I think you’ve eluded in part to some of the answer, and it is to do with the organisation and size of military units. If the unit size is 80 individuals, then having a skirmish game that requires a lower model count doesn’t quite track.

Having said that, you could easily come up with narrative reasons why there are smaller groups – stragglers from a column, a mustering area where the full body is yet to assemble, a picket line, a night time raid to silence the guns etc.

As you say, what defines a skirmish game is also important – is it a focus on individuals, a max head count, a size of game area?

@limburger Yes, I think skirmish games call out for scenario driven play. It could be a simple ‘destroy the enemy’, but only if there’s a thematic reason. I don’t think that wiping out the enemy should be the sole possible scenario for skirmish games, even if you have the warband style game with evolving characters.

Ideally, I’d love to have an overarching narrative campaign that puts the skirmish games into some context, with the option to have larger scale battles (played with a different system) that influence/are influenced by the skirmishes.

For example if you lose the bigger battle, your next game could be a skirmish whereby you are trying to get some stragglers to safety. If a skirmish is about driving away a picket line, maybe you get an advantage in deployment in the next battle.

For earlier periods I’d see it more as a case of using skirmishes as indicative of a number of small engagements that would set up conditions for the larger battles. So there might a skirmish around foraging, with the outcome resultsing in less troops/ troops with condition modifiers in the larger battle. A successful raid skirmish might mean that troop numbers are reduced to represent diverting resources to counter the raiders. Success in a scouting skirmish might give a player an opportunity to change terrain placement to represent picking the ground of their choosing.

Basically, some creative thought as to why a particular skirmish is being fought can be translated into an outcome for setting up a larger battle.

For modern settings the timeline for events can be be condensed to represent speed of communications/travel, so within days of a larger battle. For earlier periods the timescale stretches to weeks or months, and the skirmishes are more abstracted examples of ongoing operations.

I think its more governed by troop types…

Certain troop types wouldn’t be involved in raiding/skirmishes/recce yet they seem to crop up in historical skirmish games without worry…

Such as an ECW skirmish with pikemen. If they were doing such things, they would cut down the pike or just use their sword if they had one or a halberd if available.

Unut organisation size is less to do with it as soldiers are always capable of acting as the situation befits. If you want to send a party to forage, you dont have to base what you send on your smallest unit organisation size.

You need to define what you mean by a small skirmish.

I know of battles during the Williamite War in Ireland with 60 lads on one side…

I don’t think it’s that skirmishes were more or less likely in any time period, it’s that soldiers were trained to fight more for a particular type of warfare. For example, the Roman legionary was great in large battles between great blocks of troops. As a cohesive unit the century could dominate an equal or even greater number of opponents. What battles like the Teutoburg Forest massacre showed was when that cohesion was interrupted and the legionaries were forced to fight as individuals, that the training, the terrain and the man to man individualistic warfare gave the German tribes the advantage.

In the Dark Ages there are comparitively fewer large battles because the states required for massed combats don’t really exist, and forming a shieldwall becomes a big thing. The problem with shield walls is that they are very immobile. If you haven’t tried it (and any of us in law enforcement or the military will know,) getting even small groups of people to move together with riot shields takes practice, lots of practice. It’s common for novices to break up the formation just by being out of step with everyone else. Break up the cohesion and the shieldwall breaks and the combat becomes a skirmish. Without uniforms or heraldry it’s easy to imagine that killing a friendly in combat was a real possibilty.

By the age of gunpowder I think the big blocks of troops also compensated for the crappy accuracy of black powder weapons. They needed to throwout a wall of lead just to ensure they’d hit someone, thankfully the warfare of the day was to fght in large blocks of troops. I think this is why the Indian Wars in North America weren’t a slam duck for the Europeans. We would form firing blocks and they would encircle attacking from all sides and using terrain to break up the range advantage of firearms. Once the fighting changed to melee the club, sword, axe, knife and spear weilding native always held the advantage, whether Indians, Zulus, Maoris, Scots, etc.