I thought for a long time about creating an organised military during the second age. My various attempts didn't create anything that would hold up creatively so I decided after finally hitting on a good idea to use the army of the Realm. The Realm Legions are directly descended from the army of the Old Realm and follow many of it's fundamental principles. The main reason for the overwhelming strength of the Realm Legions is their use of the accumulated knowledge of the First Age. Armies are still organised and trained as faithfully as possible according to First Age practices. Unlike the idea of the Realm which was revived in a diminished capacity 750 years after the end of the First Age, the Legions are descended from an unbroken line from the time of Solar warlords. Many of them gained more individualistic characters from the fractious era of the Shogunate when legions fought eachother.
The Square
This description of a Realm legion's basic tactical unit is from a scene in Hero. I was very impressed by the units of the Chin army standing in squares forming vast areas covered with troops. So I thought of basing the main tactical unit on a square formation with a square number rather than using a decimal system (like 500, then 250, then 125) or basing them on getting the most from the Magnitude table. Something like 15 across didn't really sound like enough so then I thought of twenty. Each unit of 400 men is divided into subunits of hundreds. The leader of the unit commands of the hundreds and thee heroes command the others; one of whom is a senior commander. Each hundred forms a square of ten by ten men. The great thing about this formation is that it can rearrange itself from a square to a line or column facing either direction very easily by moving the square hundreds like blocks. The back two squares can move sideways and then forwards to form a line. Or the right squares can move forwards or backwards and then left to form a column. And a column in one direction is a line 90 degrees in the other direction.
Carrying on from my rules about mass combat, I'm not convinced about the rules for messangers in mass combat units. For one thing they aren't different enough to really be special characters. There should also be an optimisation of number of subunits for a size of parent unit. The advantages are if a square of shock troops confronted a captaincy from Harbourhead with 180 men they could split up into two units of two hundred and attack them from two direction with unit of equal Magnitude. If they were against a much smaller enemy they could split up into hundreds and surround them.
Each hundred is divided into ten man units who are trained to fight in column beside other units and in ranks.
This formation is extremely flexible and allows it to be reform very quickly. A unit this size could include a unit of skirmishers to combat enemy skirmishers and prevent them from being vulnerable to attack from a small band of light troops. Hand picked men, or one ten man unit from each hundred could carry a missile weapon such as a sling. Larger attacks would be countered by formations of missile troops. Missile troops would have different drills and different formations to shock troops (soldiers in the First Age and afterwards would have spent a long time drilling so they could changing formation as quickly as possible.) Another advantage of the square that missile troops would exploit is that it literally lets them form a square. Each side is one of the four hundreds of troops. Missile troops would probably spend most time of the battlefield formed into two ranks or another shallow line to allow them to shoot. The typical arrangement for a ten man unit is two lines of five so a unit of a hundred can have a frontage for fifty or twenty five men.
My military genius knows no bounds. In addition to forming square, column and line, the square mix of ten and four based units also allows them to form triangle. Triangle formations may have been used to assault an enemy line. The number of men in each ten man unit allows them to form a triangle like the red balls in snooker. If the ten skirmishers detach the other nine units can form a group of interlocking triangles in ranks of one, three and five. All four hundred in a square can make interlocking triangles to form one huge triangular wedge with the skirmishers as a detached unit, or two units.
