Looking in Campaigns I see that Artillery require an Artillerist (25gp per month) and crew based on what type of piece it is. Is each crewman also an Artillerest and costs 25gp per crewman? Or is there a different cost listed somewhere?
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[quote="SaruSama"]
Looking in Campaigns I see that Artillery require an Artillerist (25gp per month) and crew based on what type of piece it is. Is each crewman also an Artillerest and costs 25gp per crewman? Or is there a different cost listed somewhere?
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IANAA, but I will take a crack at this since I do not believe there to be an easily citable answer.
Let's start with the easiest question, is each crewman an artillerist? No, you only require 1 artillerist per battery (3-5 artillery pieces).
How much does artillery crew cost is a little trickier as it is never explicitly stated as far as I can tell. I believe that the best answer can be found in the core rules, the explicit rules for artillery are covered in the section on ship combat. In these rules any crewmember can operate the artillery with the caveat that the artillery pieces attacks as it's lowest level crew member. The most common crew members are rowers, who are paid 3 GP/mo. This means that opperating an artillery piece under the direction of an artillerist is unskilled labor and performable by literally any soldier in the army. So that 3 GP/mo can be your answer, the attack throws will suck but there's not great alternative for giant artillery pieces.
At smaller scales it can make a big difference to spring for higher level artillery crew, a repeating ballista with two high level fighter henchmen is a thing to behold.
I'd operated under the assumption they'd be 6gp/mo, given the minimum training/ability of light infantry. I could see an argument for treating and paying them as regular laborers, though.
As far as I know the attack throw uses the worst of all operators so you probably want to hire at least light infantry for the job.
I'm pretty confident non-veteran units are just as bad at attack throws as any other normal man (11+). Light Infantry (or anyone paid 6gp) might be the least-expensive veteran unit, though.
One might, through fiddling with armaments and armor, work out a troop wage less than 6gp using Battles conversion rules, making a specific "artillery team" troop type.
I would probably push for some kind of training for the sake of morale, though I think you need military units as crewmen in order to bring them on campaign with you, or have them participate in a battle. Hmmm that's probably why there is an entry for peasants! Levee up some catapult crewman!
The artillery crew can be laborers/militia/rowers (3gp per month) or anything else you'd like. The disadvantage of using laborers/militia/rowers will be their low morale. If the artillery unit takes any damage, they'll likely flee and abandon the artillery piece.
From what I understand, the Romans used legionaries to man their artillery under the direction of trained specialists, as they were often used on the battlefield itself. But I think it's easy to imagine something like a traction trebuchet being manned by a bunch of burly peasants. At that range, they'd almost certainly be safe from any danger; you just need strong men to move rocks.