A bunch of silly newbie questions

Thelittleemperor wrote:When do new recruits come again ? Is it with money in December ?I looked back but haven't saved all the previous turns

That is in the December-dated turn (e.g. the newspaper is dated December), so in G10 the next turn is our income and recruits month, which I'm looking forward to

Thanks for that , I had a feeling but couldn't find the early turns .Thanks for the info too on how the orders used to be .

Thelittleemperor wrote:Thanks for that , I had a feeling but couldn't find the early turns .Thanks for the info too on how the orders used to be .

I too miss the days when all I had to do was drill troops & the odd galley, write death threats to Venice and burn, loot & plunder.

These days I am seem to also be having to train horses,vets, priests and lawyers as well as troops, develop fancy saddles and do so much research into C18 agriculture, logistics, art & civil engineering that its really getting in the way of killing foes.

You missed out committing acts of piracy...sorry privateering... in the North Sea

Jason wrote:You missed out committing acts of piracy...sorry privateering... in the North Sea

Privateering is a specialist sub Catagory of "Loot & Plunder"..........that is a proper order.

But in the good old days is was Privateer Galley = Plunder. These days your modern privateer has to consider......coppering, improved sail & rigging, boomkins, dispart gun aimers, marines, grenadoes, helm indicators, improved charts, sextents, trained officers, silken, scurvey cures, and last but not least legal challenges to his licence! Times are hard for you modern privateer in Glori du Roi !!

Oh and something else I dislike "General Cargo" what the hell is general Cargo when its at home? Can people give your friendly neighbourhood privateer a bit of fun and specify some major cargo types?

I think General Cargo is a friend of Major Trade Investment

And never talks to Private Audience ... Sorry , ahem .

Stuart Bailey wrote:

But in the good old days is was Privateer Galley = Plunder.  These days your modern privateer has to consider...... and last but not least legal challenges to his licence! Times are hard for you modern privateer in Glori du Roi !!

Don't worry Stuart, I'm arranging for a special act to be passed in the Scottish Parliament. Anyone caught in Scottish waters, who claims to be a privateer rather than a pirate, will be able to prove their innocence by being able to recite the Lords Prayer...ok, they will need to recite it after being hung by the neck until dead...

It is a national emergency , I have a few merchants , East Indiamen . I need to make them into warships . What can I get ?

I don't have my rule book with me on the train today or I would look that one up...

Nothing really. East Indiamen don't convert to warships as far as I know. The rules say you can convert a fast liner to a great frigate, but say nothing about East Indiamen. You could ask on your turn, but good luck. You will need to raise new ships probably. From the rules: "To convert a fast liner to a great frigate takes 2 months in a shipyard and costs 5,000 pounds. 150 more recruits are also needed." Might be able to do something similar with an east indiaman but I wouldn't hold my breath.

East indiamen do have light armament (10 12pnd cannon), but I wouldn't try to use them as war ships unless I was really, really in trouble. You could also try to convert part of their crews to marines, maybe over staff them, and try to use them to force boarding action if you're going after another fleet. Also not advisable, but if you're in that much trouble...

Remember that east indiamen have crews of 200, so if you've got a shipyard but are in dire need of recruits, you could strip them of the east indiamen and use them to raise new ships. You need 200 recruits and 4 months to raise a new frigate.

East Indiamen being merchant sailors they'll probably be only interested in self-preservation, so will be happy to defend themselves - possibly would come to a friend in need who's under attack - but more than likely they'll attempt to flee from danger and not risk their ship/profits/cargoes/lives.

Put them into convoys is an option - but will have knock-on effects to trade profits. And, if an enemy cruiser disrupts the formation, they come under strong attack the merchant captains might just order the ships to disperse from the convoy formation and scatter so would be no better off, if not worse off.

Best bet, I'd think, is to probably build proper military vessels. Could tire foreigner merchant ships and issue letters of marque or the like. Or issue letters of marque to your own nationals and open prize courts to purchase and sell any captured vessels. But then hope the you can stop the same privateers when you cancel the letters of marque, and they don't turn to piracy of smuggling against yourself.

I'm no expert, but those are my ideas.

ex vagrants can only be assigned to local economy investments unless trained in an infantry academy or such . Do you know if this applies to things like rat catchers , townwatch , fire brigade , night soil man ....I dont see a night soil men academy , do you ?

I have a feeling that they would still need to spend a year at an academy, even for night soil duties-if nothing else just to keep game logistics simple (e.g. if not for nigh soil men, why for rat catchers?).

Right you are .Thanks .....oh and thanks to everybody who helped with the militarizing of the East Indiamen too .

Don't know the answer, myself.

A few turns back I disbanded a number of Tribal Infantry units to gain the 700+ recruits.

Next turn my recruits pool included 'x-amount of ex-soldiers'

I then, either, created Town Watch units or invested in Hunting using these ex-soldiers and there was no problem.

I know this is not what was asked, and the ex-soldiers will probably be classed as being trained enough to become Town Watch or Hunters, but ex-vagrants might get away with being used to create unskilled civil units without any training. I'd try my luck, as its got to be better than needing to buy and upkeep an Academy.

Ex vagrants can be made into Ratcatchers, Nightsoilmen, Fire Brigades Straight away. They won't be quite as good as regular recruits, but still do a decent job. They keep their ex vagrant notion still, unless put into academies.

For things like infantryman Any armed forces they need really to be put into academies for a year. They can do the above. But will be only half as good as regular Armed forces recruits.

My experience was that vagrants needed to be trained for a year to be marked ex-vagrants, and then another year to become normal recruits.

I could have misunderstood, but I think they're almost never worth the effort, because you have to spend so much cash and time on training them to get them to a normal recruit status. (divide the costs of establishing and running the academy by number of ex-vagrants). Perhaps if you could really amass a lot of ex-vagrants this would work.

But, the rulebook somewhere noted that in many cases vagrants aren't really 'vagrants'. They can be people who can only get seasonal work, so they struggle other parts of the year. I think the intended point was that taking them out of the economy can have an impact.

Who knows? I just tend to think that there are better ways to get recruits than vagrants, and you're much better off focusing on those.

Here's the rules section from Glory and Argument, one of the rule book. Allow me to reiterate my advice that all players should buy all the rulebooks. There is some good info/suggestions/rules in them, and if you don't have them, you're at a bit of a disadvantage. They're not very expensive either.

Craft-and-Workhouse institutes. These
are academies of a sort! Each is capable
of training 1,000 vagrants in a trade,
taking a year. Once ready, the 1,000 can
either be used as settlers or along with
an investment in trade. Alternatively,
once ready they can be trained for
another year at an academy (or as
apprentices), They then lose the notation
‘ex-vagrant’ and can be used as standard
recruits. So for example an ex-vagrant
then trained for a year at an infantry
academy can be used as an infantry
recruit.
To get hold of vagrants in the first place
town watches can be ordered to round
them up in towns and cities in which
they are situated, and dragoons put on
patrol in the countryside can be given
the same order. They can collect vagrants
up to a maximum allowed by the
number of Institutes available at most.
The number of vagrants which shall be
able to attend a workhouse is limited to
5% of the population figure for the
locality in which they are situated. There
is an upper limit of 1,000 in all cases, but
a workhouse in a town of 5,000 souls can
in reality only have 250 inmates at any
given time.

Ahh, one of the benefits of playing Rozwi. Being able to not have to read the rules book and supplements too often, as most of whats in them doesn't apply to me

No, Deacon is right, and I would also worry about taking vagrants out of the seasonal workers pool, as it will definitely effect your economy (although if you have a poor economy you receive more recruits).

I've never controlled a rich nation, so anything that effects the treasury is something that I don't do. When I've played European countries I've often disbanded military units for the recruits, as the likelihood of going to war was normally non-existent, or if I did go to war then I couldn't have afforded to run an army and a navy so stripped one of its man-power and materials to gain money and recruits.

As to the benefits of the units you mentioned, maybe others with more experience of such could give some advice as to their benefits in the game:

Rat Catchers - obviously will help maintain stored grain (should you have any), but is there any risk except for if an enemy spy attacks it? I can think of other benefits to pest control, but maybe my ideas are taking real life matters too far and the game doesn't go as in-depth.

Nightsoilmen - help improve harvest results (possibly). Any other benefits in the game? And even then is their contribution to better harvests so small that it isn't really worth bothering with them until your nation has improved seed grain and other farming upgrades first?

Fire Brigades - Apart from enemy spy activity or natural disasters brought about through poor honour scores, what are the chances of fires breaking out in cities? Should Fire Brigades be classed as a luxoury item, reserved for when a nation is money and recruit rich?

I've never employed any of the above, so I'd love to hear player's thoughts (and I recognise what I've wrote above could be incorrect, so am happy to be corrected on matters)

Like plague you mean Rozwi , for rat catchers .. A territory like yours suddenly looking to trade international , all sorts of ships , coming from goodness knows what ...wink ..

I'd back Deacon to the hilt on buying the supplements, they are extremely useful.

On vagrants, I only tried this once, when Hanover in G2. Rounding them up caused my economy to drop from '10' to '7' (in this case it was worth it, even after such a hammering the economy was more than strong enough to support the position and I was in need of recruits) and I had to put the vagrants into the workhouse and then an academy to make best use of them.
If you do decide to round them up, if you then need to move them to another location (to attend a workhouse), might be worth giving them an armed escort. I seem to recall France in G6 tried to send vagrants from one location to another and the naughty men ran off!

Thelittleemperor wrote:Like plague you mean Rozwi , for rat catchers .. A territory like yours suddenly looking to trade international , all sorts of ships , coming from goodness knows what ...wink ..

Yeah, that would be a good example.

Apart from if a position suffered a 'natural disaster' due to a low Honour score (discounting enemy spy activity) would an outbreak of plague, or similar, occur in the game?

In which case, if there was a chance of an outbreak happening randomly, rat catchers would be beneficial alongside a good medical coverage and adequate to good supplies of food and fresh drinking water - but does the game go into such details on the back of the GM rolling the dice for random occurrences, unless a player orders such events to occur and uses spies?



It is a good call about the introduction of foreign viruses to Rozwi, I hadn't thought about that. No one better sell me infected goods!

In the time I've been playing, I've never heard of a plague really damaging a country. Sometimes stuff breaks out around sieges but as best I can tell that just plays into the SL of the troops.

Famine, on the other hand, has done a number on several positions. (discussed in another thread).

My guess is that Richard treats plagues like other natural disasters.  You have to have an EH of 1 before those can happen.

As an aside, the rules here say that you can have an enjoyable game with an EH of 1, but "expect a lot of challenges". I always found this funny, since I've not heard of a player who enjoys playing a position that was so far in the hole that just being awful sounds like an improvement. I know I gave up on Saxony which I picked up after 2 famines had literally halved the population.

Rozwi isn't doing so bad on the famine score.

Lost 98,000 due to famine. Gained 100,000 due to military led territorial expansion. EH dropped 2 points on the famine, went back up by 1 a couple of months after - probably due to domestic trade investments I made - but no EH gain, as of yet - if any - due to the military conquest.

Oh, talking about pointless upgrades - anybody else use Caravansaries? They are allowed in Africa (probably North and East, to be fair) but I've 'adapted' the concept for Rozwi's use. Hoping that, along with market places, they would improve domestic income. Not that I'd be able to tell if they did, lol.