Tony Bath Campaign Rules #2
Winning a war is mostly a simple contest, of lying and logistics.
A Large part of this has been recanted in my next post, Here.
I feel very blessed to have people actually read these things, and one comment that hit me pretty hard:
Friend: ”Where did you get the "Resource" values?
Hexes and their income value per turn:
Farm Plot - 1 Food
River - 1 Food
Plains - 1 Horse
Forest - 1 Lumber
Hills - 1 Stone
Mountains - 1 Metal”
…
Me: “I completely made it up”
…
Time and Space
Some cleanup of some terms. This is still in flux as I am working towards coming to a concrete solution, but here is where I think the game is going. I am wholly uninterested in simulating everything.
I am interested in simulating the process of getting men and shields and spears and potatoes to a battlefield. Everything else around that I am leaving as vague as possible to allow for freeform roleplay… 1
1 Turn = 1 Week2
1 Company of Foot Troops = 20 Figures : 200 Men5
1 Regiment of Foot Troops = 100 Figures : 1000 Men
Smallest Settlement Size (F) = 2,000 Population6
Largest Settlement Size (A) = 30,000 Population
Resources
Lets first look at what Tony Bath hands us. He lays out a system of terrain and features that have favorable resources. He then breaks down every terrain hex into a value of gold in income, per year.
This means that a forest gives you X gold, and a wooden wall costs Y gold. That gold could come from a forest, or a river, or anything.
I am separating my resources, and I really shouldn’t be picking “1 per hex”, as it is purely a random amount. I want forests to give me lumber, and I want to use lumber to build wooden walls.
Lets establish a baseline here: I am not interested, for this campaign, to break everything down into individual amounts. I don’t care how much food 1 person eats per day. I only care about whatever the smallest unit of usable Wargame is.
In my case, that is the company of foot troops.
200 men, brave and willing.
So let us take Tony’s amounts of Gold, and derive a baseline resource value from the smallest unit necessary.
Food
A company of our foot troops is 200 men. A regiment to Tony Bath is 600 men.
Tony Bath says to feed a regiment(his 600 men), the food costs 30GP per month.
So if we divide that down, our 200 men will need 10GP in food per month.
Since feeding 200 men is the smallest amount of food I care about:
1 Food = 10GP
Let me give one more example of where I am getting these numbers from, then I will list the rates I have calculated…
Horses
Purchase Cost for a regiment(600men) of horses for troops is 75 GP. If we divide down to our 200, that gives us a clean 25GP to create 1 company of horse troops.
1 Horse = 25GP
Calculated Values
1 Food = 10 GP
1 Horse = 25 GP
1 Lumber = 14 GP
1 Stone = 25 GP
1 Metal = 30 GP
The Hexes
The math here is not correct, I like even numbers, so I divided each total(given by Tony) by 50 to get weeks. Then multiplied by 4 to get monthly. I like pretty numbers, so 12.5 months it is.
All yearly amounts in Tony’s GP:
Cultivated Ground
1000/year : 80/month
River/Coast7
1200/year : 96/month
Plains
800/year : 64/month
Forest
500/year : 40/month
Hills
600/year : 48/month
Mountain
400/year : 32/month
Final Income Amounts, Per month:8
Cultivated Ground
8 Food
River/Coast
9 Food; 6 Gold
Plains
2 Horse; 14 Gold
Forest
2 Lumber; 12 Gold
Hills
1 Stone; 24 Gold
Mountain
1 Metal; 2 Gold
What else is there?
This doesn’t talk about troop salary, or upkeep, or baggage trains, or scouts, or training, or mustering, or replenishment, or a million other things… I will post articles as I get the information together and in a place I am happy. The first playtest made it extremely obvious I was cutting far too much complexity, I need to have more faith in Tony Bath to guide us with the right amount of crunch.
Demand excellence in all that you do!
We can rant about this in other articles. This is not really the place.
This is not to say that all turns have the same quality. The start of a month is going to have resource gathering and spending of upkeeps, but every individual week will mostly be about internal roleplay, troop movements, and minor management of the domain.
Tony doesn’t give hard numbers for this in his book, but this is a quick assumption. Scouts can move 30 hexes per week on roads. If a week is 6 days plus a day of rest, that is 5 hexes a day. If we poke the history beast with a stick very lightly, 25 Miles a day is at the higher end of movement that roman legions could accomplish, so I am fine leaving the hex size at 5 and calling it ‘close enough’.
Can you double footnotes? Feetnotes? I am going to say Hex but mean square. Not Sorry.
In Peltast and Pila, Tony says that a ‘regiment’ is 20 figures, but he gives no smaller division of troops. In ‘Setting up a Wargames Campaign’ he also doesn’t give too many specifics on numbers, but he does say a ‘regiment’ is around ‘600 men’, so 20 figures at 1:30? I don’t know, maybe I am missing it. I enjoy Chainmail battles with 20 figure units as a baseline, and 200 men is a reasonable, realistic company size to match a 5company 1,000 man regiment. So will be looking at 1:10 figure to man scale, 200 men company, 1000 men regiments.
These divisions come (mostly) from William Silvester’s ‘Solo Wargaming Guide’, his recommendations of A-F scale have a number of regiments and companies that a settlement can Train/Garrison/Support, and I used those numbers to backtrack from an assumption of 10% population can reasonably be mustered, to get the populations. An F size settlement can have 1 company, that is 200 men, so the settlement would have to be 2,000 in total.
He has these separate, I am using his river value for both. I can’t stand having 7, when having 6 means I can use a d6 for various purposes.
This is surprisingly close to just multiplying food by 10 in my original playtest, which is fairly interesting to me.
Gorgeous!