Alternate army building rules (Warpath in Kingmaker)

[blargney the second]

I'm reworking the rules for building kingdoms and armies in Kingmaker right now. My players seem pretty stoked about using mass combat, so I want to make sure I'm providing a fairly robust system. I've been reading as much as I can in these messageboards to learn from your compiled wisdom and experience. As a result, I've picked up Warpath and I'm planning on using it as the engine for our battles.

One of the things I want to change is the ability to field armies of almost arbitrary size and (more importantly) level. I did some research into the demographics of historical and modern populations and armies. I also took the demographics info from the 3.5 DMG into account, as well as Kingmaker's kingdom info. The end result is a chart that tells you how many soldiers you can hire based on the number of hexes you have claimed. This is further broken down by class and level.

Here's the chart of maximum recruitable soldiers.

Next step, recruitment! I came up with a set of fairly simply formulas to determine how much it costs to recruit and equip an army.

Cost to recruit an army or maintain it for 1 week (active) or 1 month (inactive):
i) Cost in BP (round up) = number of soldiers * CR of a soldier^2 / 50
ii) Mercenaries count as 1 CR higher when determining cost, but give you limited access to powerful races like lizardfolk or trolls.

Cost to equip an army:
i) Cost in BP (round up) = number soldiers * cost of 1 soldier's items / 2000
ii) Price mounts as part of equipment
iii) Equipment maintenance = 10% of initial purchase cost

I've still got a few pieces to put together, but this is the core of it.
-blarg

[PJ]

blargney the second wrote:

I'm reworking the rules for building kingdoms and armies in Kingmaker right now. My players seem pretty stoked about using mass combat, so I want to make sure I'm providing a fairly robust system. I've been reading as much as I can in these messageboards to learn from your compiled wisdom and experience. As a result, I've picked up Warpath and I'm planning on using it as the engine for our battles.

One of the things I want to change is the ability to field armies of almost arbitrary size and (more importantly) level. I did some research into the demographics of historical and modern populations and armies. I also took the demographics info from the 3.5 DMG into account, as well as Kingmaker's kingdom info. The end result is a chart that tells you how many soldiers you can hire based on the number of hexes you have claimed. This is further broken down by class and level.

Here's the chart of maximum recruitable soldiers.

Next step, recruitment! I came up with a set of fairly simply formulas to determine how much it costs to recruit and equip an army.

Cost to recruit an army or maintain it for 1 week (active) or 1 month (inactive):
i) Cost in BP (round up) = number of soldiers * CR of a soldier^2 / 50
ii) Mercenaries count as 1 CR higher when determining cost, but give you limited access to powerful races like lizardfolk or trolls.

Cost to equip an army:
i) Cost in BP (round up) = number soldiers * cost of 1 soldier's items / 2000
ii) Price mounts as part of equipment
iii) Equipment maintenance = 10% of initial purchase cost

I've still got a few pieces to put together, but this is the core of it.
-blarg

So, you haven't ran this yet right? Tell us how the cost adjustment goes. It looks good though. Thanks for sharing and your time.

[blargney the second]

PJ wrote:

So, you haven't ran this yet right? Tell us how the cost adjustment goes. It looks good though. Thanks for sharing and your time.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

That's correct. We haven't even started playing yet. Right now I'm looking ahead and trying to smooth out any major wrinkles before they become problems. Here's hoping that the wrinkles caused by the new solutions are smaller!
-blarg

[redcelt32]

Dotting this for future reference...

[PJ]

blargney the second wrote:

PJ wrote:

So, you haven't ran this yet right? Tell us how the cost adjustment goes. It looks good though. Thanks for sharing and your time.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

That's correct. We haven't even started playing yet. Right now I'm looking ahead and trying to smooth out any major wrinkles before they become problems. Here's hoping that the wrinkles caused by the new solutions are smaller!
-blarg

Keep us posted Blarg!

[Eric Hinkle]

This looks like it might be good, I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Though if too-small armies are a problem for PCs, they can always hire mercenaries.