WWI population & conscription

If your game is only lasting 2-10 years, then you're not exactly going to have time to worry about 'breeding' rates.

What becomes important is the effect of total war. That is, whether or not your towns and cities are being attacked, vs open field battles. If your cities are being hit and burned, then you are going to take youth losses, which reduces both your population that comes of age and those who were already eligible for draft.

You may also want to crack open some history books and look at the numbers of actual population and fielded soldiers.

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Original post by Talroth If your game is only lasting 2-10 years, then you're not exactly going to have time to worry about 'breeding' rates.

Good point... For 1-15 years war breeding rates during war are irrelevant since all workers and soldiers had to be born before war anyway.

So the breeding rate would be based on initial population (at the start of the game). Only civilian casualities can affect the initial population and therefore breeding rate.

Since we can exclude the wartime breeding rate, what would be the yearly breading rate for before war XX century population?

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You may also want to crack open some history books and look at the numbers of actual population and fielded soldiers.

Well... first I would like to hear what you "feel" is the proper number. I mean, this is a game, so it is more important to have it appear realistic than be realistic :)

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Original post by Acharis Good point... For 1-15 years war breeding rates during war are irrelevant since all workers and soldiers had to be born before war anyway.

There was the Volkssturm and even younger children have been involved in "playing" war, too.

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Original post by phresnel Quote: Original post by Acharis Good point... For 1-15 years war breeding rates during war are irrelevant since all workers and soldiers had to be born before war anyway. There was the Volkssturm and even younger children have been involved in "playing" war, too.

Yes, but it has several complex problems. At the moment all population is considered as A or E class recruits. No B,C,D.

Historically, at the beginning only class A are recruited, while D (60+ and 15 years old, so your Volkssturm) are being recruited at the very end of war when you basicly lost. During Blitzkrieg (so quite early) Germans formed some B class divisions, they were just supposed to hold the line while fast divisions made from A class recruits were supposed to do the advance and fighting. Class C were probably used as garrisons inside country and on borders with neutral & friendly nations.

So, if we make lower class recruits, how do we track it? Recruiting order depending on constipts drafted already? But why all A class are to be draft before lower classes, while some of the A can be important scientists or specialists you would want to draft only if really desperate? What about combat casualities? Who should die first? Right now I can't think of an elegant and not overly complex solution...

"But why all A class are to be draft before lower classes, while some of the A can be important scientists or specialists you would want to draft only if really desperate?"

You don't draft them. They're still A class recruits, but they're exempted.


The easy way to deal with this is to produce a multiple-axis boxing and then place population totals in each box and then the more general numbers are sums along axes.

So you have a box which represents A-recruits/exempted and another for A-recruits/workers and another for A-recruits/drafted, and one for B-recruits/exempted etc. A-recruits/discharged

Since this WW2, you may need only need C-recruits/drafted/female[1] and not the A and B equivalents.


An easy way of storing this is to use a tuple as a key into a hash. The tuple contains (say) [class, age, draft-status, contribution, gender]

"class" is A - E
"age" is "child", "adult", "retired"
"draft-status" is N/A, "exempted", "potential", "drafted", "discharged"
"contribution" is "disabled", "worker", "carer", "fighter", "none"

and so on. Note that a theoretical person should live in exactly one of those boxes.

Some of the boxes [A,child,exempted,M] will be empty.

And then you treat them like bank accounts -- you're only allowed to move people between groups and not create ones.

Hence; drafting a new front-line battalion means taking 1000 people out of [A,adult,potential,worker/none,M] and putting them into [A,adult,drafted,fighter,M].

If you create volkssturm, you move

[E,child,N/A,none,M] -> [E,child,drafted,fighter,M]

or

[E,adult/retired,discharged,worker/retired/none/disabled,M] -> [E,,drafted,fighter,M]



The question "how many people in my military" is the sum over [*,*,drafted,*,*]



If you need access to higher levels, you can either do the sum on the fly or maintain a presummed view. There are various ways of representing this sort of data which are called "datacubes" or "OLAP cubes"[2].



[1] In the UK/US, women flew transport planes, for example.
[2] The term cube is misleading -- you can have more than 3 dimensions.