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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5950463" data-attributes="member: 82106"><a href="http://www.hyw.com/books/history/agricult.htm" target="_blank">Agriculture</a> seems like a useful link on medieval European type agriculture. Classical period technology was a bit less sophisticated. Even low level magic might impact all of this somewhat though. Being able to cure diseases or get an acre or two of your land enhanced by the local druid could be a pretty decent boon, though I doubt it would add a huge amount to overall capacity (but it might well lessen the harshness of the bad times).Now, considering military forces... Again you're looking at that 3% of the population that aren't farmers. The gentry/nobility are your main professional warrior class, so you're looking at say 60,000 people total that aren't famers out of 2 million. You can raise levies of course, but even there probably 10% of the population is fit to serve. England never raised an army of larger than about 20,000 before modern times. Most wars were fought with small bands of a few 100 to a few 1000 men, plus sporadic levying. Chances are even the most powerful of your city states might raise a mighty army of 10k soldiers once every few centuries. The rest of the time they'd be fielding 1000 men here and a 1000 there. Maybe every decade or two there'd be a big fight. Again, this jibes well with classical Greek military force size estimates where Alexander might have had 30k men and a 10k army size would be pretty large. Sparta in the 300's BC was fielding forces of a few 1000 and even those would only be available for a few months out of the year. This is really one of the main reasons that it was hard to take over other cities, there just wasn't a large population base to draw the men from needed to siege and conquer an opponent's city state. Even if you DID manage to beat them the enemy tended to revolt etc before too long and you simply couldn't afford large garrisons needed to permanently control territory.</blockquote>

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