The Anarchic Kingdom: Recruitment

Friday, 12th January 2024

On each turn apart from December, you will need to spend some of your money to recruit forces for your next turn. It's inevitable that you'll lose some knights and footmen that you send out on attack, and that you'll lose some castles and footmen to incursions by the enemy. You will also do better if you can increase the size of your military.

Make sure you're looking at your own barony, and select the "Spend" option (which only appears on your own barony). You're then asked how many Castles, Knights and Footmen you want to invest in. The maximum number shown is updated as you type; the more castles you build, the fewer knights and footmen you can afford.

On the first turn you have to be careful. It's possible to spend all of your money and draft all of your peasants, giving you 40 castles, 400 knights, 4000 footmen or some combination thereof. But this would leave you with no gold and no peasants to tax: you'd be bankrupt the next turn, and many of your forces would desert. That would be an incredibly bad start to your game.

I tend to start the game by building 10 castles, recruiting 100 knights, and drafting 1000 soldiers. This would cost a total of 3000 gold to recruit. Importantly, it leaves 1000 gold for upkeep of units, with 1000 peasants who will generate another 1000 gold in tax.

I omitted to mention in the manual how much gold is needed for upkeep of units, so I'll mention it here. A castle costs 10 gold per month, a knight costs 1 gold, and 1 gold pays for 5 peasants. So in the likely event that our barony has no losses, our total force of 50 castles, 500 knights and 5000 footmen would cost 2000 gold: exactly the 1000 gold we had left plus the 1000 gold that would be raised by taxing 1000 peasants.

In practice, we'll lose some units in the attack we're sending out this turn, and loot a certain amount of gold, so there'll probably be some gold to spare in February.

In subsequent turns your recruitment will vary. You may not be able to afford the same forces. The strategy you choose in balancing castles, knights and footmen will determine what you spend on, as will losses that you need to replace.

Once you've entered your numbers for recruitment, select the "Done" option and you'll return to the barony screen. This is all you need to do on your first turn, so select "Done" from the menu at the bottom of the screen to end January's turn. We'll see what's happened in the next article.