In looking over the table for Mercenary Officer Characteristics on p. 23 of Campaigns it struck me that a mercenary officer suited to serving as platoon lieutenants was not listed. It seems like a 3rd level officer would be warranted. I don't know what their title should be, but it seems like this would be a level of officer needed for battles played at the platoon level. Was there a formula used to determine their abilities and wages? Or should I just eyeball it? Just eyeballing it my inclination is to go with:
The wages and characteristics you've suggested look correct.
The reason a platoon-lieutenant isn't in the game is that the scaling rules (for platoon scale combat) got added in very late in the development cycle and I never want back and revised the merc commanders to make them available.
Thanks for the reply. I'll add the sargeants to my set of house rules. This will become more important because I'm considering another HR where defending a fortification will typically use units of platoons instead of companies.
I'm having some difficulty conceptualizing a tower housing hundreds of men, or 60' of wall being defended by 120 men. The defending platoons would still be as effective as a company, so the only real effects would be that a fortification wouldn't be sheltering as many men, but I still have to do a lot more thinking on this house rule and see how it works out on the table.
A unit of 120 men represents a formation 20 men wide and 6 deep. The system is arithmetically set up so that a basic human unit has 6 uhp to represent the fact that it's 6 men deep - the UHP represent attrition of the line. At 5 uhp, the front rank soldiers are wounded or dead, at 4 uhp you're down to 4 effective ranks, at 1 uhp, you've just gone one rank left in fighting shape. But since fighting occurs across the *length* of the line and not its depth, fighting ability is not reduced by casualties.
Man-sized troops in close order each occupy a frontage of 3’. So a 20-man wide formation requires 60'. Thus a length of wall 60' wide requires a 120-man unit (arrayed 20 x 6) to hold it with 6 uhp. The wall isn't being manned by all 120 men at once. It's being manned by a portion of the men, with the others in a second rank, on nearby stairs, in the adjoining courtyard, etc. ready to reinforcing it as casualties are suffered, people are pushed back, etc.
A platoon of 30 men represents a formation that is 5 wide and 6 deep. Platoons fighting other platoons retain their full uhp because the depth is the same (6 ranks deep) while the widths match. If you have a platoon man a 60' wall, it would be in a formation that is 20 men wide and then only half a rank after that. It's 20 x 1.5.
As such you would want to reduce the uhp of the unit to just 1.5uhp, which rounds to 2.
Many of the attested siege towers of antiquity were huge and did hold hundreds of men in a literal sense.