Tony Bath Campaign Rules #5
One more about resources...
Tony Bath, Setting up a Wargames Campaign.
I am sure I am the only person in the world that cares about this, but I would really like to use resources OTHER than gold, using tony’s framework. This requires me to understand his current scheme to know how to inject alterations …
100 people per square mile? 10? is a country 400 hexes? 20? What is he talking about when he lays out scale? is a country a million people? 10 million? 10 thousand? Without knowing these things, the scale of his resources don’t make much sense. He calculated them for his specific vision of ‘medieval fantasy’.
Finding the Men
‘The average country disposed of a regular force of probably 12 to 16 regiments of infantry, and 4 to 6 of cavalry.’
From 16 - 22 regiments, comes out to 9,600 - 13,200 men in that army. Armies are assumed to regularly be 10% of the population, so a country has somewhere in the 96,000 to 132,000 population total.
This doesn’t give us any representation of density, until we read a little higher on the page… ‘each sizable town could supply from 2 - 4 regiments of infantry’. That makes each town supply 1200-2400 men, so 12,000-24,000 people total.
With that in mind, we see that 2-4 regiments per town, makes 4-6?? sizable towns to supply the whole army with men.
So we are at:
9,600 - 13,200 men in the average national army
96,000 - 132,000 population in the average nation
Spread across 4-6? towns of 12,000-24,000 population each.
We are getting somewhere.1
Feeding the Men
So how much food do we need to feed ~114,000 people.
A regiment costs 30g / month to feed.
That is 600 men, 30g / month.
That works out to 100 men, 60g / year2
So assuming the ONLY thing we do is feed our people, that is 68,000g of food to feed our 114,000 people.
Hexes range in annual yield from 1200g to 400g, averaging out to ~720g each with a random terrain.
68,000g in food needed from 720g per hex puts us at 95 hexes needed to just FEED our people.
For offhand reference, this also puts population density far below historic standards.3
Now we have a sense of scale.
Arming the Men
Don’t we need to pay the men, arm them, transport goods, buy strongholds, have things to trade, and all kinds of things to do other than feed our men without an extra penny ?
Tony recommends taking the entire yearly sum of resources, taking taxes and reductions, and adding the remainder to the treasury at the start of the year. This would mean that the food for ALL of the population is drawn from this pool before the treasury is filled with the extra.
I then remind you, that troops on the move need to be fed with food from their supply trains, and they also need to be paid salary. This means troops require a cost to hire, train, build supply trains, and supply those supply trains.
That means that armies are MUCH more expensive than regular citizens.
Feeding these men already costs double food, (as you fed them from the initial pull to the treasury, AND when the are on the map), but their baggage train also takes double food (quadruple total!).
Paying them comes to 400gold per year per regiment, double that if horse!
Equipping them costs somewhere around 165 gold per regiment, for somewhat standard heavy infantry. These costs are also increased as armies after a battle require replenishment of damaged gear.
Not to mention cost of boats, roads, forts, generals, stronghold, repairs, and more!
Just finding the minimum size of hexes to feed your nation is absolutely not enough.
Leading the Men to Glory
I posit that a country with a population of 80,000, with 100 hexes under its control, is the bare minimum you should consider when looking at Tony’s rules.4
With this in mind, I think it is of great help to further understand what can/can’t should/shouldn’t be tweaked if you wish.
But even if you don’t want to tweak anything, and you wish to run his rules as written, I think this is a valuable nugget of wisdom so you can base your countries and armies on the sizes that Tony is assuming.
The tests shall continue!
Its worth noting here that when I first tried to map this out, tony’s example of a city having 150,000 people in it really threw me off. I was trying to figure out how that kind of scale matched the rest of his numbers. They just don’t. He was purely giving an example.
This number really hit me randomly, Tony LOVES dividing things into thirds. So this was probably him saying ‘2/3’s of the population number in food to feed it. But I don’t know for sure.
If we look at the averages, a hex at 15m would be roughly 100sqmiles. 100 hexes would give us 10,000 square miles for a country. If that country had 114,000 people in it, we are looking at 11.4 people per square mile. This is quite low.
Tony also gives rules to say that mines of precious stones should add a gold value, but he gives no hard numbers. I don’t know if a mine adds 500 gold a year, or 50,000 gold a year. He doesn’t say. I am ignoring that for these numbers.