SKM Development: Military Matters 2

The Army. ACKs has beautifully detailed rules for this stuff. Elegant rules. Amazing rules. Horrendously complex rules if you’re doing it for five players, in five kingdoms, with each hex being treated separately.

Again, I’m cribbing ideas off of ACKs to try to make these house rules work. In ACKs, the army size is limited by your fams (everything in domain management in ACKs boils back to families or gp). Raising your army decreases the fams. Raising more than the average amount decreases them further (and knocks down your supply, morale, and so on).  In ACKs you can conceivably conscript every breathing human being in your realm, at the cost of bankrupting your realm (and creating an administrative hell-scape if you’re working in spreadsheets).

I’m therefore going to simplify it myself. You can pull up a levy force equivalent to your number of families in realm (families represents 5 people) so let’s assume that means that out of each family you get most likely to be fighting (father, older son, etc). So if your kingdom has 7 hexes, each with 100 families, you can raise 700 men.

Now, let’s say things are rough, so you need to press grandfathers, little kids, the sick, sons and fathers, and Sweet Polly Olivers into a fight. Well, you can pull up another 700 troops (for a total of 1400) but now you get hit by a morale penalty, and we gig you by lowering the affected hexes’ subsistence value by 1 to a minimum of 0.  Why are we lowering the subsistence value? Because those strong hands were needed to help feed the family. It also means that mechanically, more fams have to be allocated to subsistence (away from resource), and provides a monstrous disincentive to press gang too many people from areas that can barely support themselves.  

This is also simpler then in ACKs, where pulling the military up lowers the morale /and/ decreases the effective number of families in a hex. This is difficult to represent on a spreadsheet because of the fact that the effective number of families determines your hex income, but total family pop is still what determines your garrison requirement and festival requirements. I personally think just paying the upkeep fees for the army is enough at first, and I only really want to poke the players if they decide to yank every twelve year old boy, or seventy-six year old man to fight too. Doing it hex by hex also lets the players manage their economy somewhat better (although might perversely create a District 13 situation where one hex gets all of their menfolk pulled into military service while other hexes continue as normal).  

Now that we know how to raise the army, we need to figure out how to train and provision it.  This’ll require me to figure out training fees (and again, training your army should have a high up front cost, but earn its keep back over time). I also like ACKs’ idea that trained soldiers never ‘go away,’ they just pass on their skills, so if you train one light infantryman, that training never really ‘goes away.’  

This can result in a situation where you’d have more ‘trained soldiers’ then you have available soldiers, providing potential incentive to pull up everybody or alternatively just banking them.  You’d need to ‘toss’ trained folks to train new folks though if you’re over your limit.  To explain better, let’s assume you have 700 available soldiers. You train 600 of them as light infantry, 50 as archers, and the remaining number as say, heavy infantry. Then you have a famine, and your total number of families drops to 650. You wouldn’t lose the ‘trained soldiers’ in your latent pool even though you can’t pull them all up, but you can’t say train 25 more archers unless you lose enough trained soldiers to pull you back below your new troop limit.

Every five casualties would also inflict a loss of 1 ‘family’ worth of pop in a random hex, so nobody treats their army as imaginary people.

Coupled with the above, this gives me a wonderful idea. A horrible wonderful idea.

Garrison/patrol forces represent hired folks. They get paid in gold for their upkeep (which might get lowered by having strongholds available). What if the army has an overall lower upkeep cost for their wages, but they primarily get paid in Subsistence?  This would mean that raising an army would basically risk forcing your nation into starvation, as the army eats everything (while simultaneously not producing anything). It dis-incentivizes resource production as well, giving the impression that the kingdom is potentially going hand-to-mouth. Not as many people available for digging up gold, iron ore, or cutting down trees if food is scarce but you could still have cached resources to ‘spend’ on food or gold.

This also lets us deal with the ‘supply route’ issue. We can have the army move slower if its foraging/living off of the land, and increase its subsistence upkeep cost the further away it gets from the main kingdom. We’ll need to figure out the specifics, but that seems a cleaner (even if maybe less accurate) way of representing it.