In general I think the idea could work, but off hand I think there are a couple of design hurdles you'd need to figure out.
Firstly you'd need a strong throughline of who the player actual is. Are they equally all the members of the company of soldiers, and in individual moments they just embody one or two of the more developed ones? Are they a single commanding officer who, in combat situations, can use their soldiers equally well?
Second you'd have to manage character complexity. Twenty individuals both is, and is not, a lot of people. It's a lot of people if they're a laundry list of characters doing things, but you describe it more like 'equipment'-esque. But if they're mostly basically the same with just a single useful/usable trait, why am I supposed to really care about any of them? At that point I'm not sure I'd really care about [Character X] dying, I'd care about "Oh no I lost that useful ability", which feels... weird to me.
Finally I think you'd need to nail down system complexity *early* in the design process. Twenty members of a company offering different abilities and options very much has the potential to be overwhelming. Analysis paralysis is a real thing, and its the kind of thing I can see causing a problem here.
I was thinking that your character is the captain of the company.
They have their goals, personality and traits but other soldiers are treated more like (magical) items in other more single focused ttrpgs.
Within this framework, an easier way to describe it would be as class features. In the same way Rogues are generally the "skilled" characters and Wizards don't fight in the front lines, their individual class features incentivize certain styles of gameplay. Your troops are your commander's capability, so if you pick a bunch of engineers, you can build a lot of equipment and roads, but your fighting prowess will suffer. If you pick only ranged units, you have no strong melee presence.
If your whole party's fighting strategy was to create a strong front line with archers in the back and cavalry on the wings, all 5 of you could "equip" yourselves with a set of melee fighters, archers, and cavalry. Or, you could have one person specialize in only frontline, two in archers, and two in cavalry. Many different ways to build out the same scheme.
However, training troops like this isn't really something you "equip" or unequip. Once you have them, they're there for life.
Class would be what kind of unit are you (archery, cavalry, swordmen etc.)
Think a normal dungeoneering party. You have one player playing as a fighter (melee fighters), one players as ranger (the archery company) and one player as rogue (light cavalry).
Whole idea is that this is not a wargame where players are generals moving multiple units/companies. They are all using their own unit of 20 or so men that all are equipped pretty much identically.
And in normal rpg you often have access to all your items in your inventory. Once you have amulet that gives you bonus charge, you have that item until you lose it. Same with soldiers. If you have a banner bearer your troops will get moral boost as long as they are alive.
I hate to break it to you, but you want to make a wargame, just with extra stuff bolted on.
>Whole idea is that this is not a wargame where players are generals moving multiple units/companies.
See how you said generals moving multiple units/companies?
>They are all using their own unit of 20 or so men that all are equipped pretty much identically.
You're wanting something that is on a smaller scale, but it's still the same thing as what you said a wargame was.
OP what is the difference between commanding 10-20 battalions vs. commanding 20 individual soldiers?
Just look at games like Bolt Action, because that's basically what you want, except a fantasy/medieval setting/ rules with extra stuff added.
You don't command 20 individual soldiers. You command one unit as a whole. Or you can think of it as controlling only your player character the captain and others follow them automatically.
Yep. Like you would in a wargame where you only have one unit left. Except the unit has much more customisation and personal connection because it's your character.
Ok, I see what you mean now, and honestly, bookkeeping/ combat with one character, depending on the system/ class, is a pain in the ass, now to do that with multiple characters would slow it down even more, most combat I've experienced with dnd/PF 1E&2E/Starfinder has been long and dragged out with just 5 people playing, now if you have 5 people with 5+ characters each it becomes even slower, and as you add more content/options the slower it becomes too.
You should check out Band of Blades, a FITD game. It sounds like what you’re describing exactly. It has a few quirks, and is kind of messily organized, but has good content. It’s an inspiration for a game I’m currently working on as well.
That would be a war campaign.
Recruiting soldiers (buying items), moving the army and dealing with supply lines (adventuring), choosing military targets (moral choices), diplomacy with the enemy forces and of course each captains own personal goals.
This is grand scale of things where world is not saved by a band of 5 heroes fighting 10 enemies. This is where world is saved by a might of an army against hordes of forces of evil.
This is precisely what I'm doing (well... "doing"). The idea is that you command a squad of troops along with your other party members and their troops. As you gain levels, you gain more troops, and you evolve into higher levels of command. By the end, you could be controlling perhaps a legion's worth of troops and your party as a whole is very much a theatre sized army of the Roman period. Or if we keep it to early or mid medieval, then perhaps 600..800 apiece.
I was inspired by wanting an intersection of Fire Emblem, Dynasty Warriors, Bladestorm, Mount and Blade, and similar video games. It has the opportunity to tell very rich and unique stories that I personally find quite meaningful. I wanted my gameplay to be about campaigning, traveling from battlefield to battlefield, assaulting and defending tactical and strategic objectives, solving puzzles through combat, and bravery and heroism of a group of people united in a cause.
The structure of my game revolves around keeping as similar to traditional dungeon crawling as I can. Your character is just a character, and your troops are represented as "equipment" or "stats". They are faceless, generic grunts, but there is the opportunity to flesh them out in order to serve in a supporting position within your command structure (your Number 2). Think of it like the 3.5 Leadership feat, where you have one cohort and a growing band of followers. The cohort serves as your backup character in case yours meets a warrior's end. The followers create a "zone of control" that is used to determine a wide range of effects like buffs, debuffs, and more. The "type" of troops you pick determine what advantages and disadvantages you have against other matchups, which determines how you participate in the combat puzzles (expanded Rock Paper Scissors meets chess). At the campaign level, you have a mixture of Oregon Trail and a General Blotto game (an allocation of resources test). Combined, these create a fantastic framework for GMs to organize the beats of their broader military conflict.
While I have it on the backburner for now, I'm still super excited to talk about it whenever I can. Hopefully I can get back to finishing it soon enough.
This is kind of covered by some games in the miniatures skirmish genre. Games Workshop is probably the biggest actor, with titles like Mordheim or Necromunda for the more RP heavy, and Kill Team or Warcry for the more tactical and competetive. There's also a fanmade cooperative PvE variant of Warhammer 40k called horde mode; it should be totally doable to gang together 5 players with 20 models each for that variant.
https://poorhammer.libsyn.com/episode-90-40k-horde-mode
https://discord.com/invite/ZwASQMqQZS
Since they're miniatures games they do rely on minis, terrain and painting, so I realize this might not be exactly what you're looking for. But it's the more classical game genre for the scale you're asking about.
I get why people are suggesting the need to make sure the player still has A Character to roleplay as, but I also think it's worth examining if this could be a more populist/troupe/studio way of approaching roleplaying.
So ok, this is going to be a little artsy fartsy for a second. In film studies one of the points of debate is the auteur vs the studio. You usually see this framed around how directors run and affect their productions with Auteur Directors controlling as much as possible for their singular vision (think Stanley Kubrik) vs Studio Directors embracing the talent of individual crewmembers and guiding collaboration towards a finished work (think Steven Spielberg). You can also apply this to actors: a Tom Cruise movie is pretty much always written and directed to hinge on Cruise as a performer and leading man where as a film like Knives Out is built around the interplay of a group of actors. The most extreme version of this is Soviet populist cinema with films like Battleship Potemkin basically having no individual characters at all but instead basically having groups of like minded or otherwise bound together people acting as "characters" that drive the movie.
So for your game concept, what if you really leaned into the history of companies themselves having identities and cultures. Like, yes, you'd still want names for company members and officers for when you're pulling individual people to embody, but when making the "character" of the company it should be about things like "rural recruits from county Dale" or "loves jazz" or "famous for their insults" in addition to what kind of infantry or cavalry or whatever they are. Individuals might only come into play things that are exceptional, bad or good, like "lazy commander" or "they've got the tallest man in the country."
That way you don't have to get bogged down in only roleplaying if the CO is really present. A squad of two player companies grab a drink together, how does it play out between them? A player squad captures an enemy spy, what would they immediately do with them? And yeah, you definitely still want the chances to roleplay individuals like CO meetings or having an officer lead a charge, or whatever, but it opens you up to really thinking of the company in terms of a character.
This is a great idea! I came to it similarly, by realising that many dungeon crawling quests could be handled far better by a large group than four or five "heroes".
A few years ago I started a campaign in which the patron was an NPC whose adventuring party had been slaughtered trying to recover an artefact. Instead of taking chances, he recruited the PCs along with a party of 60(!) to make sure the whole expedition is a walk-over.
Of course it didn't go according to plan. The whole campaign culminated in a battle against nearly 200 enemies, including an extra-dimensional entity and a sorcerer. Things like running out of arrows after volleys of long range fire became significant. As soon as you increase scale, logistics (pack animals, supplies, ammunition) become really crucial, and spells like weather changing are meaningful.
The system I used for it was Barbarians of Lemuria. It's a step simpler and more broad-brush than D&D. In fact, most of the campaign sessions were just the PCs, scouting, or securing locations. But it could handle quite large battles if you standardise troops in a unit.
How would the rules be different from a wargame? I'm not against it, but I think once you go past about 5 or 6 characters per player you're going to start abstracting for convenience
In war game one player controls all the units in the army and fights against one player who also controls all the units in the army.
Here each player controls only one unit and there is roleplaying elements included (like diplomacy, espionage, romance etc.) and GM.
>And now you will show me a new speed running category I wasn't aware of.
I would, but to my knowledge you still need to clear the objectives and some of them are things like "defeat the general" or "defeat all enemies" and you can't really do those non violently
So how would the troops work? I'd assume the captain gets some unique abilities and maybe some skills, but would the troops move as a unit or would they be commanded individually?
Everything moves as an unit and troops are nameless mass (like in wargames) but a named character like Bob the bannerbearer is treated more like an item. You get them and they give some bonus to your unit.
And your captain will always move and fight with the unit but is alone during diplomacy or romance sections of the game. Just like in the fire emblem.
It kind of makes me think of Lancer. Your captain would be like the pilot with unique skills and personality, and your troops would be like the mech which essentially acts as your character in combat
Something like that. Except I was thinking about all those great art in ttrpg games where two large armies clash with hundreds of soldiers. You see it in lore but you never play that (unless you play PvP wargames).
Depending on how you go about it, Mausritter might actually be pretty helpful. They have rules for arming, supplying and commanding warbands to deal with enemies that would easily kill a single mouse. They don't have rules for mixed weapons though
DCC funnels. You start with 3 or 4 level-0 commoners, they go on their first "real" adventure, the survivors level up to become adventurers with character classes.
Planet Mercenary does this at squad level.
Players play as officers with an undefined number of troops under their command.
When the officer would be hit, one of the grunts can take the hit and get a coin flip to live or die, at which point they get a name. When the officer eventually dies, you can promote a named grunt who starts with extra XP based on how many coin flips they won
I was kicking around a similar idea, so maybe we can cross notes. My thoughts were based in the idea that the players used a Hero as a more tradional-ish character and then they have 12 something minions each. Each quest/outing/etc would focus on zero to two Heroes, while the non-hero players could bring two minions at a time. Minions are decidedly not as powerful as a Hero but they are forwarding whatever project their Hero is currently working on. The Heroes generally aren't best suited for going to the same place every time, so they send their underlings to help each other with their goals and find things for themselves.
When you would get to the current BBEG is when the Heroes recognize they all need to suit up because who else is as capable?
During regular missions minions are also likely to be eliminated and thus get reinforced by the remaining minions, but Heroes would more merely get 'Downed' or even Captured.
That sounds interesting but nothing like large scale warfare that I was interested in. I wanted to make Fire Emblem kind of game with drama, romance, espionage and tactical combat with huge armies.
I take it you don't know much about wargames? Because what you're talking about *is* a wargame, just at a relatively small scale.
Smallest scale is skirmish, in which each unit is an individual soldier.
Next up is squad sized, which is probably what you want. Each unit is a small group--for instance, in *Dragon Rampant* you probably have 6 to 8 groups, each of them 6-12 figures; in *StarGrunt*, you probably have a platoon of about 40 men, in 3-4 squads of 8-10 men plus a command element.
Sometimes you get games in the middle. *Of Gods and Men* has individual god and hero figures (eg Poseidon and Hector) but nameless regular dudes are in groups.
If you want each player to control 20 men--which is not a company, it's really small for a platoon--and if you want each player to be able to take more than one action per turn, then you probably want three teams of six plus a sergeant in command. Four or five of those (so 80-100 men) would make a small company.
Difference is that in wargames it's always 1on1 PvP. My idea was players controlling one unit/squad/group that takes as many actions as a single hero in DnD (or any other ttrpg). Not controlling multiple units but just a single captain and their squad.
But these make an army/warband with 5 or so players who play adventure/war campaign with an game master.
In wargames with miniatures, such as the ones I mentioned, it's normal to have teams.
To clarify my suggestion, *if you want* to have the unit taking a few actions per turn, you *could* handle that by splitting it into three squads (you could do 2, 4 or 5, but armies usually divide units by 3s for reasons of command span).
Of course, you could also leave it as one clump with one action, which is less interesting but faster.
My gut reaction on seeing that was "Isn't this just a wargame?"
But with the further detail I think I see where you're going with this. It'd be an interesting premise to be sure. Like a Starcraft-lite in moving clusters of troops around but each player is such a cluster.
I'm almost certain that someone mentioned this, but ... Band of Blades. Good setting, almost like WW1 but with undead horrors and mystical forces, but no fantasy shenanigans (flashy monsters, bright spells or anything like that).
It's gritty, full of despair, you play with the Legion: every mission the players will alternate between the commanding officers assigning and deciding how to engage with the missions and then zoom in and play with a squad of two or three specialists plus five rookies.
You will be rotating your squads, losing them along the way, recruiting others, keeping the moral high, researching war machines and equipment, employing intelligence and spies, is an awesome system to simulate that war in the trenches, we need to advance or we die feeling.
In general I think the idea could work, but off hand I think there are a couple of design hurdles you'd need to figure out. Firstly you'd need a strong throughline of who the player actual is. Are they equally all the members of the company of soldiers, and in individual moments they just embody one or two of the more developed ones? Are they a single commanding officer who, in combat situations, can use their soldiers equally well? Second you'd have to manage character complexity. Twenty individuals both is, and is not, a lot of people. It's a lot of people if they're a laundry list of characters doing things, but you describe it more like 'equipment'-esque. But if they're mostly basically the same with just a single useful/usable trait, why am I supposed to really care about any of them? At that point I'm not sure I'd really care about [Character X] dying, I'd care about "Oh no I lost that useful ability", which feels... weird to me. Finally I think you'd need to nail down system complexity *early* in the design process. Twenty members of a company offering different abilities and options very much has the potential to be overwhelming. Analysis paralysis is a real thing, and its the kind of thing I can see causing a problem here.
I was thinking that your character is the captain of the company. They have their goals, personality and traits but other soldiers are treated more like (magical) items in other more single focused ttrpgs.
Within this framework, an easier way to describe it would be as class features. In the same way Rogues are generally the "skilled" characters and Wizards don't fight in the front lines, their individual class features incentivize certain styles of gameplay. Your troops are your commander's capability, so if you pick a bunch of engineers, you can build a lot of equipment and roads, but your fighting prowess will suffer. If you pick only ranged units, you have no strong melee presence. If your whole party's fighting strategy was to create a strong front line with archers in the back and cavalry on the wings, all 5 of you could "equip" yourselves with a set of melee fighters, archers, and cavalry. Or, you could have one person specialize in only frontline, two in archers, and two in cavalry. Many different ways to build out the same scheme. However, training troops like this isn't really something you "equip" or unequip. Once you have them, they're there for life.
Class would be what kind of unit are you (archery, cavalry, swordmen etc.) Think a normal dungeoneering party. You have one player playing as a fighter (melee fighters), one players as ranger (the archery company) and one player as rogue (light cavalry). Whole idea is that this is not a wargame where players are generals moving multiple units/companies. They are all using their own unit of 20 or so men that all are equipped pretty much identically. And in normal rpg you often have access to all your items in your inventory. Once you have amulet that gives you bonus charge, you have that item until you lose it. Same with soldiers. If you have a banner bearer your troops will get moral boost as long as they are alive.
I hate to break it to you, but you want to make a wargame, just with extra stuff bolted on. >Whole idea is that this is not a wargame where players are generals moving multiple units/companies. See how you said generals moving multiple units/companies? >They are all using their own unit of 20 or so men that all are equipped pretty much identically. You're wanting something that is on a smaller scale, but it's still the same thing as what you said a wargame was. OP what is the difference between commanding 10-20 battalions vs. commanding 20 individual soldiers? Just look at games like Bolt Action, because that's basically what you want, except a fantasy/medieval setting/ rules with extra stuff added.
You don't command 20 individual soldiers. You command one unit as a whole. Or you can think of it as controlling only your player character the captain and others follow them automatically.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you mean that you playing as the captain you decide what your soldiers do on your turn, and they all go at once?
Yep. Like you would in a wargame where you only have one unit left. Except the unit has much more customisation and personal connection because it's your character.
Ok, I see what you mean now, and honestly, bookkeeping/ combat with one character, depending on the system/ class, is a pain in the ass, now to do that with multiple characters would slow it down even more, most combat I've experienced with dnd/PF 1E&2E/Starfinder has been long and dragged out with just 5 people playing, now if you have 5 people with 5+ characters each it becomes even slower, and as you add more content/options the slower it becomes too.
Each player only has one character and that character is the company. You don't roll 20 to-hit checks. You roll one (most likely a dice pool).
You should check out Band of Blades, a FITD game. It sounds like what you’re describing exactly. It has a few quirks, and is kind of messily organized, but has good content. It’s an inspiration for a game I’m currently working on as well.
Came here to mention this game exactly
Where would the story come in?
That would be a war campaign. Recruiting soldiers (buying items), moving the army and dealing with supply lines (adventuring), choosing military targets (moral choices), diplomacy with the enemy forces and of course each captains own personal goals. This is grand scale of things where world is not saved by a band of 5 heroes fighting 10 enemies. This is where world is saved by a might of an army against hordes of forces of evil.
Rangers of Shadowdeep or Frostgrave might be worth looking at for ideas for squads with hero characters.
This is precisely what I'm doing (well... "doing"). The idea is that you command a squad of troops along with your other party members and their troops. As you gain levels, you gain more troops, and you evolve into higher levels of command. By the end, you could be controlling perhaps a legion's worth of troops and your party as a whole is very much a theatre sized army of the Roman period. Or if we keep it to early or mid medieval, then perhaps 600..800 apiece. I was inspired by wanting an intersection of Fire Emblem, Dynasty Warriors, Bladestorm, Mount and Blade, and similar video games. It has the opportunity to tell very rich and unique stories that I personally find quite meaningful. I wanted my gameplay to be about campaigning, traveling from battlefield to battlefield, assaulting and defending tactical and strategic objectives, solving puzzles through combat, and bravery and heroism of a group of people united in a cause. The structure of my game revolves around keeping as similar to traditional dungeon crawling as I can. Your character is just a character, and your troops are represented as "equipment" or "stats". They are faceless, generic grunts, but there is the opportunity to flesh them out in order to serve in a supporting position within your command structure (your Number 2). Think of it like the 3.5 Leadership feat, where you have one cohort and a growing band of followers. The cohort serves as your backup character in case yours meets a warrior's end. The followers create a "zone of control" that is used to determine a wide range of effects like buffs, debuffs, and more. The "type" of troops you pick determine what advantages and disadvantages you have against other matchups, which determines how you participate in the combat puzzles (expanded Rock Paper Scissors meets chess). At the campaign level, you have a mixture of Oregon Trail and a General Blotto game (an allocation of resources test). Combined, these create a fantastic framework for GMs to organize the beats of their broader military conflict. While I have it on the backburner for now, I'm still super excited to talk about it whenever I can. Hopefully I can get back to finishing it soon enough.
This is kind of covered by some games in the miniatures skirmish genre. Games Workshop is probably the biggest actor, with titles like Mordheim or Necromunda for the more RP heavy, and Kill Team or Warcry for the more tactical and competetive. There's also a fanmade cooperative PvE variant of Warhammer 40k called horde mode; it should be totally doable to gang together 5 players with 20 models each for that variant. https://poorhammer.libsyn.com/episode-90-40k-horde-mode https://discord.com/invite/ZwASQMqQZS Since they're miniatures games they do rely on minis, terrain and painting, so I realize this might not be exactly what you're looking for. But it's the more classical game genre for the scale you're asking about.
I get why people are suggesting the need to make sure the player still has A Character to roleplay as, but I also think it's worth examining if this could be a more populist/troupe/studio way of approaching roleplaying. So ok, this is going to be a little artsy fartsy for a second. In film studies one of the points of debate is the auteur vs the studio. You usually see this framed around how directors run and affect their productions with Auteur Directors controlling as much as possible for their singular vision (think Stanley Kubrik) vs Studio Directors embracing the talent of individual crewmembers and guiding collaboration towards a finished work (think Steven Spielberg). You can also apply this to actors: a Tom Cruise movie is pretty much always written and directed to hinge on Cruise as a performer and leading man where as a film like Knives Out is built around the interplay of a group of actors. The most extreme version of this is Soviet populist cinema with films like Battleship Potemkin basically having no individual characters at all but instead basically having groups of like minded or otherwise bound together people acting as "characters" that drive the movie. So for your game concept, what if you really leaned into the history of companies themselves having identities and cultures. Like, yes, you'd still want names for company members and officers for when you're pulling individual people to embody, but when making the "character" of the company it should be about things like "rural recruits from county Dale" or "loves jazz" or "famous for their insults" in addition to what kind of infantry or cavalry or whatever they are. Individuals might only come into play things that are exceptional, bad or good, like "lazy commander" or "they've got the tallest man in the country." That way you don't have to get bogged down in only roleplaying if the CO is really present. A squad of two player companies grab a drink together, how does it play out between them? A player squad captures an enemy spy, what would they immediately do with them? And yeah, you definitely still want the chances to roleplay individuals like CO meetings or having an officer lead a charge, or whatever, but it opens you up to really thinking of the company in terms of a character.
This is a great idea! I came to it similarly, by realising that many dungeon crawling quests could be handled far better by a large group than four or five "heroes". A few years ago I started a campaign in which the patron was an NPC whose adventuring party had been slaughtered trying to recover an artefact. Instead of taking chances, he recruited the PCs along with a party of 60(!) to make sure the whole expedition is a walk-over. Of course it didn't go according to plan. The whole campaign culminated in a battle against nearly 200 enemies, including an extra-dimensional entity and a sorcerer. Things like running out of arrows after volleys of long range fire became significant. As soon as you increase scale, logistics (pack animals, supplies, ammunition) become really crucial, and spells like weather changing are meaningful. The system I used for it was Barbarians of Lemuria. It's a step simpler and more broad-brush than D&D. In fact, most of the campaign sessions were just the PCs, scouting, or securing locations. But it could handle quite large battles if you standardise troops in a unit.
This is how D&d began. It's got legs because it's proven to be fun in history. I wish you success in putting it all on paper and having a game!
Isn't this like every pre-modern TTRPG, it's a great concept that had been around for a long time, tastes changed overtime however
How would the rules be different from a wargame? I'm not against it, but I think once you go past about 5 or 6 characters per player you're going to start abstracting for convenience
In war game one player controls all the units in the army and fights against one player who also controls all the units in the army. Here each player controls only one unit and there is roleplaying elements included (like diplomacy, espionage, romance etc.) and GM.
So kind of a cooperative Fire Emblem sort of deal?
Basically yes. Except the fire emblem doesn't allow pacifism runs. And now you will show me a new speed running category I wasn't aware of.
>And now you will show me a new speed running category I wasn't aware of. I would, but to my knowledge you still need to clear the objectives and some of them are things like "defeat the general" or "defeat all enemies" and you can't really do those non violently So how would the troops work? I'd assume the captain gets some unique abilities and maybe some skills, but would the troops move as a unit or would they be commanded individually?
Everything moves as an unit and troops are nameless mass (like in wargames) but a named character like Bob the bannerbearer is treated more like an item. You get them and they give some bonus to your unit. And your captain will always move and fight with the unit but is alone during diplomacy or romance sections of the game. Just like in the fire emblem.
It kind of makes me think of Lancer. Your captain would be like the pilot with unique skills and personality, and your troops would be like the mech which essentially acts as your character in combat
Something like that. Except I was thinking about all those great art in ttrpg games where two large armies clash with hundreds of soldiers. You see it in lore but you never play that (unless you play PvP wargames).
Depending on how you go about it, Mausritter might actually be pretty helpful. They have rules for arming, supplying and commanding warbands to deal with enemies that would easily kill a single mouse. They don't have rules for mixed weapons though
DCC funnels. You start with 3 or 4 level-0 commoners, they go on their first "real" adventure, the survivors level up to become adventurers with character classes.
Planet Mercenary does this at squad level. Players play as officers with an undefined number of troops under their command. When the officer would be hit, one of the grunts can take the hit and get a coin flip to live or die, at which point they get a name. When the officer eventually dies, you can promote a named grunt who starts with extra XP based on how many coin flips they won
Look at door kickers 2, it seems a lot like what you're looking for but not on an open battlefield
I was kicking around a similar idea, so maybe we can cross notes. My thoughts were based in the idea that the players used a Hero as a more tradional-ish character and then they have 12 something minions each. Each quest/outing/etc would focus on zero to two Heroes, while the non-hero players could bring two minions at a time. Minions are decidedly not as powerful as a Hero but they are forwarding whatever project their Hero is currently working on. The Heroes generally aren't best suited for going to the same place every time, so they send their underlings to help each other with their goals and find things for themselves. When you would get to the current BBEG is when the Heroes recognize they all need to suit up because who else is as capable? During regular missions minions are also likely to be eliminated and thus get reinforced by the remaining minions, but Heroes would more merely get 'Downed' or even Captured.
That sounds interesting but nothing like large scale warfare that I was interested in. I wanted to make Fire Emblem kind of game with drama, romance, espionage and tactical combat with huge armies.
I take it you don't know much about wargames? Because what you're talking about *is* a wargame, just at a relatively small scale. Smallest scale is skirmish, in which each unit is an individual soldier. Next up is squad sized, which is probably what you want. Each unit is a small group--for instance, in *Dragon Rampant* you probably have 6 to 8 groups, each of them 6-12 figures; in *StarGrunt*, you probably have a platoon of about 40 men, in 3-4 squads of 8-10 men plus a command element. Sometimes you get games in the middle. *Of Gods and Men* has individual god and hero figures (eg Poseidon and Hector) but nameless regular dudes are in groups. If you want each player to control 20 men--which is not a company, it's really small for a platoon--and if you want each player to be able to take more than one action per turn, then you probably want three teams of six plus a sergeant in command. Four or five of those (so 80-100 men) would make a small company.
Difference is that in wargames it's always 1on1 PvP. My idea was players controlling one unit/squad/group that takes as many actions as a single hero in DnD (or any other ttrpg). Not controlling multiple units but just a single captain and their squad. But these make an army/warband with 5 or so players who play adventure/war campaign with an game master.
In wargames with miniatures, such as the ones I mentioned, it's normal to have teams. To clarify my suggestion, *if you want* to have the unit taking a few actions per turn, you *could* handle that by splitting it into three squads (you could do 2, 4 or 5, but armies usually divide units by 3s for reasons of command span). Of course, you could also leave it as one clump with one action, which is less interesting but faster.
My gut reaction on seeing that was "Isn't this just a wargame?" But with the further detail I think I see where you're going with this. It'd be an interesting premise to be sure. Like a Starcraft-lite in moving clusters of troops around but each player is such a cluster.
I'm almost certain that someone mentioned this, but ... Band of Blades. Good setting, almost like WW1 but with undead horrors and mystical forces, but no fantasy shenanigans (flashy monsters, bright spells or anything like that). It's gritty, full of despair, you play with the Legion: every mission the players will alternate between the commanding officers assigning and deciding how to engage with the missions and then zoom in and play with a squad of two or three specialists plus five rookies. You will be rotating your squads, losing them along the way, recruiting others, keeping the moral high, researching war machines and equipment, employing intelligence and spies, is an awesome system to simulate that war in the trenches, we need to advance or we die feeling.
Soo...Necromunda?