[Discuss] Strategies with Small Army Groups

[Anthony Cerqueira]

On 5/17/07, James <TheKobald at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
> Anthony Cerqueira wrote:
> >
> >
> > "Right lads we have swords and they have food lets get some grub!"
> > "Uh boss....?"
> > "What is it?"
> > "Where's the nearest group of people with food?"
> > "Um...... wait I'm sure I have a map here somewhere....."
> >
> > Just because you can demand the food doesn't mean you can find every
> > place that has it, hence why it's harder to forage but not impossible.
> >
> Sure it is, silos are hard to hide.  Oh yea and there's all those fields
> with it just growing.  It isn't like today when farming is done in just
> a small area of the country, it was quite the opposite, people lived in
> small areas and farms were EVERYWHERE.


Sure /small/ so to feed the big mob of guys you brought with you will
require a lot of effort in foraging. Which rather implies that smaller
armies wouldn't have quite the same trouble.


>
> >  Well recruitment centers run out of soldiers sure, but regions? I
> > mean even during the height of the Defensive Alliance war my kingdom
> > didn't manage to burn through 65000 soldiers in the capitol. (We tried
> > though we /really/ did) And as far as the time constraint, how long
> > does it take to get an extra 20 soldiers in all honesty? I mean if
> > you've got say 5 regions 2 centers per region and maybe 3 in the
> > capitol you're looking at a day or two? By the time you get back from
> > the fight you've got, some men to recruit at least. I agree you can
> > still runout over a long war, but compair how long it takes to get a
> > new group of soldiers in BM and the time it takes to outfit that many
> > men for your standard ancient nation. (note I'm not saying that
> > mimicing RL is the best answer for our problem, just that you can see
> > how much faster BM is)
>
> Realms do run out of soldiers, if you're down to just a capital, of
> course you're going to have trouble taking it.


Live and learn I guess then. Never in all my years have I see a realm run
out of soldiers, I mean even having monsters eating peasants as the soldiers
are dying fighting them during an
invasion right after fending off an entire continent only dropped the
numbers to 40000....
-shrug- Oh well, I guess some people are tallented. (And I was just
using the capitol population as an example
since I happen to know it.)


>
> >
> > Professional soldiers, peasants.... hard to see a difference from my
> > nice noble high horse. They must be inferior to me, they can die. :)
> > Seriously now, considering the rapid birth rate of the average peasant
> > does make sending the army home for the harvest rather pointless, but
> > it does seem rather strange for such a large number of professional
> > soldiers to be just kicking around. I mean think about how big the
> > hammers people use are, is it really that wise to have so many armed
> > lessers kicking around all the time? The might get /ideas/ and then
> > what will we do? No much better to demand some basic training for all
> > peasants in a region and then draft out a few hundred as needed, that
> > way we get to control the weapons. (example: See british longbowmen
> > for training example) I mean sure there must be some professional
> > soldeirs, but I don't think every small county would have it's own
> > legion of them.
> >
> >




The peasants aren't being born at a rapid rate.  Remember the numbers
> you're seeing are people maturing to adulthood and immigrating.  You
> don't know how many 10, 11, 12, etc year olds are in the region.
> Remember someone was adult at the time at around puberty.  Training
> EVERYONE would be the most expensive thing in the world to do.  A realm
> would have money for nothing else.


I've seen regions go from 0 (or even negative population) to thousands in
less then a year. I mean I'm certain monsters eat kids, they're small sure,
but they're not tough and stringy, so 0 pop must mean
something because when they hit it, monsters stop eating.

 As for paying people to train, why in the world would I waste good money on
that? I'm their lord, they will shoot arrows every week and swing those
sticks or they will die until the peasants realize I mean buisness. Sure
they won't be very good, but most soldiers aren't. If you want to good,
professional soldiers, you go hire them and get the nice high
training/equpiment to reflect the cost you spend on them.
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