ECW - Rules Tweak Scaled Right Back

I've had a most interesting few days' correspondence with Peter B, Prof de Vries, Martin S and, most especially, the Jolly Broom Man. As a result of all this enlightenment (and, by Jove, these chaps know their stuff), I've decided not to make the ambitious changes to my ECW rules, as sketched out in my previous post.

It all comes back to the issue of how the regiments arranged their musket fire back in the 17th Century. I was concerned that if (to put it in layman's terms) everyone fired at once (BANG) then subsequently they would be conspicuously unloaded, and, since the idea that they might manage to reload while rushing about seemed unlikely, they would arrive unable to fire if they attacked someone without having stopped somewhere on the way. This kind of thinking owed a lot to my exposure to the Victory without Quarter rules, which make a feature of loading as a necessary activity.

Well, as everyone in the world knows very well - apart from me - it all comes down to the way they conducted the firing. Because the matchlock was a cumbersome thing to load, the approved method was to arrange the musketeers in a lot of ranks - 6 or 8 was OK - and then fire by rolling the ranks:

(1) Intraduction, by which the firing line advanced, required the rear (loaded) rank to move round in front of the rank which had just fired - the sergeant, with his partizan or his half-pike, would show the newly loaded chaps where to line up and fire. Thus the rate of advance would be up to the sergeant, and the firing line would move forward.

(2) Extraduction, by which the firing line fell back, required the front rank, after they had fired, to nip round the rear (the sergeant would show them where) and get on with reloading. In time they would once again become the front rank, and it would be their turn to fire once more. Thus the firing line would gradually be moving back.

I apologise for the kindergarten explanation - it is necessary for me to envisage things in simple terms. Anyway, this means that the firing would not go BANG, as discussed, it would go bang--bang--bang--etc, and it also means that the Foot would never all be unloaded at the same time, which means that they would be able to produce some amount of fire while on the move. If, like me, you imagine that advancing or retreating by means of the rolling intra/extraduction system would slow down the attack to a pitiful shuffle then I am assured that this is correct - this is why the rules reduce the movement rate for Foot when close to the enemy, but I am also informed by the JBM that this was not a critical-path issue, since the unit closing up and the pikemen sorting themselves out was just as big a problem prior to a clash. [The Broom Man, by the way, apart from a life of monastic research, also has personal experience of re-enactment; never disagree with a man who knows how to handle a pike - especially one who may have been at the Siege of Bristle.]

I sense a lot of unrest - people with their hands in the air, protesting, "...but, Miss, Miss, Miss...". Well you are quite right, there was also the process known as fire by salvee, which was introduced by Gustavus Adolphus for his Swedish army, and which did, indeed, have everybody firing at once and thus being unloaded immediately thereafter. I am assured that this was beyond the capabilities of just about everyone apart from the Swedes during this period - thus it is not relevant for the ECW, and Peter B reckons that it would be used even by the Swedes in the 30YW as a short-range device, such that it should be considered as part of melee combat in rules of this type.

Gustavus Adolphus

Thus, after this long ramble, I am merely going to switch my CC_ECW rules back to allowing Foot to move 1 hex and fire at reduced effect, which is where I started a few years ago, in a manner similar to what Commands & Colors does for Napoleonic warfare. Peter B made the interesting point that this kind of reduced fire while moving actually makes more sense in an ECW context than it does for Napleonic warfare, which is a suitable topic for debate in the pub, but gets me off the hook anyway.

I am somewhat sorry that I didn't get to play with the cotton-wool smoke markers, as discussed last time, but no matter. Simple is good.

One other change I shall introduce in the revised rules is that Stand of Pikes formation will not be permitted in woods - in fact units armed with pikes will not be allowed to fight in woods at all. That was a stupid oversight on my part - the JBM assures me that big boys with pikes in the woods are going to get into bother, and someone will get hurt, for sure, so we can't have that. The upgraded rules will be downloadable in a week or two, once I've rehashed the QRS chart (which is the trickiest bit of the editorial process).

My thanks to everyone who contributed. There is talk of an ECW battle in these parts sometime in the nearish future, so a quick review of the rules was - how do you say? - opportune - yes, that's it. 

ECW - Possible Rule Tweak

My in-house ECW rules, which I call CC_ECW, are derived from the Commands & Colors: Napoleonics rules. They are currently sitting at Version 2.67 (dated 24th March 2017 - they are downloadable from a link on this blog, somewhere over on the top right), and I was quite pleased that - thanks to some welcome logic-checking and proofing kindly supplied by the Jolly Broom Man - I had at last got all the various bits (meaning the QRS and main booklet, really) consistent as well as up to date.

Having reached that situation, it's actually a bit of a disincentive to make further change, but I feel there is a change coming along.

Following some recent correspondence with Peter Brekelmans, whose 30YW rules (which are also downloadable here, from somewhere around the same place) are more sophisticated and more complete than my own effort, I came back to the rather mundane, though important, matter of whether ECW musketeers should be able to move and fire in the same turn. This may not sound like complex stuff, but it does make quite a difference to the game.

I know they had some pretty complicated ways of arranging for musketeers to advance or retreat while firing, either by working the loaded chaps forward or by working the chaps who had just fired to the rear, to reload, but this was not really when they were going somewhere - it was more like a gradual adjustment of their position. To keep the essential simplicity in the game, I originally allowed musketeers to fire at half effect if they had moved in the same turn. Intuitively, I didn't like this. It might be justifiable in a Napoleonic context, but not for the ponderous, nightmare ritual of reloading a matchlock.

So I changed my mind. Version 2.67 currently says of Foot that

"they may stand still and carry out Melee or Ranged Combat, may move 1 hex and carry out Melee Combat, or – provided the move does not bring them into contact with the enemy – they may move 2 hexes but may not carry out any Combat."

That seemed more historically pleasing - and the option to get a bit of a shift on when not close to the enemy is very useful for bringing up reserves and other strategic matters.

Only problem now is that attacking has become a pretty thankless proposition. Approaching enemy Foot who are in line means being subjected to heavy fire while being unable to reply. Why, one wonders, would anyone bother?

Now I'm sure that this is handled well and correctly by most of the established ECW rule sets you can think of. The tricky bit is doing something about it without damaging the intrinsic (tick tock) simplicity of the C&C mechanisms. During the period when I tried to educate myself to like Victory without Quarter, I got the hang of a rule whereby a unit which wasn't doing anything else could be assumed to reload - all by themselves - without a specific order to do so from the Earl of Essex (or whoever). In execution it was a little fiddly for my taste, but the idea was nice.

So I've been thinking about it, and I think I have come up with a minimum-effort adaptation to go in Version 2.68.

How about this?

When a unit of Foot fires or takes part in a melee, it is immediately handed a black counter (or a little puff of cotton-wool smoke would be rather cute) to indicate that it will have to reload before it can fire again. At the beginning of the owning General's next move, when the Orders are being handed out (activation from Command Cards - and I give the ordered units markers to keep track of where I'm up to) - once all the Orders have been allocated, any unit of Foot which has not been given an Order, and which is currently unloaded, may hand back their unloaded marker (or puff) - it is assumed that they will, all by themselves, as trained, reload, since they are not doing anything else this turn. If they are unable to reload (because - that's right - they are busy carrying out an Order to do something else) then they must stay unloaded, and they cannot fire until they have had a chance to do something about that.

It will, of course, be worded rather more concisely, but you get the general idea. My original idea was that this should only apply to units which fired, or carried out Ranged Combat, as they say in C&C. But a lot of melee action must obviously have involved firing muskets, or at least bashing the daylights out of them, so I felt it would be appropriate to assume that any kind of Combat would require a reload. Which then leads to another thought: should unloaded units be at a disadvantage if they are involved in a melee? Well, maybe they should. I might consider deducting a die in melee for an unloaded unit of Foot, or - more simply - just gloss over it and allow them to melee as normal.

Still thinking about that one. It also occurs to me that a unit which is already in a melee shouldn't be able to reload while standing next to the enemy, even if they haven't been given an Order to fight this turn - I can't see them doing a very good job of it.

OK - that's shaping up - I need to try it out, and I need to identify all the places where the rules need to be changed, so that Version 2.68 is as shiny as it's predecessor.

And then I thought - what about dragoons? And I said to myself, ignore them - they can already move and fire, and in any case they do not have much of an effect.

The Red Tiddlywink of Courage

I've had an interesting exchange of emails with Hedley, who lives in New Zealand, about my use of casualty markers, or loss markers, or whatever you may choose to call them (I am a bit inconsistent myself).

It is evident from photos of my wargames that the look of the thing is rather compromised by the presence of bright red tiddlywinks, which Hedley thought was not necessarily an enhancement. I have written here about this topic before, but Hedley thinks it's interesting, so maybe there is some mileage in setting out my thoughts (my current thoughts, that is - they will doubtless evolve further) on ways of keeping track of the state of our wargame units.

This is one of those areas where it becomes evident that everyone likes what he likes - that we play our games in ways that suit us, and that one man's no-brainer of a solution is another man's pet hate. If I say something here that you disagree with, by the way, that's not a problem - please do not feel the need to write and tell me what a cretin I am. Recently I have been on the receiving end of some silly invective concerning my fondness for the Accursed Hexagon; it seems only fair if I respond by saying that I also have developed a very strong dislike of a few things - order sheets and roster cards are high on the list. They do not work for me - they create mess and they distract attention away from the action on the tabletop. They are simply methods of recording more information, and I understand why they are used, but I find them a mighty turn-off. If I read a set of rules and become aware of an expectation that I am going to write down orders for each unit, each turn, then I shall put the rule book back where I found it. Similarly, I find that unit cards (such as in the Perfect Captain rules, which otherwise seem very satisfactory) are a fussy sort of add-on, to solve game problems that could be handled in other ways.

Let us not get into any boardgames vs miniatures debate - these discussions invariably become religious - but it would be silly to disregard one of the obvious differences. The miniatures player has an advantage in that a lot of the information needed is apparent from the models themselves - we can recognise the type of unit from the uniform and weaponry, and it is convenient to use the size of the unit - the number of figures remaining, if you approach the matter in that way - as an indication of effectiveness. This is a very flexible variant of those numbers in the corners of your boardgame counters; with some thought, the unit on the tabletop can record enough information to allow the game to be fought without off-line devices - yes, that's right - we've all been doing this for years.

Many years ago, I started basing my units up as per the Wesencraft model - normally figures were based in multiples of three, with one of the threes split onto a two and a one, to allow "change" of odd casualties. As time passed, I moved toward larger groups - these days my infantry battalions mostly comprise 4 bases of 6 figures (in two rows). I found it much more convenient to abandon the "small change" idea - I either calculate casualties to the nearer whole base or else use a miniature die to record the odd losses. It's a trade-off. Certainly, I have used 6-man bases for a good few years now, and have never considered changing back, so I guess that - for me - it works.

Having reduced the labour required to remove casualties, the next step was to abandon the removal of casualties altogether, and - once again - I have no immediate intention to change back again. I now use markers to denote losses - I could use rather more subtle markers, but my current cheap-and-cheerful red tiddlywinks do the job, and are visible from across the table. These, I think, are the arguments that brought me to stop removing casualties:

(1) Handling - many of my figures are old and fragile (Les Higgins and Garrison - this mostly means you); on the other hand, some are new and even more fragile (Falcata, Art Miniaturen, NapoleoN, Hagen - this means you). As my eyesight becomes less precise, as my fingers gradually turn into horses' hooves and as my anxious nature seeks new and more obscure things to worry about, I find that the fear of damaging my soldiers has become a serious issue. They are now handled almost exclusively by their bases, and for the less tactically-detailed rulesets they are attached by magnets to rigid sabots. This may seem neurotic, but it is important to me. The less handling the better.

(2) Efficiency (and mess) - Casualties during a miniatures battle, whether removed singly or in large clumps, will gradually take over all the horizontal surfaces in the room (two separate rooms, in my case). Sorting the figures back into organised units before storing them away is a massive contributor to put-away time, and provides extra exposure to the Handling hazard (see (1) above), particularly if the hour is late and the wine is finished.

(3) Proportionality, and the Nature of Casualties [what?] - my take on this is that if a unit is worth (say) 4 to start with (bases, Combat Points, potatoes...) and loses 1 then it does not follow that 25% of the men present just got shot. What it does mean is that the unit is now only about 75% as effective as it was initially - whether the difference is explained by actual physical casualties, or fatigue, or plain old loss of interest is almost immaterial from the general's viewpoint. This came home to me most forcibly when I started working with rules for the English Civil War, which was my first exposure to non-homogeneous regiments. In a unit which consists of 3 bases - say 2 of muskets and 1 of pikes - if you lose a base, which one is it? Further to the point, if the unit has become 2/3 of what it was, what is it now? Well, I reckoned the easiest way to do this was to leave all the original bases in play (so you can see what it was, what mix of subunits it had, how big it was) and just place the red markers to show losses. That gives you a more complete picture. It's also very difficult to represent different formations when you only have 1 base left!

That's about it. That's what prompted me to move in this direction, and thus far - apart from the appearance thing - I have no reason at all to believe I made a mistake. I have a background project somewhere to develop an assorted stock of flat (MDF?) painted casualty markers - which might be interesting, but it would take some work to get this operational, they would probably not be as visible as the red plastic, and there is a slightly undignified whiff of the floating chalk outline scene from Naked Gun.

For the time being, the tiddlywinks have it.

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - Command Cards - Summary Sheet

Further to yesterday's typing extravaganza, I had a good look at the revised (Expansion #5) Command cards, and decided that a full listing of these would also be useful for reference. Note that this is a listing of the revised cards - the ones with the green backs, not the blue ones that come with the original base game (which are listed in the rules booklet).

The cards are organised in three rough groupings - first are the section cards, which specifically relate to units located in one or more sections of the field. Next are the new Take Command cards, which are a bit like section cards, but are applied to Leaders and groups of units adjacent to them. Last are the survivors of what used to be referred to as "tactical" cards - because it is too confusing to have these in the same world as the new Tactician cards, I shall just classify these as Other - if you like, they are Command cards which are not section cards. As with yesterday's list, the numbers in brackets after each card detail are the number of instances of this card in the deck.

Anyway - here they all are - any significant typos, please shout and I'll get it sorted.

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - The "Tactician" Cards - Summary Sheet

The Battle of Uclés which I played here last weekend, with Stryker and Goya in guest-starring roles, was most enjoyable - we did run out of time, which was a shame, but that can largely be explained by unfamiliarity. Not Stryker's lack of experience, as a debutant with the Commands and Colors game, but my own lack of facility with the extended card set which came with Expansion #5, although I had played it before. Since the battle, I have been thinking over why this was a bit of a problem, and what I might do to improve things.

All this is, consciously, being a bit over-critical, but among the joys of C&CN to date have been the ease and speed of play. The game is not trivial - there is a lot to remember - but the logical, fast-play rules are a great strength. So much so that a decent-sized game has typically been taking me about 2 hours elapsed - often less. It is so focused, in fact, that if your game doesn't go well you might just have time to try it again - or even try a different one - in the same session.

I've relished that aspect of the game system, and come to rely on it for crisp, understandable games. As the cliché goes - struggle against the enemy, not the rules.  Last year I bought the Expansion #5 upgrade, the Generals, Marshals and Tacticians box, which promised to add more meaning to the rather minimal role played by Leaders in C&CN. It looks good - the original Command card deck is replaced by a modified one, and there is a new Tactician card deck which adds extra depth to the play. The problem last Saturday was, as I say, unfamiliarity. Reading out the contents of each Tactician card as it is played, and agreeing what it means, turned out to be quite time-consuming. Though I had played with the Expansion #5 cards maybe 3 times before, they still proved to be a bit of a disruption. Apart from the hilarious spectacle (!) of my constantly trying to find my reading glasses among the scenery, it was all very new and a bit uncomfortable. In one step, Expansion #5 takes me from a pack of familiar Command cards which I know well and which I can recognise (and understand) on sight, to a whole new pack of rather more complicated text instructions which I don't know at all well, and which had to be studied as they emerged (and, in game play, it might take several games to see them all). That was the main problem.

The obvious solution is to do a little homework - read the cards over a few times, become comfortable with them. First snag is that, unlike the original game, there appears to be no summary list of the new cards. Not in the rules, and I've looked in a few other places - gamer sites and so on - but failed to find anything useful, so decided to type them out for my own use. That way I can swot up a little and save time and maybe some embarrassment (and a few errors) on battle days. So I've done that - you'll find them on the two sheets below. If there is a numeral in brackets at the end of a card text, that indicates the number of instances of that card in the deck. I have also attempted to edit the text a little where I thought it was potentially ambiguous.

If these sheets are useful to you, please print them off for your homework. If they are not, no matter. If they serve only to remind you that you hate anything to do with hexes with a crusading zeal, then why are you reading this anyway?

It is not my intention to enable anyone to produce their own rip-off card set - heaven forfend - this is merely to give a useful summary of the new Tactician cards, so that anyone (especially me) can do a little homework and get up to speed.

At present, I think that the revised Command cards are less of a problem - they are fairly obviously related to the earlier set, and in any case one sees more of them in a game, so familiarity should come more quickly. (Also - typically - they are less wordy, which is not an insignificant point for those of us with dodgy eyesight and failing memories!). If I get sufficiently worried about them, I may type out the new Command deck as well.

As they used to say in my old workplace, "You must embrace change - because you are bloody well stuck with it".

Update to my C&C-based ECW Rules - Ver 2.67

Following extensive discussions about 30YW rules last year with Peter Brekelmans, and some very useful recent exchanges with The Jolly Broom Man, I've produced another update to the rules booklet for my CC_ECW game, which is now up to Version 2.67 and may be accessed/downloaded via the link on the right hand side of this screen.

The main change is a more comprehensive treatment of "Volatile" and "Rash" Galloper cavalry - which includes the possibility of their leaving the table out of control if they get overexcited - and some tidying up of the rule whereby units being attacked in melee by more than one opponent simultaneously will suffer a deduction from the number of Combat Dice to allow for distraction and diversion of effort.

I've also removed Firelocks as a distinct troop class, since there wasn't really any need. Oh - and units Battling Back in melee now get a minimum of 1 die to do it with!

I had considered making the Volatile/Rash Horse thing an optional rule, but I don't care for optional rules - it is in any case possible to declare that a particular scenario does not involve any such units of horse, and you have exercised just such an option. After much pondering, and after watching my Pegasus DVD of Edgehill for the umpteenth time, I am pretty much convinced that lack of control of Royalist cavalry in the First Civil War was a regular contributor to the day's outcome!

The downloadable QRS sheet is now in need of an update to bring everything back into line - I'll get to it. If you have problems accessing the revised rules booklet (because I have set sharing rights incorrectly, which is my usual Google Docs cock-up when I update these rules), or if I have made some horrible error, please let me know, so I can fix things.

****** Late Edit ******

...and ...and ...light guns now exist only as an attachment to a unit of foot, and medium and heavy guns can move only until they fire or are attacked - in either case the draught crews will leave them to get on with it at that point.

****** Late Late Edit ******

...and ...QRS now updated to match Ver 2.67 - as at 29th March.

Sieges: A Small Matter of Supplies (and Mining, Just a Bit)

I’m pleased to say that my elderly mother is now safely moved to a care home, which is the best outcome all round – it has been a very difficult and distressing time. Also, we have now sold her house, which was quicker and far easier than it might have been, so, with a bit of luck, my life should be returning to something a bit nearer a state of normality in the next few weeks.

Without  wishing to jump the gun, I thought it would be good to plan a celebratory wargame – a proper, social wargame – for the first time in ages. And it also seemed like an opportunity to try out the siege game again, after my brief but unsustained spell of progress in April. When I come to think about it, though, there is a bit of a problem. It’s all very well running a solo siege, correcting (frequently inventing) rules as I go along, and glossing over the incomplete bits (such as supply – and then there’s mining…), but playing this as an actual game with real people requires a rather more polished show. Thus I am proposing to get the rules typed up in a sensible form (sort of), and fill in the more obvious holes in the game. If some motivational soul ever points out to me that a problem is really an opportunity, my instinct is normally to give them the opportunity of removing my cup of coffee from their shirt front, but it does seem a good idea to embrace this excuse for getting the rules written up. Yes – all right – before I forget them again – quite so. Thank you.

Let’s deal with mining very quickly, and I’ll return to it in some future post. In about 2010, Clive S came up here to help out with some siege testing, and it was pretty good fun, but one thing that was clearly wrong was the effectiveness of mining. Mining was so devastatingly successful in the test game that it made us wonder why anybody ever bothered with all that tedious bombardment stuff. As I frequently do, I shelved the problem, pending some great leap of inspiration or some further research. My shelves are overloaded with things like that. 

Trouble was that my mining rules were so brilliantly clever that I had completely missed the point, and failed to check the dimensions of the problem. Clive and I had our mining parties tunnelling at speeds which would have left the machines which dug the Channel Tunnel miles behind. I will not give details of just how fast our miners could dig – it’s too embarrassing – but if such speeds had been possible then it is clear that mining would definitely have been the standard approach – in fact the whole history of fortification  (and everything else) would have been vastly different. Just put it down as a misunderstanding.

I did a fair amount of reading of late – the most useful source was a nice little booklet published by the Shire people, Siege Mines and Underground Warfare, by Kenneth Wiggins. He actually discusses digging and tunnelling techniques, but the main thing I took from all this scholarship is that miners who had no bad luck and knew what they were doing would do well to average 3 paces a day for the progress of a tunnel.

Ah – right. 3 paces a day is about 20 paces a week, which is one tenth of the way across one of my terrain hexes. This is a very small nibble indeed in one of our battlefields, and requires a whole new look at the matter. Hmmm. This also explains why mining was something of a secondary activity – though useful on its day, of course. I’ll think about this.

Just before I leave the subject of mining – does anyone know where they keep those Channel Tunnel digging machines when they are not using them? Just wondered. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you would throw on the back of a low-loader and off to the next job – interesting…

So – supplies.

SUPPLIES!

I am looking for some dead-easy approach to supplies which does not lead to either insanity or a crippling bookkeeping industry, yet prevents the matter being forgotten completely. My rule of thumb (it may be one of Foy’s Laws, but I can’t remember which one) is that the cleverer and more realistic you make your add-on rules (command, morale, supply, whatever), the more fiddly they become and the more likely they are to be dropped during an otherwise exciting game. In other words, if you really wish to exclude all consideration of command and activation from your wargame (for example), spend a few weeks developing the cleverest rule system the world has ever seen to cover this, and the players will just abandon it on the day. [This may have some parallels in the world of Brexit legislation, but let us not go there.]

I started off with provender – I’ll leave ammunition for the moment. Starting place, obviously, is Bruce Quarrie. Interesting, but far too much information, man. Can’t see the wood for the flipping trees. From the classic Siege of Dendermonde I picked up the useful idea of 2 lbs of bread plus 1 lb of meat per man per day. Ron Miles had a lot of detail in there about how many portions of meat you get from slaughtering a cow (1000) or a sheep (80) or even a cat (1.5), so I decided the simplest way to do this is add the whole lot together as food rations – not to worry what the recipe of the day was. The important bit is that a soldier needs 3 lbs of food a day. A magazine will contain a weight of food, and I’ll formulate some rules on how much this needs to be. As a quick aside, this is an aspect of warfare I have always studiously avoided – so I was interested to see what amounts are involved here.

My unit of strength for my ECW forces is the base – 6 figs per base for foot (200 men), 3 per base for horse (100). It occurred to me that it might be a nice additional convenience to add fodder into the food stores as well, and assume that 100 horsemen consume the same amount as 200 foot – let us stop short of whether the men can eat hay or the horses like their beef well cooked – I’m looking for the simplest-ever supply system.

This is a detailed depiction of 4 lbs of food - that's all you need to know

Thus a base of foot will require 200 x 7 x 3 lbs per week, which is, near enough, 2 tonnes, if you add in the drink. That is a lot – thus a regiment of 3 bases of foot will eat their way through 6 tonnes a week, and (by dint of my bovine assumption of equivalence) a unit of 4 bases of horse will require 8 tonnes. On the basis of no science at all, I’ll assume that an artillery unit needs 4 tonnes a week – they have few personnel but a great many draught animals.

The poor old citizenry do not get to eat as heartily as the soldiers. I’ll assume that 1 tonne will feed 500 civilians for a week. OK – that gives me a basis to get started. I’ll add a rule about rations – military and civilian personnel may get full, ¾, ½, ¼ or no rations – which will affect the health and vigour and general happiness of all parties. Oh yes – about the civilians…

In the absence of factual historical data, the population of a township or conurbation can be generated by the formula nD6 x k, where n has the following values:

Major City – 15

Provincial City – 10

Market Town – 6

Village or fortress – 3

My first assumption is that k should be 250 (I may change my mind later) – thus a market town turning up 6 4 4 3 3 1 with its 6 dice has a population of 21 x 250 = 5250.

Standard split is 50% females; for both sexes, one quarter are children and infants, one quarter old or infirm, thus one half able-bodied. Overall split then is

Females – children 12.5%, able bodied 25%, old/infirm 12.5% and the same for Males, so our market town of 5250 might yield 25% able-bodied men = 1315 approx.

Now I need to check how much you can get in a wagon, how much on a mule. I bet Bruce Quarrie has something on this…

Next I need to develop this a bit, and work out some dice algorithms for the relationship between diet and vigour, vigour and susceptibility to outbreaks of fever; I also need to work out some rules for how the effective strength of a garrison is affected by the need to police the population, and how the attitude and loyalty of the population is affected by things like food supply, sustained bombardment. Lots to think about – that’s OK, I have some more free time and a bit more spare brainpower than I had a week or two ago, so I’ll enjoy the challenge!