march of empires war of lords food capacity

The first concern for the general is to determine the route of march and the options here might be surprisingly limited. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter ( for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings. For the most part, because of the limits of space, that is going to mean simply covering the generalities of these concerns (with some models to walk through the interactions) this post is already terribly long and in any event getting much more specific than this is going to essentially require looking at the specific details of individual campaigns.Īnd before we march onward, if you want to support my logistics, you can do so via Patreon.

1 This week we’re going to look at those decisions and how the interaction of foraging and marching shapes where an army can go, how fast it can get there and how large it can be.

I want you to keep that misery in mind because we’re going to shift perspectives here to the perspective of the general in charge of campaign operations, but in the back of your mind you should also be thinking about what the calculations the general is making are going to mean for the underlying populace that will have to endure his decisions. For the average peasant, an army came upon them like a rolling calamity. Because of their limited ability to transport supplies, armies were forced to draw those supplies locally, to the considerable misery of the local rural population. In particular, we focused on the considerable damage that armies could not fully avoid doing (not that many tried very hard) when moving over the countryside. In our last post, we outlined what ‘foraging’ actually entailed – how armies got supplies both from friendly populations but also from neutral or hostile populations. This is the third part of a three part ( I, II, III) look at some of the practical concerns of managing pre-industrial logistics.

March of empires war of lords food capacity