
Originally Posted by
Lucjan
I could live with only 4 duchies, but I disagree with keeping the neat family tree division of loyalty.
You don't need to be politically loyal to your House (think of the infighting among the Aemili...). Other competing forms of political division - by piety, by judgement, by chivalry etc - can and should emerge. The Houses are just to make the regional element significant, as I believe it was in the HRE. Don’t worry - the map can get messy, as the Emperor could gift Bologna to the Duchy of Franconia.

Originally Posted by
Lucjan
I'm also not convinced that following Terry Gore's example is all that great of an idea.
Under that idea, I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this.
2 Generals
2 spears
2 archers
5 knights
4 mounted sargeants
5 artillery
The 5 artillery are my addition, not Terry Gore's. IIRC, the only artillery in his lists are only 0-2 stands of organ guns very late in the period. So that would be half a M2TW unit (by my 4 stands = 1 unit equation). But I wanted to allow for an "artillery park" and so the 5 max is a way of doing that.
Why don't we say instead:
0-2 artillery for field battles; 0-5 for sieges [if you have more than 2 at the beginning of a field battle, you must retreat them off the field]
My issue with that method is that saying the army draft from terry gore's game allows 2-8 stands of knights and 2-8 stands of spears. This cannot possibly be realistically applied to M2. Because whereas a stand of knights in his game may only contain 5 knights (pulling numbers out of my butt for sake of argument), a stand of spears in his game may contain 20 spearmen.
No, I don't think that's true. A stand of knights and spears in his game are roughly comparable to units in M2TW.
Mercenaries and/or drafted peasantry/militia made up, from my understanding, the largest part of almost all medieval armies until the development of the English and French professional soldiery.
...I have to suggest that my own army formation formula, not just the idea, be seriously considered.
I am seriously considering your idea. How about this as a synthesis of your proposal and Gore's army lists?
First off, let's take the mercs out of the equation. They are going to be capped by an overall maximum of 1 merc: 1 native unit restriction, so they don't need to complicate the discussion of unit types.
Now,combining your ideas with Gore's Army List, I propose:
For full stack armies (15+ units):
Generals - max 2
Knights - cavalry or foot, max 8 units inc. generals
Total cavalry - maximum 8 units, inc mounted knights and generals
Artillery - maximum 2 units (5 in a siege)
Foot missiles - maximum 6 units including artillery
Zweihanders, halberdiers & other heavy infantry, max 4 units
Spears, pikes, peasants, town militia etc - unlimited
For half stack armies (7-14 units), we just halve the above.
I don't think we need to bother with minima - the key thing is to limit the possibly overpowering elites (knights, cav, missiles, artillery). We want to keep things simple - no Chancellor is going to want to be calculating percentages when putting together armies (I am pretty sure Servius did not).
Note that I think we should cap knights collectively whether mounted or not. A TW knight is essentially what in the day was called a "man-at-arms" i.e. a melee fighter with best practice armour of the time. He usually had a horse and could fight dismounted if needed. M2TW does not allow dismounting, but the point remains.
I think my synthesis restrictions differ from your restrictions only in allowing 40% cavalry, rather than 25%. But I think my more liberal allowances are probably more historical. For example, if we look at the French army at Crecy, Gore puts it at 39% knights. (He puts the English at 62% missiles.) For the Sicilian Normans at Durazzo in 1081, he puts them at 37% cavalry and 42% missiles. We're capping missiles a little tight at 30%, but I think that may be needed against the AI (don't want this to be a turkey shoot).
Here's Gore's version of the French at Crecy:
Gore's version of the Sicilian Norman Army of Robert Guiscard at Durazzo - 1081:
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