My particular disease - mass combat systems

I've noticed that I don't take a system seriously as a thing I might use unless it has a mass combat system; in fact, I tend to not buy something these days, even if I'm otherwise interested, if I know it doesn't have one. Especially if the background of the setting implies mass combats occur or are important to said background.

You see, I mostly run political games, and I often angle the games towards eventually having mass combats (and sometimes it's built into the premise).

So, I have played a whole lot of them and looked at a whole bunch of other ones. I consider a system good if I can do army and vehicle mass combat with it, and if it scales easily between small units and giant armies. Some highlights:

The Great

1. GURPS Mass Combat- I consider this the gold standard. Easy to use, quick once you've set up (setup being calculate the forces ahead of time, but that's also relatively easy). Plenty of choices for the commander, and space for PCs to affect the battle in different ways and help or hurt the commander's battle roll. I've used this in a few games now. I measure all other systems against this one. My players have always enjoyed this one.

The Good

2. Fate Core - suprisingly, it worked. I thought the way it handled units was odd but it was fine. I used it a lot in a Rome campaign and it was quick and easy, and again, things for individual PCs to do.

3. Savage Worlds - my players liked this one a lot. Fast and easy, plenty of impact from PCs. Fits well with the "Fast, Furious, Fun" moniker. Nothing but good experiences, though it's fuzzy on details for the actual forces and such (but it's SW, so that's fine).

4. Genesys - it seems good on paper; I haven't run this one yet (but will soon I think as I'm running a Genesys game now) but it seems to have enough narrative detail to be interesting, and all the other elements I'd expect. Only tiny issue is it does not natively scale to larger number, but if you ignore the examples (and they are listed as examples) you can change the scale of forces to whatever you want.

5. Burning Empires - a little complicated (but isn't everything from Burning HQ?), but it worked at the table and led to some gripping battles. Some of the rules are fuzzy at the edges, but works well enough, though can take some time to resolve.

The Frustrating

5. Mythras - I REALLY like Mythras, but the mass combat rules for some reason only scale to having, say, at most, a few units of a bit more than 1000 soldiers in them (and each unit of each type is counted as a sepearte thing). Meaning even running a single Roman legion of 5000 men against a similar sized force would be a nightmare of 5-10 units on a side. The rules were written for Viking England, where armies weren't terribly large, but outisde of that narrow perview, it gets weird (as said, Late Roman Republic battles could easily reach 50000 on a side). Running it was actually pretty fast, and my players thought it was fun (they liked the Special Effects system in these rules a lot), so it works well, but not at the scale I'd like. Also, no rules for mass ship combat (which is, for me, horrible in a book called Ships and Shieldwalls). M-Space, on a side note, has a system for resolving extendd conflicts, and the author has informally suggested ways to use it for battles, but that was EXTREMELY abstract.

6. Burning Wheel/Torchbearer 2e - same problem; the guide for this only scales to units of 1000 men, which seems silly, as even in the "period" the BW book seems to emulate sorta (12th century France) battles were larger and could easily reach 10000 on a side. Rules are iddly, but you'd expect that here.

The Not Great

7. Reign - The mass combat rules for Companies at that level are fine; it's all very abstract anyway. The mass comabt rules for actually controlling an army in the field are actively not good. There's no way for individual players to affect anything, or get hurt, or anything else, really. Also, for some reason the author only supposed battles of around 1500 men will happen, tops, which again is ludicrous, especially for a "generic" fantasy game (I know bigger battles can happen, but you only get 15 dice in your roll, and obstensibly, each die is supposed to represent a unit - anything above 15 units on a side and you have to wait until other units are destroyed, making a big battle take forever). The top unit size is 100 men, which is the main problem here (but not the only problem). I like a lot of things in Reign, but not this.

8. Trinity Continuum - I don't know what to make of it. It's technically for mass vehicle combat for some reason, but you can bend it to handle mass infantry combat. But the rules are loosey-goosey, but not in the fun, Fate way, but in the "we threw this hear because we had some extra pages" way. I think. Like much in the book, it's very possible I can't parse the prose and they really work fine.

The "Why don't you have mass combat rules?"

9. Runequest (and by extension, Basic Roleplaying) - just...why not? Much of Runequest lore is based on big set-piece battles that changed the narrative of the world. It'd be great to play those out, or other things between clans and tribes and such not in Dragon Pass. The game even has a Battle skill, which lists some effects for rolling it, and not much more. It's kinda annoying that it doesn't have proper battles.

10. Traveller - also...why not? There are, I acknowledge, ground mass combat rules in the Mercenary boxed set (which I hear are terrible; the old ones in Classic Book 4 were servicable, but I only ever used them a handful of times but I didn't feel they were terrible). For a science fiction game set in space, neither Classic, nor the new Mongoose versions, have a mass space combat system, and that's a crime. There's some sort of something in the 2e High Guard book about rolling damage for multiple units, and I heard there's somethng a little more fleshed out in the new HG 2022 book, but I have a bet it isn't great, but no idea. It would otherwise be the perfect system for the Honor Harrington game in my head, but can't do it. Why do Admirals exist?

11. Wrath and Glory (and all the other WH40K or Warhammer Fatnasy rule sets) - like, I get there's the tabletop miniatures game, but I detest minis; I want a version connected to the RPG rules I'm using so I can fight the battles the rules imply are happening in the setting. It's really odd we NEVER got a RPG-based system for any of those games.

So, that's all the ones (I think) I've actually played, save for Genesys and Trinity, which I've only read. It's one of the reasons I tend to stick to generic games, because they tend to have mass combat systems that are fun and involve the players, and can scale. Some other generic-ish games have them but they don't really scale, even for the time periods they are about. And some systems which SHOULD have them don't.