Garrisons for Pre-Existing/Long Term Realms

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In this thread, Alex suggested that, when building garrisons for pre-existing realms, “Just spend the gold, subject to a limit of 1 year’s quota of each type of mercenary troop for the size of the realm.”

That seems like a good way to do it, so I am trying to determine how to calculate a year’s quota of mercenaries. Most the realms I am dealing with are independent duchies and counties. Based on my reading of DaW:Campaigns, pages 9-11, it appears that with a time period of 1 month and a crop size of 360, a year’s quota of light infantry for a duchy of 20000 families is 1080 (3 crops per year * 360 per crop). With a time period of 1 week and a crop size of 85, a year’s quota of light infantry for a county of 4600 families is 255 (12 crops per year * 85 per crop). Is that the correct way to calculate this?

Also, if there are more than 180 light infantry in a duke’s garrison, or more than 42 light infantry in a count’s garrison, are prices increased for light infantry throughout the realm? And am I correct to assume that a supply-and-demand increase in the price of troops does not increase their value as part of a garrison?

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  1. You are doing it correctly. Because of how the math breaks down, some anomalies can occur. The system is trying to abstract both demographic/market availability AND bureaucratic slowness. The latter is less relevant when you’re building a domain over time. If you encounter something really odd, subdivide the realm into realms of the next smaller size and calculate the crop based on that.

  2. Unless your duke or other ruler is obnoxiously staffing up on particular troop types, I wouldn’t worry too, too much about this - you can just assume that some percentage were trained up as conscripts over time, etc. The limits on troop types are primarily there to guide players towards historically plausible behavior rather than to straightjacket the Judge in building his domains.
    Put another way, there are many reasons why a realm, over many years, might have accumulated a particular army of a particular type. But in the course of a campaign year, it is much harder to justify why a given ruler could hire a vast amount of a particular type of mercenary without affecting their wages.

  3. That’s correct, it does not.