Unusual Military Formations (in D@W)

General ACKS Forums Ask the Autarchs
1

I'm currently working up a setting for a campaign I hope to run later this year. I'm definitely looking at delving into Domains at War, since my setting is thoroughly "war-torn". As a result, I have been working on existing military forces in the game setting.

One thing that stood out was that by the standard assumptions of D@W:Campaigns, the main sources of troops (at least for PCs; NPC/monster troops are of course basically whatever I say they are) are mercenaries, levies, conscripts and slaves. But one thing that comes up a surprising amount in my campaigns is a desire to form elite military units; knightly orders, royal guard, and so on. I can build these as units using the custom unit rules and even generate a BR for them.

The D@W rules (especially in Campaigns) seem to assume that all units are either paid (in the case of mercs) or otherwise subject to restriction based on available levies, population penalties from conscription, or monetary outlay for slaves. But how would you fit those kinds of elite military units into that kind of army maintenance structure? Who, ultimately, pays for those kinds of special units anyway? In particular things like Templar orders tend to act as a generalised religious tithing element; I don't really see how that would fit into the ACKS financial management paradigm. 

Now, my guess is the official answer is "you're the DM, you decide" and that's fine. I was just wondering if anyone had advice.

2

I think a lot depends on how you would define your elite military units, i.e. how elite is elite.

As a “measure” of scale, in this thread http://www.autarch.co/forums/general-forums/house-rules/custom-units-domains-war Alex comments:

"World War I was the last era when troops still fought in massed formations while also introducing aircraft, tanks, and battleships, so this seemed like a useful benchmark.

The French Army had 8 million soldiers during WW I, with 4000 tanks. The US Army had 4,355,000 soldiers and 4,436 aircraft. The British army had 8.9 million soldiers and 18 dreadnaughts, 10 battle cruisers, 35 cruisers, and 200 destroyers. So those were the sort of ratios I was looking for fantasy warfare to mimic.

For flying creatures, I looked at the relative cost of cavalry versus fighter aircraft in the WWI era. For powerful monsters, I looked at the prices of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses compared to the cost of of fighter planes to get an estimate of what the price difference between a dragon and a pegasus might be. I also looked at prices of WWI dreadnaughts and early tanks.

In the context of the Auran Empire, assuming an army of about 250,000, it would only have about 125 “tanks”, 240 “fighters”, and 2 “battleships/battlecruisers” across the entire army. So we’re looking at, say, 6 20-creature units of huge monsters (maybe bronze golems or something), 4 60-creature units of air cavalry (grififn riders or something), and 2 “battleships”, maybe giant rocs with spellcasters on them. So, they exist, but the typical battle is not going to see them making an appearance.

If you want to have a more fantastical playing field it’s easy enough to fiddle with these dials."

In a recent Patreon/forthcoming Axioms article, Alex defines elite units for D@W as mass units with special training (a Proficiency common to all), provides battlefield applications for units with Proficiencies, and defines geographically based elite troops, a la English longbowmen or Swiss halberdiers. These troops appear from a region in numbers proportional to their region’s size.

Veteran troops have more experience/HD, and veteran elite troops exist.

But your royal guard might be even more “elite”, like 60 spellswords on pegasi. Such troops are essentially exotic troops akin to a monster, rare in number, a luxury affordable to kings and emperors.

Unless you adjust the “dials” Alex mentions for your world.

I am not knowledgeable of the real-world Templars, so I can’t help there. I believe some others may be able to help with that reference. Autarch or not, please chime in.

3

In the end I think “who pays for this” is a question of the world, not of the mechanics so much.

We know what the wages are of various military units, which serves as a balancing factor as well, but who pays them doesn’t. If you want to, you could say that for example, in your world, all merchants give 10% of their profits to their local church, and it uses those tithes to pay for maintenance, congregations, and quasi-military knightly orders. (Estimates/numbers for the amount of money that goes through cities of various sizes are on the forums and, I believe, better hammered down in an issue of Axioms, so that would let you know what the income of this temple is in each city that it has a presence.)

This is just an immediate example, of course, but I think it shows the idea; we can know how much money exists in the world, adjusting the specific locations it flows to is a relatively easy task (by the standards of ‘insane things we do for ACKS campaigns’) and can be used to figure out the budget of whatever organization paying for these things you want.

(Note: Not an Autarch.)

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Thanks for the responses, much to think about.

The reason I'm coming at this question is because I've played with most of these people quite a lot before now and as a result I know for pretty sure that this is how they will respond to the domain and warfare elements of the game. They like creating new institutions and new power pieces in their gameworlds; that's part of the reason I'm going with ACKS in the first place, of course. 

Here's an example of what I'm thinking of. According to the level-by-population guidelines, I can expect to see one level 3 fighter in every 150 or so population units. This means that with a large enough population it would not be particularly unreasonable for an elite military order to demand that all of their entrants be level 3 fighters before being permitted membership; with a solid set of social mores behind it, it would also potentially be able to request Royal funding. This means we end up with a large unit of 3HD heavy cavalry.

Now, the obvious parallel is mercenaries (the Crown is most likely paying for the order, with perhaps some assistance from the families of members). But a group like this are not going to have the usual issues with mercenary loyalty, are they? They bear a stronger resemblance to vassal troops. 

I guess the real answer is, as always, whatever works at my table; and tbh these players are probably more likely to go down the "hippogriff cavalry" route anyway. (When I ran a short-lived meatgrinder game, upon encountering Stirges for the first time one of these players immediately wanted to know if you could mount a halfling on one.)

5

I myself always hoped for the possibility of a system of war where units of level 3 and 4 of a particular class were possible, but the sheer number of battles they'd have to be in to level solely from war makes it almost impossible before they get wiped out.  Another factor is that I believe the base assumption is that, while you COULD build a unit of level 3s, they are likely to be so rare relative to the abundance of level 0s and 1s that it's more efficient to use them as sergeants and captains.  It's an implicit assumption that the "glue" that holds a unit of 120 or however many units together is 1 higher level officer for every 8 troops.  Thus, creating a unit of 120 level 3 fighters prevents you from using them as captains in order to bring slightly under 960 regular men to bear.

But that aside, let's look at some of your other concerns: who pays.  The important thing is that SOMEBODY cares enough to pay these higher level warriors their money.  If not, then there should be a story reason why they're ok with not getting paid.  There absolutely CAN be a story explanation, but the base rules tell you how much they would usually expect and therefore how important of a cause they should be signed up for relative to what they can expect to make.  That folds right back into the issue of morale.  The base game allows that particularly well compensated mercenaries have higher morale.  As long as we accept that these are warriors who can be compensated with some sort of "satisfaction" that is not literally gold, they can be part of a cause SO important to them, that it is as though they're being paid more and have a corresponding morale bump.

6

[quote="Jard"]

I myself always hoped for the possibility of a system of war where units of level 3 and 4 of a particular class were possible, but the sheer number of battles they'd have to be in to level solely from war makes it almost impossible before they get wiped out. [/quote]

I was thinking more of a "you must be this tall to ride" situation. You simply say people aren't allowed to join unless they're level 3. Since ACKS works on the assumption that power = power (one I quite like, not least because it throws off a lot of modern players), there are quite a few of those around; most likely cutting their teeth on repelling raiding beastmen and keeping the peace rather than war XP. 

> Another factor is that I believe the base assumption is that, while you COULD build a unit of level 3s, they are likely to be so rare relative to the abundance of level 0s and 1s that it's more efficient to use them as sergeants and captains.  It's an implicit assumption that the "glue" that holds a unit of 120 or however many units together is 1 higher level officer for every 8 troops.  Thus, creating a unit of 120 level 3 fighters prevents you from using them as captains in order to bring slightly under 960 regular men to bear.

That's very true; there is an implict application of the platoon-level hidden inside the company-level, and lvl 3 troops are lieutenants at that scale.

And sticking with the "elite military order" element I think it could well be the case that a lot of low-ranking members of that order would get farmed out as trainers, platoon lieutenants and so on during a large-scale conflict. But their cohesion as a distinct order means you could *also* raisethem as a single unit with 3HD.

> But that aside, let's look at some of your other concerns: who pays.  The important thing is that SOMEBODY cares enough to pay these higher level warriors their money.  If not, then there should be a story reason why they're ok with not getting paid.  There absolutely CAN be a story explanation, but the base rules tell you how much they would usually expect and therefore how important of a cause they should be signed up for relative to what they can expect to make.  That folds right back into the issue of morale.  The base game allows that particularly well compensated mercenaries have higher morale.  As long as we accept that these are warriors who can be compensated with some sort of "satisfaction" that is not literally gold, they can be part of a cause SO important to them, that it is as though they're being paid more and have a corresponding morale bump.

This is good stuff; I've been reading quite a few Ars Magica supplements lately and one of the things they go into is that to a large degree, anything requiring lots of deep expertise and high-quality equipment outside of a city tends to coalesce into organisations that primarily recruit from the nobility. With a large enough noble class (and therefore enough useless non-inheriting sons and daughters) you end up with things like the early monastic movement and the Templars. Both of these are good examples of organisations that for the most part don't necessarily demand payment from a ruler, or even necessarily recognise that ruler in a feudal sense.

So that becomes more of a Diplomacy/reaction roll situation rather than a morale situation - and one that probably has "large donation to the organisation" as a major positive modifier. But a ruler with a matching alignment and a good Charisma modifier might well find themselves in a position to call upon them.

7

Marginally relevant:

http://crowbarandbrick.blogspot.com/2014/09/acks-black-company.html

It's not inconceivable to think that in a world with threats both mundane and magical, that a ruler of a city might not need to suppress his own revolting garrison with a large hammer; or that a sorceror-queen might not need an incredibly crack team (at company scale) to further her own purposes.

The difference between some castellan offering a ?kgp gold bounty on beastman heads to 4-8 adventurers and a sorcerer-queen offering a bounty on whatever to 96-144 adventurers is just scale, I guess, at the end of the day.

 

 

8

[quote="koewn"]

Marginally relevant:

http://crowbarandbrick.blogspot.com/2014/09/acks-black-company.html

[/quote]

not to derail this too much, but is there a good primer somewhere for someone wanting to start reading black company? There seem to be a lot of stories and it's not clear how I should dip my toe in.

9

Start at the beginning, more or less. It's one long series, not short vignettes.

The Black Company

Shadows Linger

The White Rose

Onmibus of the first three here: https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Black-Company-Glen-Cook/dp/0765319233/ref=pd_sbs_14_img_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E6RTRYH0YR1DJ8NMF840

 

While I'm recommending books:

https://www.amazon.com/Swords-Dark-Magic-Sword-Sorcery/dp/0061723819/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484961372&sr=1-1&keywords=swords+and+dark+magic

Swords and Dark Magic; a collection of short stories. 

Maybe we should have a forum for this sort of stuff - books and other media, both fiction and nonfiction, that hold inspiration for ACKSy things?

 

10

I can’t imagine not starting the Black Company with the first book, The Black Company. The writing is not as polished as his later work, but likely appeals to anyone who has played a fantasy RPG. Or, you could begin with volume 1 of the omnibus collection, Chronicles of the Black Company, which includes The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose, the first three novels.

Edit: I’m too slow … ninja’d.

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That's a great idea. There are definitely works that are ACKSpirational...

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[quote="Alex"]

That's a great idea. There are definitely works that are ACKSpirational...

[/quote] And good non-fictional resources. An article in Ancient Warfare magazine is what started my idea for naval rules, and issue #6 of Ancient History magazine had some good articles on Archaic Roman religion that could help someone crafting a campaign.

13

[quote="The Dark"]

 

 

That's a great idea. There are definitely works that are ACKSpirational...

 


-Alex

And good non-fictional resources. An article in Ancient Warfare magazine is what started my idea for naval rules, and issue #6 of Ancient History magazine had some good articles on Archaic Roman religion that could help someone crafting a campaign.

 

[/quote]

Righto. Sorted; see "Inspirations" forum under the main category.

14

Just thought I should pop my head up and thank the Autarchs for Axioms 4's rather epic answer to my initial query :)