Once More With Feeling: Historic movement and size benchmarks for geography

[Ash_Mantle]

So I read this thing a while ago and today I came across this thread in mulling over some aspects of the game. And I don't know if the former is a silly misapproximation or just a bad representation of history, but I do know that the latter wasn't really dialing in on anything like a sensible consensus (though the posts in the thread seemed various degrees of reasonable), so I figured I'd ask here.

As a side note to those unfamiliar with marching speed, before you post 'a horse/man can run x miles or kilometers per hour, multiply by hours marched and use that,' slow down and think hard. Someone in a previous thread said they'd expect the cavalry to go five to ten miles an hour for an entire day; that's fifty to a hundred miles and makes no sense unless all your horses run on gas (well, okay, stagecoaches hit the bottom of that range...around 1900). A really good Olympic athlete can demolish a four minute mile, but make him do that for an hour, let alone a day, and you'll get a dead athlete. Finally, Mongol numbers need not be quoted - even in reference to Calradia's steppe-dwellers - unless you can justify them intelligently. Anyway, to business.

Basically, this comes down to a few factors for me, primarily that I can't for the life of me remember reading about any military force traveling more than twenty-five miles on a daily basis for a sustained period; the Roman legions were infantry heavy and carried a lot of their supplies on their backs, but I don't think any website you could pull out of your ass would claim they got much past twenty miles daily (and if that looks wrong make sure you're not thinking of kilometers). And you can cross Calradia (moving in a cardinal direction; I went from east to west) with a small party of cavalry on coursers, going at some sort of sustainable label-less speed of '7.3,' in two daytime marches.

Admittedly, this can be a forced march, even a 'death march,' for you and your elite/miserable and well-controlled/horse-riding band of adventurers/mercenaries/men at arms (if you're a vassal). The more typical forces to be found, lords and kings and their parties, don't go much faster than 6 to 6.5 'speed units' and the caravans are something like 4 to 4.5. I suppose if we use Harold's march to Hastings as a benchmark for what sounds like a cavalry force (I don't know if there's anything to the scattered mention of him leaving behind his infantry) going full blast for a week or two and not much caring if they stopped just short of killing the horses, we can create an absolute maximum of thirty to thirty five miles daily. If that seems right, which is a point I'd certainly not mind some contention on, then a bunch of mounted adventurers that aren't stopping for much rest at night (at least not the way I play, anyway) and really pushing themselves might average around this mysterious 7.3; the player alone seems to be able to approach a speed factor of nine, which I'm guessing means one guy at a reasonable pace and a lot of guys at a death march. Going by Harald's standard, I have urges to peg this absolute maximum around forty miles a day for an all-cavalry force, but I have just as strong urges to peg it at twenty-five unless they're running for their ****ing lives, with everything but the horsewhips left behind. Any ideas?

I suppose accounting for slowdown due to terrain (Calradia is mountainous), risk minimization in hostile territory, and attempts to maintain cohesion, your standard lord's army can maybe make it ten to fifteen miles a day, so I wouldn't feel bad about pegging 'fifteen to twenty five miles' to a day's march at speed factor 7.3, making Calradia smaller than Flanders.

If anyone made it to the end of all that, reward yourselves by posting a reply

 

[Archonsod]

The Romans are a poor example, as they spent an awful lot of time not actually moving. One thing they did do which makes sense however is leave four hours for foraging at the start and end of the day. Assuming this is an accurate time for everyone to find food, cook and eat it, there's eight hours of the day gone simply feeding your troops. Add on another four hours for sleeping, and (being generous) a further hour for the troops to form up or prepare a camp and fall out either end of the day and we're down fourteen hours. That leaves ten hours, and we've not even moved anywhere yet! Again, being generous deduct another two hours to account for breaks, halts and similar pauses during the march, and you've got eight hours of time actually marching.
Generally, columns became faster as time went on because they reduced or removed these factors. Carrying sufficient food to keep the army and it's beasts fed drops the time needed to feed and water the column to as little as one hour at a push, however if limited to horses this is only efficient for smaller armies - the more food you need to carry, the more horses to carry it and the more carrying capacity dedicated simply to keeping those horses fed. Pre-prepared encampments became common too; a force being sent out roughly a day ahead of the column to locate and prepare suitable camping grounds for the march. While this enforced the decision of when and where to stop for the commander (negating any benefit of a swifter day's marching) columns still moved quicker with it than without it; so obviously the time a marching troop actually spent preparing and dismantling his shelter for the night was a considerable effect on the march.


I wouldn't try using it to judge Calradia's size though. The game is hardly measuring time accurately. I mean, how many situations can you think of where a single fish can feed a few hundred men for several days?

 

[Ash_Mantle]

Shark-meat's tasty! And I'm told you can find it in rivers.

Alright, enough sarcasm.

That fish is measured in fifty units; each unit might be an individual fish - a meter-long pike, for example - or a basket of fish. One's inventory is managed by icons; not every icon need represent precisely what it looks like, though the weapon and armor and book ones had best do so (or did you think, economic scaling for high end armor and so forth held to be an inflated market all its own, that three hundred gold pieces was a fitting price for a single jar of oil? Or two hundred for a single fish?). The real problem there is that buying fifty units of cabbage or honey or whatever doesn't slow you down enough to realistically portray the transportation issue such things would create unless you assume its icon also represents the mules needed to haul all that **** around.

If we base Calradia's size off of population by extrapolating from approximate standing army size (running totals of Lord's warbands, garrisons, patrols, etc) I still get similar numbers from the source article, of which I'm rather fond. Overall, though, I'm sticking with SOMETHING I can point at from inside the game, even if it's badly modeled and there is no mechanic forcing anyone to camp after a march that should have left their troops exhausted.

Feel like telling me your guess at the size of the place? I'm all ears.

 

[Cirdan]

Sorry, your first article is almost entirely bull****. The author seems to have missed the rather obvious fact that historical pre-industrial states were not limited to a single urban centre . He also is imagining standing armies which were far from the norm and using completely asspulled figures (4% of the total population as standing military WTF? levies in the front lines? )He does--more or less--touch on the reasons feudalism worked, however--slow communications mean that the king cannot directly control every part of the realm, so he entrusts subordinates with the defence and government of entire regions, and in turn these subdivide their territory until you're down to a manageable admnistrative unit. You can do the same thing with civil servants rather than hereditary dukes, as well, though control becomes more of an issue.

 

[Archonsod]

Misses the fact that you don't need a military everywhere to extend your authority. Just a church ...

 

[Ash_Mantle]

I won't imply that the article in question is worth defending as a summary of relevant historical fact. It's part of a design document that tries to rein in the amount of fantasy and correct some of the imbalance the author feels is caused by basing a game's little fictional reality off of other games some designer has played. The numbers are not historical (they're described as less stupid and grossly unbelievable than those found in certain other products), but they are consistent with those of the previous article - it should be noted that all the articles on that site were part of a single document touted as a theory that needed to 1) be taken and criticized holistically and 2) invited criticism, having no illusions about being some sort of gospel. The previous article, incidentally, dealt with some numbers that I suspect were rather messily hashed out of historic averages taken from translations of primary sources and so forth, but nevertheless begin to enter the realm of believability. Then, they were increased with as few black boxes as possible to create population numbers (noted in a later article) conducive to good gameplay as defined by the author.

I was mostly using the damn thing for scale, anyway, reason being that it gives me a run-down on population and distance figures for a single urban center and its periphery with a single power figure at its head -  a 'realm' twenty miles across.

There was mention of medieval English farming villages of a hundred and fifty to two hundred people, counting dependents, existing three miles apart. I've found mention of this but I am not a scholar and have certainly not translated any primary sources. If any of you have, I'm curious if you could bear this out.

Same with the bit about farmers being non-functional more than five miles or so from a market center; same with a feudal monarch or powerful vassal being unable to project his own power more than about twenty miles from an urban center and relying on others allied to or loyal to him to do so for all other urban centers.

If, for example, we take each city in Calradia to be such an urban center and assume they must exist between ten and twenty miles apart, that would give a sense of scale.

If we count the villages and use the average distance apart they existed, that might do the same. Or the castles if we equate them to strongpoints including keeps and motte and baileys. Or the hours of travel to cross the place.

I suppose I'm asking which scales people feel would make the most sense.

 

[Archonsod]

There was mention of medieval English farming villages of a hundred and fifty to two hundred people, counting dependents, existing three miles apart.

Rural villages had no centre as such, measurement was therefore from whatever prominent landmark everyone could decide was part of their village to it's equivalent in the next. It wasn't until the 17th century or so that you got a uniform measurement, primarily thanks to the Royal Mail which measured the distance from post office to post office. Prior to that distance tended to be measured in days travelling (in fact, the law held a market could not be held within a days travel of another market) which varied according to the county, season and local transport infrastructure.

Though this has some pertinent information.

Same with the bit about farmers being non-functional more than five miles or so from a market center;

They can go a lot further than that. A man can walk five miles in an hour, carts might be slow but they tend to be faster than walking.

 

[Cirdan]

Same with the bit about farmers being non-functional more than five miles or so from a market center; same with a feudal monarch or powerful vassal being unable to project his own power more than about twenty miles from an urban center and relying on others allied to or loyal to him to do so for all other urban centers.

Firstly, no urban centre is needed to project power, though the projection of power will usually create a urban centre if it reaches far enough. However, this is not always the case--many petty Icelandic, to take a fairly recent example, never managed to get enough people under their rule to have an urban centre pop up, and so never had a stronghold grander than a fortified farm. Even more recent examples exist in Africa. "Relying on others loyal to him" is a necessary component of any state; imagine what would happen to today's states if the army, local officials, judges, etc all started revolting. A more worthwhile point of comparison is whether the locals are more loyal to their direct governor, or to the central authority. However, the central authority can command more loyalty than the immediate ruler more than twenty miles from its centre of power. Similarly, farmers don't necessarily have to go to the urban centre at all--a subsistence economy needs no trade, and itinerant traders played an important role in real medieval economies (hence the importance of medieval fairs). Moreover, most traded goods can be kept fairly long, so the notion of food perishability restricting the area urban centre can feed off is just bull****. Otherwise, how could the Mediterranean grain trade have been so important to the Romans ?

 

[nijis]

This isn't related to marching distance, but to population density and distribution...

As Arch's link shows, the communities we now refer to as "villages" tend to come in two sizes, those with a market and artisans, and those without. Those without a market (thing homesteads or hamlets) will be within an easy walk of the fields moving a plough -- say, 2 to 4km. A dozen or so of these will then be centered around a market village (which can be a small town) which is an easy day's journey with cart or pack animal (5 to 15km) from each of its dependent villages.

As an example, the Domesday book lists 13,000 locations spread out over 120,000 square kilometers. Over 1000 of these locations eventually became burroughs.

This is a good speculative map of a small village: http://www.aedificium.org/Maps/Bilby.gif

This is a good speculative map of a large village/town: http://www.aedificium.org/Maps/WorksopAndRadford.gif

Other maps are here: http://www.aedificium.org/Maps/LocalMaps.html

And yeah, as Cirdan says, grain and other medieval staples weren't terribly perishable. In fact, if you throw in the salt trade, pottery manufacture, cheese-churning, fish drying, vinting, brewing, and everything else, almost as much effort went into preserving food as to growing it in the first place.

 

[Cirdan]

Not to mention that the food production of cities was anything but negligible back then. Hell, there were farms in Paris until about fifty years ago, and even today there still are woods within the city's confines--if you want to know how this is particularly significant, consider that Paris has about five times the population density of London or Amsterdam, four times that of Tokyo and two-and-a-half times that of New York. Even in extremely densely populated areas, it's still possible to grow food.