Province Size?

[tinkthank]

I would like to think of it as a county as well, since this feels right in terms of population, magic sites, etc.

However, militia and heavy troops can only move 1 province in a month. If such a unit can march only 10 miles per day (which is shabby), that would still be about 300 miles a month, or about 450 kilometers.

That is somewhere between the breadth of England and Germany.

See what I mean? Either province is too small to allow meaningful map-movement restrictions, or it is too large to be a platform which can handle PD and battles.

[Gandalf Parker]

OK but do we have any choice? Should movement be more restricted? A game like this doesnt like to keep information from one turn to the next. It wants to read the info for each turn processing. So if we made it that "forest" ability allowed movement of 1 province a day, and non-forest capable moving thru forest areas took 2 or 3 turns to do it, I think we are looking at an entirely new non-PbEM style game.

Which they can do if they want but I think it would be another game, not an "improvement" of this one. (Not arguing, just thinking as Im typing)

[tinkthank]

Sorry, I should have made myself more clear.

There is one other option, of course, which is purely for RPG purposes, but which I am bringing up because the dev team has let slip the "aging" principle for dom3....

*Turns represent 1 week, not 1 month.* (Or even: 1 day)

[Chazar]

The german version of the Wikipedia article about the battle of Kadesh says that one of Ramses II major mistakes was to have the divisons of his army marching 10km apart from each other and states that this meant a whole day of marching at that time, thus preventing the latter divions (who were just marching along the path of the previous devision) to reach the battle!!! The army consisted of 4 mixed divisions, each counting 5000 men. Well, you never know about wikipedia's truth, but I believe that one so far...

One should also consider that heavy rain, snowfall, etc. might furthermore prohibit marching at all!

Then I think there was a delay due to wait for short-range scouting: Where can the army pass? Where are suitable places for the night? Could there be places for ambushes?

The lack of proper roads poses another problem: An army of 5000 cannot march like ducklings one after the other along a mere trail. So how do they cross smaller rivers (I suppose Dom2-Maps show only major rivers, but not smaller brooks which already present a problem in the absence of big bridges!) or hills??? I thought armies of those times were sometimes even required to breach their way through smaller forests, no?

I am not speaking of mountain or forest provinces, since I suppose that "plain"-terrain type entails terrain having some smaller woods, smaller rivers (floodplains), dales and hills, but not a real huge wild forest without any trails! Likewise I imagine mountain provinces to be like the alps. BTW, how long did it took Hannibal to cross the alps?

I am no military expert and neither am I a historian, but by the considerations above I doubt that a roman army could traverse the breadth of england or german in a single month. Thus I guess that this all severly limits the size of those provinces even further. Also, not all provinces are of the same size, so some are easier to traverse than others, despite having the same terrain modifier. Who is an experts for mediaeval warfare here?

[Hakko]

I got this little bit of info from this site:

The first thing the soldiers were taught to do, was to march. The historian Vegetius tells us that it was seen as of greatest importance to the Roman army that its soldiers could march at speed.
Any army which would be split up by stragglers at the back or soldiers trundling along at differing speeds would be vulnerable to attack.
Hence right from the beginning the Roman soldier was trained to march in line and to keep the army a compact fighting unit on the move.
For this, we are told by Vegetius, during the summer months the soldiers were to be marched twenty Roman miles (18.4 miles/29.6 km), which had to be completed in five hours.

I presume this speed was over a Roman road, rather than rough terrain. It also mentions that a legion was expected to begin a campaign with 16 days' rations, which, along with other equipment, weighed in at somewhere between 66 and 93 pounds (30-41 kg). So, theoretically, in sixteen days, a legion cold march ~480 kilometers (300 miles) without resupply. I imagine that actual pace was slower, since sustaining that kind of speed over that long would probably kill the unit as a fighting force.

[Chazar]

Impressive! Maybe strat move should change during summer and winter. That would make a nice complex addition to the game. Maybe non-storm-fliers should be grounded in winter as well...!

[Agrajag]

Chazar said:Maybe non-storm-fliers should be grounded in winter as well...!

That doesn't make much sense, winter isnt a perpetual storm, its just really cold (and possibly rainy or snowy or windy etc.)

[Reverend Zombie]

Chazar said:
Maybe non-storm-fliers should be grounded in winter as well...!

Or maybe allow them to move, but only TOWARDS THE EQUATOR of a given map. Assuming the earth isn't flat.

[Endoperez]

tinkthank said:
Sorry, I should have made myself more clear.

There is one other option, of course, which is purely for RPG purposes, but which I am bringing up because the dev team has let slip the "aging" principle for dom3....

*Turns represent 1 week, not 1 month.* (Or even: 1 day)

Well, the game already has seasons and years (3 turns/season, 12/year)... It seems you have quite long weeks (or days) in there!

[bone_daddy]

Actually, after giving it a little more consideration, you're right. Ten miles a day is pretty low. It should probably be double that figure, assuming an average marching speed of 2 to 2.5 miles per hour over a period of 8 to 10 hours, which yields a range of 16 to 25 miles per day. So the province size should be about 600 miles. Which would be like marching across Texas.