orders may include a general uniform and regiments include x number of battalions or y number of Squadrons.

Tend to go into specifics for some Guard Units or formations which have gone something of note. Thus in G2 the Rumelian Cavalry basically had Lancers Squadrons, Light Cavalry Horse Archers and Dragoon Squadrons. Only three units stood out - The Sipahi of the Porte (Elite Lancers), a bunch of Merc Horse Archers from the Khanate commanded by Iskander Kruppa from early on who ended up owning large chunks of Moldavia and Wallachia and forming their own Horde. Plus a Unit known as the Belgrade Horse which got Black Cloaks when they killed five foes each and had wolf head standards.

Take view that since the paper was normally hostile to my Cavalry (who were kind to their horses & mothers ) a lot of reports in paper were based on reports of Hapsburg/Venetian/Polish etc scouts etc which would have basically been X number of lancers. Y light cavalry, A number o foot.......oh **** its them again.

I take a similar approach to Stuart. I have a few ships that are named in order to make the writing of articles a little easier for Richard. I do have named formations and such in the Army and the Navy. For example... I take 10 ships of the line and group them together as the 14th Battle Squadron and then place them in Fleet structure as needed. The Army is a bit more difficult, but a group of battalions are placed in say the 21st Regiment of Foot that would be brigaded and then placed in a division and army. It does take some effort and costs a little more, but it makes organization of such forces easier.

Tend to name units either historically if I can find a good ORBAT, or failing that name them after cities or regions of the country I am playing.

With ships I just don't bother naming more than the flagship, its much easier for Richard to write 75 SOL lost in a storm rather than having to name every single ship, captain & cabin boy.

I have experimented with both approaches and can see advantages with either.

It is always tricky to decide how much to change in a position previously played, especially if that player knows more about fighting than I do or has designed the army to fight in a particular way.  But inevitably units will be lost or need to be adjusted since it is now your position.

With England the forces I had were very unbalanced and I needed recruits from existing units to make formations more useful - this applied to both army and navy.  So up to a point I was going to have to make choices fairly early on.

When it came to ships most larger vessels were already named, and I have stuck to that using either historic names or themed names to signify when a particular group of ships were built.  I also noted the date of construction on the uniform pattern for some ships.  For frigates and smaller ships it doesn't seem worthwhile naming every ship or being overly fussy about formation names because the nature of smaller ships is that they are assigned where needed.  Sometimes Richard will invent a name for an unnamed frigate that he refers to in the newspaper, which then sticks.

The army was much more problematic than the navy.  Historically most English regiments were known by the name of the Colonel, rather than a number.  When the Colonel died or was replaced, the name of the regiment changed.  So when I reorganised the army I tried to group units together in larger numbered regiments, adding historical names after the number or inventing titles where the unit performed particularly well.  Historically numbered regiments only became mandatory in 1751, but it is much more convenient than having to rely on names alone.   The other useful thing I did was to give a unit a title based on where it is serving (or will serve) so that I didn't have to remember why I raised it.  So "20th Regiment of Foot (Jamaica Regiment)" may originally have been raised in Liverpool, but was intended for service in Jamaica.   This worked for most infantry and cavalry.  There are (as always), some exceptions, though, where a unit has a particular commander or a non standard number of units and it works rather well.  When I want to form a new army I can just allocate 20th-22nd Foot, 3rd-4th Horse to form Jamaica Expeditionary Force under the command of General Flower, and send it on its way, without having to repeat a lot of the detail.

Where this method falls down is with artillery/engineers - it is just not practical to have a name or number for each unit of FA, engineers, etc.  So I tend to just have a reserve of FA which I then draw upon to add to formations as and when needed.

It does lengthen the asset list, but in a huge position it helps to be organised.  If you number units then you can determine quite quickly which units are missing (numerically), and find them on your sheets, whereas if you just have 50Frg which are constantly swapped between formations it is much harder to track down which ships are where and why you moved them there.  It also makes it easier to remember how many recruits you need to use to replace lost units so you are back to normal strength. The disadvantage of a numerical system is that if you don't specify which units should attack, Richard will tend to use the 3rd Foot to lead an attack instead of the 20th Foot, irrespective of their drill/sickness level.

Like others I do prefer to keep some period detail and uniforms, but with England this has tended to be only on units I have raised/reformed myself so I have lots of fancy tartan uniformed Scots.  I just haven't bothered giving basic units uniforms (probably for the same reason as JFlower doesn't name every ship - they don't tend to last long enough on the battlefield to make it worth doing).  This is probably the most important thing to remember - if you are intending to fight with your army/navy rather than just parade with it, then however nicely named/numbered and well balanced it starts off, it will be thoroughly messed up after a year or so of fighting.  You will have some units that despite being untrained perform brilliantly; others that may be well trained, but are just unlucky.  With a numerical system you always have the choice not to use a certain number if it proves to be unlucky.  I'm also experimenting with using certain ranges of numbers for colonial troops, so that it takes even less time to figure out which units should be where, so 40th-49th Foot would be reserved for America, 50th-59th Foot for India, etc, subject to certain exceptions, of course.

Whichever approach you choose it costs a lot less if you change it over a long period of time or when you raise units rather than trying to reorganise what you already have. And of course you can always rename regiments later on if your needs change, or just to confuse the enemy.

My take is to name the regiments and keep whole regiments in a force, as splitting into battalions is a bit of a stretch for my to keep under control, unless it is the odd dragoon squadron or from an elite unit.

Similarly to above I'd name a General or Admiral and one or two officers for their interaction but not more than that. I think Richard helps us find having a named force commander helps it react better. Otherwise it feels as effective as having senior officers vote on what to do next - something's actually happening Reg!

As Russia I'm looking at traditional unit names for tribal inf, numbered systems for western style troops with a combination for garrisons - a bit like Papa with town name included.

Purchased Russian Warships in the Age of Sail 1696-1860 this year so I'm looking at the historical set up for Russia's navy. Really good book if you get a chance to look at it with much never seen (published in 2010) in English information from a Russian naval historian. Not saying I'll be true to what it says made up the fleets (which even includes the Caspian fleet), but will probably include as an element at some point and see how it fares. Can't be any worse than current Russian navies across TGOK games

The Russian Navy in Game Seven holds the record for the most ships sunk in one month, Bet no one else has managed to sink 75 SOL in one go, took a lot of skill , hard work effort to achieve.

Was it a divine wind? The Mongols lost 2 fleets trying to invade Japan, the second around 4000 ships sunk in a typhoon, fully loaded with men and materiel of course...

Vauban wrote:Was it a divine wind? The Mongols lost 2 fleets trying to invade Japan, the second around 4000 ships sunk in a typhoon, fully loaded with men and materiel of course...

I had it down as a mixture of North Atlantic Storm and crews made up of sea sick serks inexperienced with conditions outside of the Baltic and coastal waters.

But perhaps it was a "divine wind".......Gods punishment on the Russians for the hostile position their diplomatic corp had put them in against the noble and godly House of Hapsburg. The Armies the Russian Diplomatic corp sent to Scotland and the America's for the same reason also suffered from plagues of midges and other types of plague.

It is believed that wh.en the Czar came round from his Vodka binge to find out that his Diplomatic Corp had given his new City of St Petersburg to the Swedes and left the Swedish Army in control of the route to Riga just so they could drown his Navy and expose some of his best regiments to the dreaded Scots Midges he got very C13 on them.

In actual fact some players in Glori have lost more than 75 ships but these have been either smaller ie Galley's, Corvettes or merchant liners or they have been captured. In terms of actually drowned in one month in one incident the 37,500 Russians are well in the lead.

But I have hopes for Rome is burning........Roman Naval disasters being impressive. In terms of pure man power lost the worse Roman Disasters were not on land V Hannibal but at Sea in the First Punic War.