The Commander Series Forum

Hi all,

I'm quite new to large scale miniature gaming and i'm quite confused as to the size of a formation. Can I move my entire battle group at once on one order? If not, how do I decide which units are in which formations

Units are assigned to a formation before the start of the battle ,each formation has its own CO(only 1 per Battle-group)/HQ which can issue orders to all of the formation or various parts, they can also issue orders to units which are not part of their formation depending on doctrine but penalties may apply.

In theory your CO could order the entire battle-group, but its an unnecessary risk in most circumstances

Cheers, I think I understand. I Probably need to show on the model which formation or I'll forget. A colour code maybe?

I have painted the edges of my bases appropriate colours so I can see at a glance which formation is which.

I was thinking about that but after a wee solo play through I thought i might want to vary the formations from game to game

Greetings

You will often want to vary formations. I tend to write up the forces on a spreadsheet with each formation listed with its stats under the relevant HQ. Formations tend to be reasonably geographically distinctso it's not normally too difficult to track in practice.

Regards

Edward

I'm starting to understand the game more now. I had thought to keep some long range units back and these very quickly started to hamper advances as they effected comand rolls. Quite a clever mechanism.

Painting the base edge does have its drawbacks, however ive built up over 10,000 point armies each with set formations(based on battalion sized units) which I can pick an choose from as the game/scenario requires, and for smaller games I don't mind picking just parts of formations , I can ignore the coloured edge if need be.

And as for units holding you back, you could have your long range units upto 20cm behind your HQ and your leading units upto 20cm in front, giving a gap of 40cm from front to rear of your formation without any command penalty

It also depends on doctrine. Flexible doctrine armies can just declare turn to turn which HQ is ordering which stands. Normal can do the same, but at a penalty. Rigid are stuck with what ever troops they had in their formation at game start.

Also, don't forget that for ordering recce and indirect firing artillery such as mortars, you don't pay the distance penalty.

attoxicpixie, arnt units assigned to formations regardless of doctrine? Does it not effect some other aspects of the rules - ones I cant think of or locate right now?

At toxicpixie and Happymc:

Off the top of my head the only time flexible need to assign units to formations (and so HQs/the CO) is when they arrive on table using mobile deployment. Otherwise toxic is right - flexible and swap and change their HQs / units from turn to turn.

There are two uses of the word formation in rules. The first one is where you assign units to a particular command unit at the very start of the game. For rigid doctrine, this determines which units that command unit can give orders to and which ones it cannot. For normal, it determines whether there is a penalty on the command roll.

The second use of the word formation is where you assign units to which a command die roll applies. For rigid doctrine, this second formation is the same or a subset of the first formation. For normal doctrine, this second formation may include units from outside of the first formation but there is a command penalty for doing so.

Dr Dave & Siggian, thanks for clarifying that

atSiggian whilst I know and implement the Mortar = no command range penalty, I cant locate it in the book and in my last game I needed to show the rule to a new player, can you point me in the right direction?

Page 12, note 2 explains the distance penalty.

thanks why and how I didn't see that I don't know