I'm working on a logistics system for Dinosaur Riding Barbarians, but I'm hoping that it can be applied to D&D as well, if only to drive some conversation and get more feedback. So, you want to make a unit of guys into your minions? Well, you're going to need you to bump up their loyalty score to a certain level to win their loyalty. Loyalty can go from 0 all the way up to 10, and you need at least 5 for a unit to become loyal to you and keep them above 0 to stop an already-loyal unit from deserting. Units have constant loyalty drains based on how awesome they are, so unless you want to be constantly saving their children from demons or whatever, you need a constant loyalty benefit in exchange. You can get that benefit from three places, and those are land, wealth, and influence.
Now here's where the math gets tricky enough that I expect people not from the Den might have trouble following along, so I'd appreciate suggestions as to how to simplify things even though I expect most people here to get it. Loyalty bonuses from land, wealth, and influence are triangular, but the loyalty penalty for awesomeness is flat and static. So, if you give a Knightly Order a single village, he gets a steady income of +1 loyalty per turn. If you give him a second village, he's at +1.5 loyalty (round it down to +1). Give him a third village and he's at +2. It takes six villages for him to reach +3, and ten to reach +4. So if the Knightly Order is a level 3 unit with -3 loyalty per turn, you need to give him 6 villages to keep them loyal, and you need to give them 10 villages to have their loyalty steadily increase up to 10. Now let's say you're forced to cede all ten of those villages to an enemy for some reason. If you've had enough time to build the knights' loyalty up to 10, it will now decrease by 3 loyalty per turn, which means it will be four turns before they desert, and you have until then to get them some land.
Land
If you control a fiefdom, the levy for that fiefdom is automatically loyal to you, provided their loyalty score doesn't drop all the way to zero. Levies are basically impossible to raise higher than maybe level 3 or so, but you can hand out land as a fiefdom to the leader of a more powerful unit, and they'll become the local mayor or baron or whatever. If you're giving them enough land to bump them up a title from unlanded to knight, knight to baron, baron to count, etc. etc., you get an immediate boost of 5 loyalty, plus a certain amount of loyalty income based on how much land you gave them. If that's enough to offset their loyalty penalty based on their awesomeness, you're set. If it's not, you can string them along for a couple of seasons by steadily increasing their size of their fiefdom.
All the lands in your kingdom are worth less loyalty if you centralize the realm by passing certain laws that apply in all places (the reason people like owning land is because they can do what they want with it, so they won't appreciate you passing laws that tell them what to do with their peasants or the harvests they bring in). Land that you claim but which is currently occupied by an enemy you are actively at war with is worth half its normal value, and you cannot give away land that is under the de facto control of realms you aren't actively at war with even if you claim that land de jure. Likewise, if you lose land during an invasion and make peace without reclaiming it, that land no longer even counts halfway towards retaining your vassals. Vassals will continue to fight in your wars to reclaim their lands for quite a while, maybe even indefinitely if the lands you've granted them are substantial enough, but after you've ceded their territory they won't remain loyal just because of an empty title (unless you keep them loyal with wealth or influence).
In the reverse situation, where you still have the land but the unit claiming it has been wiped out, you get a stacking -1 penalty to the loyalty bonus granted for giving that land out. This is a one-time penalty, but it means that you'll have to use influence or wealth to make up the difference and attract a vassal who is actually loyal. For example, a previously unlanded level 3 vassal being given six villages (+3 loyalty per season) would normally get a +5 bonus for being given a fiefdom at all, but if they're replacing a destroyed unit, it's down to just +4, which means you'll need to buy up that unit's loyalty with another 40,000 gold (equal to the 4 villages needed to get him up to +4 loyalty per season). You can't just constantly generate new vassal units for the meatgrinder indefinitely even if you never lose any territory in war. If a levy unit is destroyed, replacing it grants a permanent -1 penalty to that fiefdom's loyalty score. This might prevent the levy from being raised at all if it drops the loyalty score to 0. The more you've raised your fiefdom's loyalty scores, the more you can replace levies from them before they're tapped out. Regardless of the current loyalty score of your fiefdoms, however, each fiefdom sustains only one levy.
Generally speaking, followers whose loyalty hits zero just leave, but if they're vassals with lands, they'll take their land with them. Now, no one's going to rebel if they're guaranteed to lose, so you can also have military diplomacy, which is where vassals with at least one fiefdom under your de facto control who think that you can probably beat them into submission gain a loyalty bonus, but they'll rebel immediately if that stops being true because your forces are drained by a foreign war, or enough vassals become rebellious that they can band together and win, or a powerful neighboring kingdom is willing to accept their defection. This can be determined algorithmically, but it's way too much bookkeeping, so it's probably better for the GM to eyeball. The vassals themselves are eyeballing it, so it's fine if they rebel because they think they can stand up to the king but actually can't.
If you're Sauron and have a crazy-huge army of orcs, you don't need any kind of casus belli to expand. You can just attack because you want more land, and Gondor and Rohan and Rivendell and so on will all team up to stop you because invading without a valid casus belli leads to everyone with a shred of survival instinct to forming a coalition against you, sometimes even with hated enemies. And if you're Sauron, your army is big enough that you could win anyway if the heroes weren't constantly meddling with you. The PCs are probably not Sauron, however, which means they need a valid casus belli to invade in order to keep the war limited to just the target kingdom and their military allies. This is important, because establishing a casus belli is often a task better suited to an individual adventuring party than a giant army. For example:
-Finding a lost claimant to the throne of a territory you'd like to seize, then having them swear vassalage to you, whereupon you can push their claim.
-Finding a last artifact of sufficient religious or cultural significance that simply being its owner gives you some amount of legitimacy as a claimant to the throne of the target fiefdom (like the Imperial Seal in Romance of the Three Kingdoms).
-Conspiring with someone second-in-line for the throne to assassinate the current holder of the throne and their heir apparent in exchange for an oath of vassalage from the newly-crowned duke (or whatever).
-Reconnoitering hostile or unknown territory for future expansion, in which case you aren't actually getting the casus belli, because the casus belli is presumably that the current occupants of the land aren't in whatever club established the rules of casus belli in the first place. Maybe they're tribal and lack a castle-dwelling aristocratic class, maybe they're all feral undead, maybe they worship a rival pantheon and invasions against them are always considered justified. This is basically a hexcrawl and there's source material justification for this kind of thing. Voyage of the Dawn Treader is about Prince Caspian leaving his kingdom for like a year to go explore the frontier, Sun Jian and Sun Ce alike had a habit of doing recon missions alone or mostly alone when they weren't satisfied with their scouting reports, and as recently as WW2 the commander of the Luftwaffe was personally flying scouting missions over enemy territory when he wanted a better idea of the shape of the battlefield. So depending on circumstance you may be able to slot this into an adventure for a completely unrelated casus belli.
-Additionally, if some big nasty like a monster is menacing one of your fiefdoms, you might reasonably want to go and take care of that personally, since you are the biggest badass around.
Wealth
The second way to win loyalty is to pay a salary. You have some rate of conversion such that every 10,000 GP (or whatever) paid per season equals one village's worth of loyalty (the immediate problem here for using these rules with D&D is that we are interacting with the D&D economy, which makes no sense, although since I'm actually using this for a different game I don't have to care). If you want to have an actual kingdom, you'll still need vassals to run your kingdom past your own demesne limit (which probably has something to do with your CHA or INT score), but you don't need them to have large armies because you fend off attackers with unlanded military units whose loyalty score comes purely from the gold you're pumping into them all the time, so it's fine if all your vassals are level 1 punks.
People taking the economic road to power will ignore most fiefdoms, and instead focus on controlling and defending a handful of extremely high value fiefdoms. You could give away an orichalcum mine as a fiefdom and get one unit of dragon riders, but you could also keep it for yourself and pay the salary of dozens of infantry legions, plus you can build fiefdom improvements like fortifications or an expanded harbor or a courthouse, and if a war starts you can then raise several more mercenary legions by diverting funds from the courthouse. The income of a fiefdom goes up the more trade routes it has, especially if you control both ends of it and especially especially if you have a resource monopoly (or several), so you expand your power by capturing fiefdoms which are either important trade centers or which produce valuable resources and you ignore everything else.
If you're taking the wealth-based road to power, you don't care about the levies or harvests of that fiefdom, so the only kingdom-level policy you care about is taxes, which means that so long as your king (PC or NPC) is willing to keep those taxes low, you can otherwise be as accommodating as he needs, which means you have little incentive to become king yourself. In fact, you can be a vassal to multiple different kings, each one having ultimate authority over a different one of your fiefs, and those kings can go to war with each other, and your stewards will raise the levies and send them off to meet up with the king's forces and your own troops will then fight against each other and you won't care because your real army is your mercenaries, not your levies.
In addition to money, controlling resources can be important. Having a trade route to a mithril mine means that your units of a certain level (i.e. those important enough to bother having mithril weapons and armor in the first place) get bonuses to speed, attack, and defense, while having adamantine equipment instead would give them greater bonuses to attack and defense, but maybe a penalty to speed. If you have a monopoly on mithril, anyone you dislike loses the ability to produce new mithril-armed units. This means that if you decide one side or another of a war needs to lose (for example, if they're trying to seize control of your resources), denying them your trade routes won't have any immediate effect on their army, but as the war drags on the quality of their troops will degrade even if you aren't actually taking any land, so they can give it away to get new vassals.
Wizard lords are fundamentally the same. They use mana, not money, to raise armies of constructs, not mercenaries, and connect high value fiefdoms along leylines, not trade routes, to maximize income. There's nothing stopping a wizard from being king or pope instead if he wants, but if you want to be a secluded wizard in his tower who doesn't care about the peasants, you can do that. Likewise, a Fighter is perfectly capable of setting up shop in Isengard, building a giant scary tower, and having goblin minions dig mana wells and then use them to forge a construct army. Construct or undead armies function just like regular mercenary units, except that their loyalty score is technically a mana power score, and when they run out they deanimate instead of deserting.
Wealth-based power relies on a relatively small amount of very valuable fiefdoms, which means that you are much more likely to be willing and able to personally deal with marauding dragons or explore dungeons with high potential value if they're dangerous enough to pose a significant threat to your normal surveyors.
Influence
Finally, there's influence. Ultimately, the key to power in this system is keeping people's loyalty scores high, and influence-based characters are going to ignore land and income and just focus on directly keeping people's loyalty scores high. They're a Bard and his rock band playing for a sold out concert, and then using the rabid fans to overthrow the government. They're a Space Pope calling up a crusade. Influence characters rarely concentrate on controlling large swaths of land and indeed do not need to have so much as a single fiefdom to their name. Instead, you build fiefdom improvements in other people's fiefdoms, like churches and amphitheaters and schools. These grant loyalty points to the fiefdom's score like normal, but you control who they're loyal to. You can have your fiefdom improvements stop providing loyalty score to the fiefdom's lord at any time. If you get the levy up to the 5 loyalty needed to raise them without being their legal lord in the first place, you can raise the levy personally, including as an uprising against their lord.
You still have a limited demesne, though, and you can only affect as many fiefdoms as your demesne limit whether you're administering them personally or just running a church in them, so you need bishops. A bishop's loyalty is based on the number of loyalty-generating fiefdom improvements in a fiefdom, not the value of the fiefdom, so if you want to turn some tiny little fiefdom into the Mecca of your religion, covered in relics and cathedrals, just so that you can convince a captain of dragon riders to be the bishop of just that one fiefdom, you can do that. That wouldn't be very cost-efficient, because the costs of adding new improvements to a fiefdom rise the more improvements that fiefdom already has, but you can do it.
Like landed vassals, bishops don't like it when you tighten up doctrine and prevent them from preaching their own interpretation of your religion or philosophy. Also like landed vassals, if one of your bishop's loyalty drops to zero, they will begin a heresy, breaking away with all of his fiefdom improvements, they gain a loyalty bonus if they think starting a heresy will go poorly for them, however if enough bishops want to break away or if your forces are distracted elsewhere or they have the support of a powerful rival or whatever, that bonus goes away and they will become heretics.
Influence characters can use social checks to provide a one-shot boost to loyalty. So if you've got enough loyalty buildings to get most people up to +2 but you want to snag some more powerful levies who have a -2 loyalty penalty (and who are therefore hanging at zero), you can call for crusade and get a +5-ish bonus to loyalty all around. This will allow you to call up the level 2 levies, and if you only need them for a few seasons, you can even snag some level 3 or level 4 levies.
Influence characters can construct a basilica of some kind if they want to, but they have no particular reason to be there very often (especially if they can teleport home to preside over monthly staff meetings), so there's very little incentive for them to stop personally wandering around righting wrongs and helping the helpless. This will give them loyalty bonuses in the affected areas, which they can use to levy the peasants into building fiefdom improvements, which will then allow them to permanently levy those troops in the future. Influence characters may also have adventures that revolve around solving a king's problems in order to convert him to the Church of Pelor or the Limozeen Fan Club. A grateful king might order the construction of churches throughout his kingdom and then bam, two dozen new parishes for Pelor/Limozeen in one season.
Mixing and Matching
You can have vassals, mercenaries, and bishops all at once. You can have some of your demesne limit filled up by directly administering lands, and some of it filled up by controlling loyalty improvements within other people's territory. You can be a wizard king with vassals, but whose personal demesne is mostly comprised of magic sites connected by leylines to maximize the size of your golem armies. Whatever.
Mass Combat
So, great. There's lots of different ways to get your units. Now you actually have to use them for something, and we need to figure out how scaling works. Here is how scaling works: There are only four scales of combat that we actually care about.
Skirmish Scale: 2-50 combatants. Yes, you can run a D&D skirmish with 50 combatants, provided most of those combatants are uninteresting orcs/ogres/giants, with only a handful of important dudes. This is why I support having boring block-of-stats monsters at every level. They're super boring as standalone encounters, but they have an important niche in being easy to manage in very large numbers when you want to give your boss squad a bunch of backup dancers. Anyways, skirmish scale is something that is generally considered to work to satisfaction under whatever set of weird house rules your table is personally using.
If you're so low on the logistics game that owning one village is a big deal, you can go ahead and keep using the skirmish scale. One village produces a levy of like twenty or thirty guys.
Cohort Scale: 51-1250 combatants. At this scale, one unit is approximately however many dudes can fit into a 25x25 foot square on the skirmish scale, provided they're in close formation (which they aren't necessarily on this scale). So that's two dozen regular guys or a dozen ogres or a half-dozen giants. The neat thing about this scale is that every time two units fight each other, you can resolve that as a skirmish fight if it's important enough. The atrociously bad thing about this scale is that every time two units fight each other and you don't resolve it as a skirmish fight, you need it to have results similar to what would have happened if you did do that. This whole scale is a nightmare to implement, because it's at a small enough scale that you need to model things like a pack of manticores or the presence of a single particularly badass champion or a single really badass champion fighting on his own, but it's a big enough scale that you need to resolve a fight between a badass champion and a pack of manticores in a single roll. In theory you'd want a way to derive Cohort Scale combat statistics from the Skirmish Scale statistics of individual fighters.
The good news is that this doesn't need to scale up any further than that, because starting next zoom level we care more about formation coherency than individual badassery.
Play at this level is kind of petty. If you control small clusters of villages, each village will produce one unit. That means that if players and their foes have roughly equal numbers, fighting at this level means players are barons within a single county. In CK2, one county is the smallest amount of land that a player can control and still be in the game at all.
Legion Scale: 1251-24,000. At this scale, one unit is a cohort of between 250 to 750 individual guys, or 125-375 for ogre-sized opponents and 60-180 for giants (note that this is not to say that a unit of ~100 giants would be equal to a unit of ~500 regular infantry, just that they would both occupy one hex on the battlefield). Whereas the previous scale was basically a transition state where it's still pretty much a skirmish but way beyond the ability of the skirmish engine to model, at this point we're looking at a fundamentally different form of warfare where you're moving around giant blocks of soldiers who need to stay in formation rather than loose bands of warriors who need to personally kill lots of dudes.
At the legion scale, several broad unit types emerge. Skirmishers harass and weaken an enemy force, then quickly retreat before the real fighting begins (when two skirmish cohorts fight, they end up having a cohort scale battle). Light cavalry can serve as scouts, very fast skirmishers, and can also pursue routing enemies to prevent them from regrouping. Heavy infantry are absolute monsters in melee, but they're slow moving and thus vulnerable to having their morale worn down by long-range artillery cohorts (where "artillery" means archers or slingers or wizards or whatever), which are themselves vulnerable to attacks by light or especially heavy cavalry, which can cross the distance to hit artillery before they're worn away, plus their more loose formation means that fewer arrows find a target in any given volley. Heavy infantry can absorb the shock of a heavy cavalry charge and absolutely butcher them because of their tighter formations, so they can be used to defend artillery cohorts, although they're vulnerable to a heavy cavalry charge in the flank. Mounted archers can match speed with heavy cavalry to keep distance rather than relying on infantry cohorts to defend them.
Some fantasy elements need entirely new unit types and roles assigned to them. Harpies can fly, dragons can fly and also have stupendously powerful but relatively short ranged breath attacks. A lot of weird abilities are starting to vanish under weight of numbers, however. Trolls can regenerate. That makes them particularly hardy heavy infantry, so you give them a bonus to soak (or whatever) and call it good. Beholders have very high attack because of all their crazy powers disrupting enemy formations, and even a beholder commander leading an otherwise mundane unit will provide an attack bonus. That's it, though. We don't need to model each of his individual eye rays. We don't even need to figure out how many hobgoblin legionaries he is personally killing. It doesn't matter, because each unit is individually an entire cohort, and cohorts basically never get wiped out to a man. What matters is that the idea of this guy zapping you with an eye ray while you're stuck in the fourth rank and can't even fight back is terrifying, and so enemy formations will be much more prone to routing when they're fighting a beholder in melee (like light infantry, beholders are actually fighting at a distance of something like 30' to 90' depending on what rays they're using, but it doesn't matter because none of it is volleys from 200+ feet away).
The bulk of kingdom level play takes place here. Each county can (roughly) produce one or two cohorts, which means once players are all counts (which means they collectively represent a duchy and are interacting with other dukes and the king), they are fighting at legion scale. Dukes field about a half-dozen cohorts, which isn't really enough to make a complete legion, so when the players are a king and his dukes, or an oligarchic council of dukes, or in some other way representing a complete kingdom, they are playing at the upper end of legion scale.
Army Scale: 24,001+. A legion of several thousand men is enough to have units of every kind of dude you have access to and want to deploy. So when we're at the scale where each individual unit is a legion, that means each individual unit has every cohort type inside of it. A Rohan legion will have a lot more cavalry than a Mordor legion, but they both have cavalry (and infantry and artillery). What this means is that having each unit on the map represent two legions or ten legions or a hundred is all going to work out to being basically the same, because all of them are already combined arms units, and giving them more arms to combine doesn't really change anything. We've already reached the point where attacking the adjacent hex means attacking an enemy who is at least five hundred feet away, and probably one or two thousand, so we're outside the effective range of almost all spells and medieval weaponry. At this scale you could reduce legions down to two stats: Movement speed and awesomeness. You'll still want some tags and special abilities, like how Rohan legions are dense with mounted combatants and thus get bonuses in flat terrain and penalties in rough terrain. You can have pretty titanic clashes just by having one unit represent one legion, but if you're fighting the Blood War and each team represents an interplanar super-empire, you can go ahead and have each unit represent one hundred legions and have a fight between tens of millions.
Army scale is the realm of empires and beyond, and is probably going to be reserved for endgame confrontations in most campaigns.
Logistics: Land, Wealth, and Influence
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momothefiddler
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