Scaling Down the Rules For Infantry?

With the upcoming^tm Northag, I'm looking at doing this in 6mm, as that scale suits my limited space and the longer (potential) ranges involved.  Vehicles are fine, but handling individual 6mm infantry casualties feels like it would be too fiddly (in figures if nothing else), so I was thinking about how to mod them into perhaps infantry "stands" of say 4-5 men (like the old GW epic game used.)  This would make a 10 man infantry squad in game equivalent to broadly two 'stands'.   My thoughts then ran that each type of stand (with however many variants needed) would have a fixed 'firepower' rating, and then probably a saving throw, to determine if the element was killed or not.  This would I think make the infantry component of the game simplified, wouldn't need (m)any additional rules, but the problem I've got is how to put some actual data around this.

My feeling is that taking the base firepower of the 5 man teams would be too high - as it needs to represent an 'average' value - but at what point do squads become effectively combat ineffective? Also, what would a workable saving throw be? (The number should produce an average result of a stand being killed (or combat ineffective,) when the 'average' amount of firepower dice needed to eliminate 5 men is applied to it.)

If I assumed all 'stands' would have roughly the same number of men that would simplify things, and perhaps that would be an abstraction that would be necessary (so larger platoons would simply get given more stands) - there might need to be an allowance for each order dice to activate 2 or more stands depending on the army composition.

Anyhow  - I've put this out there to gain the communities thoughts and feedback - let me know if you think it's a workable (or stupid) idea, and perhaps if you think its workable, how I might go about fleshing it out.

Why do not just use some small dice to mark casualities on your bases? Would be much easier than to develop new data for your infantry. And if you place your infantry models on sligtly larger bases than the old 20 x 20 mm epic bases, you could place the dice on the bases themselve.


Greetings
Wolflord

I've thought about this in the past as I really like element based games. My conclusion was so much change was required that it would no longer be Battlegroup.

I’m building 6mm forces based around 3-4 men per base. Casualties will be marking using a small dice as already suggested.

ok, thanks for your responses guys. I didn't think the changes I'd suggested would change the game too much - in a vehicle only game the rules would be the same - but perhaps I'll think a bit more about it.

I use 1/144 with dice to mark casualties on bases from 2-5 figures strong, works fine. Less fiddly moving them around too!

I've thought a lot about this issue for 6mm figures and in the end for my 6mm Tobruk army I'm basing them using the 3, 2, 1 approach (number of figures per base). It just makes sense to me for casualty removal and it's handy for building any squad size that I need for future desert battles. I will however base them on 2 washers glued together so I will have roughly 2.5mm thick base to make them easier to pick up.

A squad becomes combat ineffective for anything more than defending itself in close combat after 33% casualties. This gets back to the old rule about how killing one man removes one man from the battle, but wounding one man takes three (or more) out of the battle.

You see this reflected in the BF 'Nam rules, where a single failed save (which would be enough to remove the whole team from play in Flames of War WW2) is only a casualty marker on the stand in 'Nam.