The last post got a lot of feedback since we all love math, but this is also quite interesting. I didn't realize that quartering troops was such a common practice as I had imagined more armies acting like the Romans setting up their own camps - however it seems common based on the authors writing. He mentions a few times how this probably impacted the writing of the American 3rd amendment - no quartering troops in civilian homes
I love “the tyranny of the Wagon Equation,” what a great way to put it. I’d never thought through this before, but it provides a lot of context on the way wars unfolded throughout history.
Some of it is pretty specific, but decisions like:<p>* Heavy or light foraging?<p>* Forage with smaller groups of cavalry or large groups of infantry?<p>* Terrorize the people in the countryside or try to stay on their relative good side?<p>* Do you have handmills?<p>* When is your campaign going to happen?<p>seem like the type of choices that could intuitively be included in a board game (although some of the content bumps it out of comfortable family game night fare) or even maybe hacked into a pen and paper RPG (I say hacked in because usually players aren't in charge of huge armies anyway, so we're already pretty far from, like, standard d&d).<p>It would be neat to play a game about logistics with tactics as an afterthought, for once.
This seems like so much more effort than war in modern times. Wonder what future generations 100 to 200 years from now would think and write about our current happenings.