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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 9252993" data-attributes="member: 2525">From what I was able to find on various message boards, the best argument I found on your end of the spectrum was, "the percentage of people in an army is roughly 5%, and increases up to a maximum of 10% during wartime. This means in a town of 1000, not currently fighting any wars, there should be approximately 50 trained guards. "I then also saw, "The statistic is, in a medieval society, you're looking at about 90% of the population being subsistence farmers. 5% of the population being full-time military would mean that every other non-farmer is a guard. Remember that a town of 1000 people is actually not very big at all, and in an age where taxation is woefully unreliable, the government is fairly small. You'd be lucky to get 5 guards."I also saw that the trained folk of a town would often be out of town on patrol, so many wouldn't even be in town ready to battle a dragon suddenly swooping in for an attack on the town.So the estimate seems to range from 5 to 50 for a town of 1000. They're not beating an adult Red Dragon.Your claim of 30% of the population being trained for warfare matches just one country: modern north Korea. That's it. No other nations were listed (old or modern) with such a high trained population level. Though nobody has good stats on, for example, Sparta.</blockquote>