Recruiting Soldiers and CONSCRIPTION

[SoB]

I would suggest conscription in terms of rounding up men to add to reserves or to active military staff. Not a consript unit, nor anything else. I am looking for a way to click a button, then suddenly in 1 in-game week, 800 million men are in service (from China). Can you add such a button of "Levée en Masse", in which mass mobilization of troops is possible?

I bielf there should be two pools enlisted reserv and conscript reserv.

[UchihaMadara971]

I would suggest conscription in terms of rounding up men to add to reserves or to active military staff. Not a consript unit, nor anything else. I am looking for a way to click a button, then suddenly in 1 in-game week, 800 million men are in service (from China). Can you add such a button of "Levée en Masse", in which mass mobilization of troops is possible?

I bielf there should be two pools enlisted reserv and conscript reserv.

Yes. I would like the option a 800,000,000 men instantly.

[SoB]

I would suggest conscription in terms of rounding up men to add to reserves or to active military staff. Not a consript unit, nor anything else. I am looking for a way to click a button, then suddenly in 1 in-game week, 800 million men are in service (from China). Can you add such a button of "Levée en Masse", in which mass mobilization of troops is possible?

I bielf there should be two pools enlisted reserv and conscript reserv.

Yes. I would like the option a 800,000,000 men instantly.

Instantly is way to fast. for the sack of realism minm 3 months and up to 1 year. The only difrence between permnet and conscript should be the amout of people sent to basic eg with out conscription turnd on only +-60% of your potional conscription use 100% of your potional

[AEWHistory]

Conscription is a sticky subject and a few issues need to be dealt with here. First of all, the game has no real demographic data. In other words, a nation with ten million people has, theoretically, ten million soldiers. However, a REAL nation of ten million people would have 5 million each of males and females (slightly more females usually, not always) and these people would be spread from newborn to extremely old. So there are a range of assumptions you'll need to make or deal with. I'm sure this is far from complete:
1. Do you assume every single draftee is pulled or that some portion are exempted. Some portion always are since some people are physically unable to perform military service.
2. Do you draft men, or both men and women, or do you wanna go amazon with a women's army? (if its the last part, can I still join?)
3. Do you have a growing or shrinking population?
4. Depending on your answer to #3, that will determine how many people leave the army each year class and how many become available. After all, you don't get to keep your draftees forever!
5. If you dispense with a conscription system and work your manpower as a pool, then do you assume that your soldiers must be paid your national market rate and, with that in mind, it will be difficult to attract new soldiers without good pay.

Frankly, the system as it exists now does an amazing job of simulating all of this in an abstract way. Here's why:
1. Generally a sedentary society--and ALL of the societies in this game are sedentary--cannot raise more than 8-10% without severe demographic and economic consequences. It is possible, but it has rarely been done and usually is self-defeating. A good example is the USSR during the Second World War. They used 20% or so of their population to fight. They were able to compete in the Cold War for a long-time, but demographically they've never recovered. So it should be assumed that well-to-do societies without an existential threat will have perhaps 2% or less of their population in the military; more militarized societies will employ perhaps 3-6%; during war all societies will start to run out of manpower generally between 8 and 10% for some of the reasons stated above. (Modern military budgets and sizes are shrinking this down....).
2. Even though each year you'd get more draftees, you'd also lose a bunch due to age and so one. Consequently, the 'gains' in pool size would be far more modest than one might think.
3. Even if you could place all able-bodied persons into the military, you'd completely disable your society and risk destroying a generation or two if those people were lost. Consequently, most societies would be willing to risk being conquered than complete annihilation (unless, of course, being conquered would be followed by genocide).
4. Finally, there is the issue of how well a given nation can employ its human resources. One nation may have 100million people and another may have only 10million, but if the larger nation is full of starving people with no real government, there is simply no way to organize these human resources into a fighting force (eg- Somalia, Afghanistan) whereas a smaller, wealthier, more advanced nation can punch way above its weight because of governmental organization, technology, and even common national identity (eg-Israel, Switerland, Sweden).

Anyway, I could go on, but basically, the model employed where you have a pool that slowly grows is actually a pretty good one. I think the complaints here come from one issue that I share and that is what does a nation do in times of emergency? In the game, Israel's national pool of manpower is mostly available (they could theoretically raise more, but likely would not for the reasons I've stated above), but most other nations don't have anywhere near such a large percentage of their population available in the manpower pool. That's realistic, but what happens if the country is invaded? Then perhaps a mechanism is needed for an emergency draft or something. However, as a general rule, the accumulation of manpower in the game works for me except in there emergency circumstances.

-Aaron

[Cutlass]

Professor of Military History with emphasis on deterrence and the Napoleonic period.

I wasn't aware that Napoleon still needed to be deterred.

Learn something new every day