Creating your army

It's a fundamental part of any game involving war that you will have an army. There are two main routes to take when thinking about your army, you can go into massive detail and list everything you can think of or, you can list some very basic details and leave it at that. I am going to strike a compromise with this one, you need only list a few details but if you want, you can create an entire history for each and every unit in your army.

Creating a unit, original version by Thijs

This is a basic step by step walkthrough for creating you own units. We will be aiming for a mid skilled and equipped infantry that are able to hold their own but nothing too fancy. We shall call this unit the Zandhazen. We will calculate the cost with and without an Iron supply.

From the equipment page we can find all the arming options for units. We will have the following.

Spear (0.5, 0.5) - A spear is a cheap weapon that can be used to fight in ranks and is an effective against cavalry.
Chainmail suit (2, 8) - The chainmail suit provides a high level of protection for the cost.
Small shield (1.5, 1.5) - The small shield works

Total cost per thousand men to equip = 4 (0.5 + 2 + 1.5) with a supply of Iron and 10 (0.5 + 8 + 1.5) without a supply of Iron.

Now the unit will also need to be trained. Our goal is to create a unit that can hold its own but nothing special, thus we will give it normal training.

So: 4 (Equipment cost) x 1 (Training modifier) = 4 for with Iron and 10 for without. This is the cost to train 1000 Zandhazen.

We must now turn our attention to upkeep. Upkeep is simply a quarter of the cost of our unit, thus it is 1 (4 / 4) with a supply of Iron and 2.5 without (10 / 4). And we have now created a unit.

Military summary

It is as the name suggests a summary of your military (shock horror!) which you use to tell me what makes up your army. It is separated into blocks, each block is a type of unit, below are a few examples from the Aggregate forces.

The numbers in brackets are the calculated costs of the various units, the first number is the normal cost while the second is the cost when you do not have a supply of iron. The second brackets hold the upkeep cost of the unit, with and without iron. If your city does not have a supply of iron then any metal items is quadrupled. Any long numbers are rounded off to 2 decimal points. The catapults require no metal and thus the second number was removed.

Upkeep

Keeping an army can be expensive. Each turn your men will require materials to keep them able and ready. They will cost a quarter of their initial cost each turn (modified accordingly for a lack of Iron). If you have 3000 troops that cost you 10 materials to create, you will have to pay an upkeep of 7.5 (3 lots of 2.5), the workings are shown below.

10 / 4 = 2.5
2.5 x 3 = 7.5

If you are unfortunate enough not to have a supply of Iron then the cost of your troops can be up to four times as much.

Training

No doubt you have noticed that every single unit is equipped with various items and how each unit has a specific level of training? Well, I'm going to go on assuming you did. Training simply refers to how well the unit is trained before being allowed to leave the training grounds, the higher trained it is the better it will fight but the more expensive it will cost. The levels of training are below, along with the cost modifier.

• Untrained: x0.5
• Low standard: x0.75
• Normal standard: x1
• High standard: x1.5
• Exceptional standard: x2

Equipment

The cost of the equipment is listed on the equipment page, each piece of equipment has a cost. To work out the cost of a unit, add the cost of all the equipment together and multiply by the training factor and you have your cost!

Recruitment

Troops are bought from your population, they are bought by the thousand or by the hundred if the unit is expensive. When the men are bought from your population, your population count will drop as those men are now in the army and are too busy to work or grow food. It takes 6 months to train any troops.

Troops are at all times located somewhere, this is listed in your "APH" topic (Assets, Projects and Holdings). If they are not listed in there then they are assumed to be in your capital. To produce troops you must have a supply of iron, without it the cost of your men is increased dependent on their equipment. Any city with at least 25,000 people can train up to 2,500 men a turn, any city with 50,000 or more people can train 1,000 men per 10,000 people in the city (rounding down). To surmise:

• Cities with less than 25,000 people cannot train men
• Cities with 25,000 to 49,999 people can train 2,500 men a turn
• Cities with 50,000 and up can train 1,000 men per 10,000 men in the city (rounded down to the nearest 1,000)

Nomads

Nomads never construct cities yet a group of 25,000 of them in one location counts as a city for that turn for the purposes of training troops.

Engines of War

To ensure that everybody is on the same page in terms of what a war engine is, here are some simple descriptions of the different engines.

• Catapult: It throws a rock about about 0.25m in radius.
• Onager: It throws a rock about about 0.5m in radius.
• Mangonel: It throws a rock about about 1m in radius.
• Scorpion: Shoots javelins a long way.
• Ballista: Shoots very large javelins a long way.
• Trebuchet: HUGE and complicated mechanism that can throw rocks about 2m in radius. You cannot move trebuchets.