ECW Unit Frontage

[Davout]

I'm planning on jumping into my first ECW project and I have a quick question on unit frontage.

The plan is for 10mm figures, with each "unit" representing a regiment of foot or cavalry regiment. Knowing that the compliment of units was often in flux, not standardized and sometimes unknown what do you feel is the right Frontage for

A foot regiment of pike and shot
A cavalry/dragoon regiment
a unit of commanded shot

How many figures would you put on the base to make it "look right" (the plan is to use Pendraken figures so they come as individuals, not as strips)?

[Moriarty]

Assuming the bases are to be ‘representative’, rather than exact numbers of troops? AFAIK they aimed at the time for a thousand man infantry regiment, one third pike, two thirds musket, but more commonly were half and half. Horse regiments were ideally 500 men and 500 horses, commonly with sword and pistols.
All pike or all musket regiments were possible, and just to make your life difficult, muskets could be stripped from regiments for tactical purposes. Armoured cavalry were rare.
Locals forming armed defence groups would have old military equipment, fowling pieces etc and seemed to be grouped in thousand man units.
Frontages for ideal units would have been similar. For my ‘One Hour Wargames’ ECW I produced 6” x 2” blocks of wood, adding symbols for horse, foot, clubmen and guns, with guns having a 2” front and 6” depth.
I found this site to be useful:
https://www.britishbattles.com/english-civil-war/battle-of-adwalton-moor/
Good luck!

[fred]

I think a lot depends on which rules you are using, and what frontage they expect for a unit.

For my own ECW in 10mm, we use For King and Parliament rules which is gridded so fairly lenient on base widths.

For infantry I use 3x 40x40mm bases for an infantry regiment, 2 shot, and 1 pike, with 12-16 figures per base.

For cavalry either 2 or 3x 40x40mm bases with about 6 figures per base.

But as moriarty says unit composition could vary with more pikes added. Which can get really quite fiddly to represent on the table, unless you base figures in narrow strips and combine on sabot bases.

[SJWi]

Davout, as with Fred I use FK&P. I would have several bases per unit all mounted inside a bigger sabot. This gives you more flexibility to vary unit composition.

[anton ryzbak]

My understanding of history is that the troops were organized before battle into similar-sized units, combining smaller regiments to get to a desired size. I play Tercio so all the bases are to a fixed size.

Visually I have trouble "seeing" a pike unit that has less than twelve minis in it and musketeers should always  be in two rows.

[SJWi]

Anton, I know what you mean about the visual appeal. I play FK&P in 28mm and went with 17 figures on a base. 8 musketeers flanking 9 pike/command. The whole unit needs to fit in a 15cm square. Whilst maybe not for the purist I'm pleased with the result. For 1-1 skirmish I have invested in some Bloody Miniatures but that is a future painting project.