Jard said: For example, imagine a family: 2 adults and 3 children. 1 adult goes off to war and dies. Per the rules, this family of 1 adult and 3 children still produces income but can’t be conscripted again, that requires a new family.
Actually, I don’t think that’s correct. This came up in another thread recently; see here: http://www.autarch.co/forums/ask-autarchs/militia-casualties
I guess I’m a little confused, let me try stating it all out.
So you have 1280 families, you raise a militia of 240, they all die.
You now have 960 families, none of which can be considered when determining how many militia you can raise.
Over the course of a few months, you raise your domain back to 1280 families, but can only raise 48 militia because the other 960 families are “income producing only”, right?
Ok, so now as I’m thinking about this: this seems to me like the “family” unit is a bigger abstraction than previously thought. those 960 families, depending on how you squint at it, could actually be 1280 families that have been deprived of their 240 most able-bodied soldiers, producing proportionally less income.
So yes, it seems like a “regrowth” mechanic could be a useful houserule for those campaigns that would span sufficiently long periods of time.
If your domain had a “character sheet”, you would have three columns: T/A/D for T otal families, famalies A vailable for raising militia, and D epleted famlies. Of course T = A+D, but then every month you would reduce D by 0.5% and increase A a corresponding amount (or come up with a die roll that approximates the number; 0.5% of 960 is 4.8, so maybe 1d4 per 500 depleted families?)
Alternatively, it might be too confusing to directly bake replenishment into the mechanics. It might be better to write it in to a random events table of your own design that you roll on, some kind of “Vagaries of Ruling”
This has been a good discussion. The rules primarily address the concerns of a PC ruler who is doing his first mass conscription, because that is typically what happens in play – “The orcs are attacking, raise the militia” – and even within ACKS, few campaigns really stretch through 5 years or more.
In the context of long-term play, or setting up a pre-existing domain:
Assume that the military has been around for long enough that long-term conscripts and mercenaries are now blended together. Just spend the gold, subject to a limit of 1 year’s quota of each type of mercenary troop for the size of the realm.
Each month, 1 conscript becomes available per 2,000 families in the realm.
*Calculated as:
1.1 boy per family survives to adulthood every 18 years;
1 boy per family required to maintain family;
therefore 0.1 conscripts per family per 18 years;
If 18 years = 216 months; and wea ssume childbirth is spread evenly (e.g. in an 18 year period of 216 families, there will be 1 birth per month);
then there will be 0.1/216 conscripts per family per month;
That is approximately 1 conscript per 2,000 families per month.
An Empire of 5 million families (20 million people) could therefore conscript 2,500 soldiers per month or 30,000 per year.
If soldiers have a typical career length of 10 years, then that would suggest an army of about 300,000 can be continuously maintained from conscription.
That’s a very reasonable number given garrison costs, etc. and historical data (1.5% of population under arms in Rome).
In the D@W rules, conscripts and militia are two completely separate things.
Conscript losses only reduce the ability to maintain conscripts in the future. They do not affect production or the number of families in the domain.
Militia losses (which is what the other thread was about) do result in lost families.
You now have 960 families, none of which can be considered when determining how many militia you can raise.
As far as I can tell, the rules only stipulate a “depletion” mechanic for conscripts, not militia. I interpret that to mean that, after losing the 240 militia, you can then recruit another 208 militia from the 1040 surviving families (1280-240 = 1040, not 960), lose them, recruit 166 militia from the 832 surviving families, etc. with no hard limit, but at the cost of rapidly depopulating your domain and likely pushing the remaining population into open revolt (remember the -1 domain morale for every (1 militia per 10 families) raised - after three rounds of levying maximum militia, you’ve lost 6 points of domain morale!).
As far as replenishing conscripts, I plan to just handle that through the existing population churn mechanics. If 5 families leave the domain and 5 new families appear, then conscript depletion is reduced by 0.5 even though there was no net population change. Specifically, reduce depletion by 0.1 per departing family and by 0.1 per “lost” new family which can’t be added due to it exceeding the population limit. e.g, If your domain is at 1270 of a maximum 1280 families and the monthly population change rolls come up with 3 families leaving and 18 joining, depletion is reduced by 0.8 (0.3 for 3 families leaving and 0.5 for the 5 that can’t join due to the population cap - they’re marrying into existing families, etc. to replenish them). YMMV, but I find that far simpler and more straightforward than doing percentage-based reduction of depletion.
Harn players recently visited the ACKS forums, panicked, and then went back to their simple little story game.
HA! You’re proud of this technological terror you’ve created, aren’t you?
You’re absolutely correct! I misread the question. Having said that, I still thought the same loss applied to both, though on reading it again, that’s not the case. I’m curious as to what the game world rationale for this is? Something like Militia is the head of the household, Conscripts are the eldest son?
Exactly.
Or, put another way, conscripts are surplus manpower and militia are not.
Party has started hex-clearing operations now that they’re level 3-5, on the assumption that if they start clearing now, they’ll level up and use the money to start building strongholds, and if they start building the strongholds now, they’ll hit name level by the time the things are ready. This has lead to two thoughts:
Do I just roll it as though it were a random encounter, but with a 100% chance of being in lair? That seems like it’d throw off the proportions quite a bit, with players finding far more lairs of things that would normally almost never have lairs. Unless you’re meant to roll to see what you get, then roll to see if it’s a lair, and if not, reroll? That seems like tedious bookkeeping.
Is it just me, or is hex-clearing a safer, more reliable source of income than dungeons? When you hex-clear, you’re promised a lair, which to my understanding is generally just a cave with some monsters and treasure in it. When you dungeon-clear, you fight a lot of monsters, only a small fraction of which will carry treasure, plus you have to deal with traps.
Alex took the frequency of encounters and mathed out a way to figure out how much stuff is in a given hex. I don’t know where the link is, but I saved it as a txt file and so i’ll repaste it here for your convenience:
"
Based on the average frequency of encounters, the average spotting distances of encounters, the average percentage chance of an encounter being in a lair, and the average distance traversed per encounter throw, I worked up the expected number of lairs per hex.
You can use the following table to determine how many lairs will appear in each hex:
Terrain Lairs Per Hex
Inhabited 1d4
Clear, Grass, Scrub 1d4
Hills 2d4+1
Woods 2d4+1
Desert 2d4+1
Jungle 2d6+1
Mountains 2d6+1
Swamp 2d6+1
Each day of searching, allow one encounter throw to find a lair.
"
as for your second question: it’s reliable when your party is big and tough enough to handle the kind of things you can meet in the wilderness, which is wildly swingy. By comparison, when you go into the 1st or 2nd level of a dungeon, you have a reasonable expectation of what you might come up against.
“as for your second question: it’s reliable when your party is big and tough enough to handle the kind of things you can meet in the wilderness, which is wildly swingy. By comparison, when you go into the 1st or 2nd level of a dungeon, you have a reasonable expectation of what you might come up against.”
Yeah, this is the danger. Focusing on clearing out wilderness lairs is more profitable than clearing early levels of dungeons, but is also more dangerous. Thus, greater reward.
Even if you only find the lairs of creatures you’re looking for, a wilderness lair is almost always bigger and more nasty than a dungeon lair, and almost without exception is bigger than a dungeon encounter. (In fact, usually a dungeon lair is identical to a wilderness encounter, and then the wilderness lair is bigger. The reason for this, of course, is the fact that a dungeon lair is simply a wilderness encounter that settled down in a dungeon.)
Oh no. Don’t do that. My party did that, and it turned into a gruesome slog. Body parts everywhere, not much good treasure. Sure, you might think that lair clearing provides more profit per risk than dungeoneering… but there are a lot of lairs with really crappy treasure, like stirges and giant catfish and beastman villages, which are also pretty high-risk at low/mid levels. And cleared hexes repopulate if not actively policed…
It is my earnest belief that at mid-levels, that PCs should be pursuing treasure maps instead, which point to the lairs of high-value targets like dragons. Dragons are, in some ways, substantially less dangerous than a beastman village and provide much greater treasure. Powered by dragon-treasure, hitting ninth is a lot quicker, and then at that level dealing with villages is not as difficult. This is also an excellent opportunity for long-distance overland travel before settling down into the domain game. Meet the neighbors-to-be, so to speak.
Selective raiding of high-value targets would be my advice, rather than outright hex-clearing operations.
As for 1, just because a monster has a low percent-in-lair chance doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find lairs for it, though you might not expect to find all the monsters in the lair at once. I stock using the wilderness random encounter tables, and almost all of those monsters have lair entries anyway.
I have no sense of scale for what an “appropriate challenge” is for a treasure map. This is problematic, given how many treasure maps the Paladin found while attempting to solo some lairs.
There’s a thread where it was discussed.
http://autarch.co/forums/general-discussion/treasure-maps
This one has Alex making some comments on it.
Yes. Given my experience (11 sessions into a level 3-5 party establishing a wilderness colony and spending most of their time trying to clear hexes), I have to agree. It’s certainly awesome when they hit the jackpot of a lone stone giant (and her three pet cave bears) with 13kgp+ in her cave, but most nights, they’re netting 200-300xp each. Nobody’s leveled yet, several have picked up permanent injuries (most of them would be dead had I not adapted DCC’s Luck mechanic… and their Luck is running out), and many mercenaries have died (I started them off with 16 heavy infantry, 16 light infantry, and 8 crossbows; 5 light infantry and the crossbows are all that remain - and it’s only been in the last 3 sessions that they’ve been bringing mercs into the field with them).
It’s really not pretty.
I tend to roll value, then figure out about what treasure class it would be, then pick a monster with that treasure class and place a lair out at a reasonable distance. I used to try to put real dungeons at the end of each treasure map, but as you suggest, maps are entirely too common and that wasn’t going to work. Lairs are much easier to manage.
Good thread! I might start doing that rather than putting most of the challenge at the treasure site.
Okay, so treasure maps aren’t maps to free treasure, but maps to an encounter with treasure. (Should the map specify the nature of the treasure?)
Thus, the incentive to follow the map is “Guys, we can either go into that cave that might just be full of bears and no loot, or we can follow this map to THAT cave that definitely has treasure and probably bears anyway.”
I’m thinking of replacing the “Half land-value” for beastmen with a special rule that says they always treat land as having a set value, partially to represent the exceptional hardiness of beastmen and partially so that it’s not possible to have an area where becoming leader is an inherently money-losing proposition.