Determining Troop Sizes and Strength?

[Samloyal23]

I have a campaign centered around city-states that do not necessarily like each other. Is there an easy way to determine how many troops they have and what level their commanders have? How do I determine the value of their gear and how much access they have to magic?

 

[Umbran]

That sounds less like something you determine, than something you *choose*, as the GM.

In WWII, something like 12% of the population served in the military. Note that this isn't just front-line troops - this number covers *all* roles, and includes all the support personnel, the clerks shuffling papers, and such. This represents a population on total war footing. Today, the armed forces are perhaps half a percent of the population.

So, how many people are in the forces, and how much they have in resources, really depends on how dedicated each city is to preparedness and conflict.

 

[Celebrim]

I have a campaign centered around city-states that do not necessarily like each other. Is there an easy way to determine how many troops they have and what level their commanders have? How do I determine the value of their gear and how much access they have to magic?

As a standing army or a wartime levy?

Standing army is probably about 0.8% of the entire population. Keeping a standing army is expensive. Most of the military might of a nation will be conscripts, citizens, or a widely distributed aristocratic military class ('knights') which require some time to muster and organize.

Population of a city state is probably about 3-20 times the population of the city itself depending on the degree of urbanization. Southern Europe with its longer growing seasons was much more urbanized than Northern Europe, which basically depended on widely distributed substance farmers and needed a large number of villages to support each town.

In war, they might be able to temporarily mobilize about 10-15 times as many troops depending on the prosperity and militarization of the city state. However, its highly unlikely that more than 4% of the total population (5 times the standing armor) would be able to go on an extended campaign, simply because of the cost of that both in terms of the capital expended and the capital lost by depriving yourself of so much labor.

These numbers favor a short term stasis between city states. Even if you lose your army in the field, the enemy is unable to capitalize on that fact because you can always muster at least as large an army purely for home defense. Instead, wars between ancient city states are effectively about long term demographic warfare. The side that out breeds and out expands the other one eventually chokes its enemies off and assimilates its outer territories. The ability to out breed your enemy involves having stable social structures that promote large families, stable agriculture that allows for resistance to periods of famine and plague, and ability to resist cultural infiltration. A very good understanding of these dynamics can be gained by studying the wars between Rome and its rival Carthage, in which Rome repeatedly got trounced on the battlefield but Carthage was never able to capitalize on that and eventually Rome just grew too large for Carthage to continue fighting despite losing more soldiers than its rival. Rome's mono-culture more aggressively expanded than Carthage's loose multi-cultural confederation. Rome's agriculture proved more stable as North Africa experienced increasing desertification. The 'Roman virtue' proved better adapted to the technology level it found itself competing at. It was just better at turning out loyal citizen soldiers year after year and ground down its rival in a demographic war of attrition with the ultimate stake being basically genocide, at a cultural level, if not completely a ethnic one - although since victory usually involved killing all the enemies fighting age men, castrating and enslaving the rest, and capturing the women as slaves and concubines the difference between the two is a moot point.

Value of gear, access to magic, and level of their commanders will have campaign specific answers. Any answer I could give you in D&D terms would be wrong, because D&D has never had functional economics. If you read the 1e AD&D player's handbook regarding the economic situation it intends to simulate - namely, gold rush era Klondike Alaska - I think you'll see why without complete reform of the economic rules its silly to extrapolate from them. In general, the standing army will be well-equipped for its technology level, while the levied army will be variously equipped according to the prosperity and cultural traditions of the society. Rather than extrapolating what that means in terms of 'gold pieces' you are probably better off researching historical armies of different periods and matching that real world structure to your closest in game analogy. The prices of those weapons in the usual price guides are meaningless so no schedule of value can be set. For example, longbows aren't really expensive weapons to make - just expensive weapons to train to use.

Likewise, level demographics depend entirely on the sort of game you want to play. In my game, commanders are generally almost all between 3rd and 5th level, while leaders of nations and famous heroes might be 7th-10th level. In the Forgotten Realms, levels of leaders are at least twice that and its not unknown for entire units of rank and file soldiers to be 5th or 6th level.

And again, the availability of magic on the battlefield is even more campaign centric. In my game, there might be one 5th level combat centric wizard for roughly every 4000 soldiers in most armies. However, some cultures (elves especially) have relatively high numbers of combat wizards and that number could reach 1 in 100. Most standing armies in my homebrew are well trained to deal with wizards and will know about common spells with battlefield utility and how to combat a wizard on the battlefield. For example, heavy infantry will know to form shield walls to resist fireballs and other area of effect spells, light infantry will know to disperse, archers will focus fire on areas where they see magical activity, and skirmishers and light cavalry will be specifically tasked with harassing spell-casters. (Under my rules, this works, but it probably doesn't work that well under RAW, so consider the implications of RAW on the utility of standing armies if you are going to stick with it.)

You'll need to decide just how common magic items actually are. In a society that can produce wands of fireballs, lacks inexpensive effective defensive magic, and has magic item shops, standing armies as we know them from history probably do not exist simply because they aren't cost effective. Certainly a wand of fireballs has far more incremental military utility for the price than a sword +1, so if the rules allow equal access to them and make the wand cheaper than the sword, don't expect it to be logical for armies to have any soldiers in them in the traditional sense. You field 100 guys with mail, shield, and sword and I field 6 guys with wands of fireballs, then I probably win. It makes absolutely no sense to train and equip 1st level warriors with expensive hardware, horses an the like, if training and equipping 1/20th as many of wizards has lower cost and (much) greater battlefield utility. This implies that if magic is common, and works as in RAW 3.5, then the world can't remotely resemble history. Tier 1 classes certainly will defeat tier 5 classes. Military strategy will conform to the weapons and economics of the time, and if you treat the D&D economic system at face value there probably won't be any parallels with the modern world. Your best bet then is to ask one of your power gamers with high system mastery how he'd equip an army given the rules for a particular budget.

 

[Bluenose]

Do you have any ideas about the wealth and government style of each city state? How about the costs of raising and maintaining troops? The combination of knowing how much money each state has to spend and how much that gets them is probably the easiest way to get an idea of the strength of each army. The different ways a city state may be governed might suggest what sort of troops that they raise. States ruled by foreign despots are likely to rely less on local troops than they are on mercenaries, while ones with strong traditions of local autonomy will have strong militia forces to support that.

To give you one example of what different things might happen with a city state, in my campaign world there's one fairly isolated state that exists on the edge of a region that's divided among a large number of other states. It's got large but rather sparsely settled territories to it's north and east, with quite a lot of problems from various tribal groups beyond - goblins, human barbarians, and others. To the south there's a dwarven city, which it has pretty good relations with, and there're other human cities to the west but also some rather nasty human barbarian tribes. Several religions have fortified temples in the area, there's a few semi-independent lords with their own fortresses, and the borders of the territory have forts in strategic locations such as river crossings or mountain passes. Adventurers are encouraged to travel to those border forts and launch raids into the hostile territories, which damages the tribes and returns wealth and sometimes prisoners/slaves - the most successful ones often end up among the lords.

What you get out if this is a city state where the army consists of several groups. There's a small professional guard force maintained by the city council to keep order and guard the gates and walls in peacetime, which also guards the city standard in wartime. Different guilds - their leaders are the people who sit on the council - pay for their members equipment and training, so provide a fairly large number of moderately well equipped militia to the army. The rural population are rarely asked to turn out, though they can rely on some to turn up and serve as scouts and/or archers. The petty nobles of the area are asked to attend with their retinues, and they vary both in troop quality and equipment depending on the wealth and efficiency of that noble. The religious orders supply good quality troops and clerics. There's often a rather motley collection of adventurers available, since ones who don't turn up when required to are refused access to the territories in the future and any property they've left is confiscated. Plus there's access to dwarven mercenaries and sometimes troops from the friendlier groups of barbarians.

How much of each depends on what sort of campaign is going on. In a short one it's rather easy to call up the militia and the city guard, and portions of the others that are near to the threat. For a longer one it's easier to get most of the contingents complete, but keeping the militia in the field reduces the cities income, which makes it harder to keep the army in service. There isn't enough income to keep the whole force in service indefinitely, but if the militia are sent home then it's possible to pay maintenance for the whole of the indigenous force and a small number of mercenaries. So at different stages of a war the army that city state fields might look very different.

As for the commanders, the commander is usually the leader of one of the religious orders - ideally a cleric/paladin/champion of a god(dess) concerned with War. They'd rather not give command to a local lord or city official, in case they get ideas. Since those religions are also often involved in raids and small-scale warfare with hostile groups they tend to be quite experienced at least in that sort of combat, though not always at larger battles.