Supply and Your Miniature Army

I was once accused of wanting to track every biscuit issued to the army. Well, yes, mea culpa. I got interested in how to feed an army when I read two seminal works: George Washington's Expense Account, and Supplying War. There was a line in the former that captured the spirit of Washington's expensing: "Dinner for one army". And the latter is a history of the difficulties in feeding an army.

For anyone who has ever been on an expense account, Washington's Expense Account is priceless. If you recall your history, Washington turned down a salary and offered to serve if Congress merely reimbursed him for his expenses. Sounds like quite a deal. The salary established for Commander of an Army, as established by the Continental Congress was $6,000/year. After 8 years the government would have owed him $48,000. Instead they reimbursed him over $250,000. He used 22 of the 23 principles of expense accounting. In 1790 they refused to do that and insisted on paying him a salary as president. The book is simply an annotated copy of the expense report first published in the 1830s.

The latter book, by Martin van Crefeld, doesn't go into great detail, but he gives enough starting with the basics: a man consumes 1 pound of food and 1 pound of water each day (this is a rough average). A horse consumes 10x that, and can't eat meat (in the American Civil War fodder was the largest item shipped on the railroads). A 2,000 man regiment eats a ton of food and consumes a ton of water each and every day, even when sitting in a camp. An army corps, minus any horses, consumes 12.5 to 16 tons of food and a similar amount of water, each day.

Now various things can be substituted for the food, and wine or beer is often served in place of water as the alcohol will kill the bugs you'll otherwise find in the water (this was the origin of 'the flux' so often mentioned by travelers -- even as late as the 1950s it wasn't unusual for somebody to take a few days to 'acclimate' to the local bugs, and that was in the US!). The soldiers won't eat grass, but you can drive beef along with the army, and in Marlburian times soldiers would go out and harvest the fields to get grain for bread.

Now you can come up with a formula for all of this, and write a computer model to do the actual supply. Or you can look for simplifications. I did that with an area/box-to-box movement system for the Charaoenea Campaign (and the only serving US Army officer in the gaming group ended up using the logistics knowledge gathered by his scouts for intelligence purposes). It's contained in an article I wrote entitled (not surprisingly) Supply and Your Miniatures Army. There is, however, a simpler and more elegant method. This is the supply method found in the boardgame Frederick the Great, originally by SPI, but then bought and marketed by Avalon Hill.

You create a depot. This takes a minimum of 10 strength points (2,500 men/SP). It takes you a full turn to do that. After that you must trace a supply line of 6 hexes (Prussian) or 5 hexes (French/Austrian/Russian) to that depot to be considered in supply. And the depot must have at least 1 SP with it at all times to 'work'.

This simple system meant logistical considerations dominate the game. When I gamed with some people using other maps we added a twist, roads. There are two types of roads available, the macadamized roads denoted by a solid line, and the more typical tracks marked as a dashed line. The latter merely negates the effects of terrain. The former does that, and costs 1/2 of a movement point to move along. Thus a depot on a macadamized road can supply a force 10 hexes away on that road.

The immediate effect was to make roads very important. Just that little change meant that players focused on crossroads and campaigns went up and down the major roads...just like they did historically.

Then we got a little more clever. A river running through/along a hex could be treated as a road. Downstream was a macadamized road, upstream was a track. This meant that areas with roads and rivers became easier to move through.

There was one more wrinkle. A friend pointed out that there were some areas where the foraging needed to support the depot just wasn't there (south of Berlin, for example). We tried various things, and then just arbitrarily designated some areas as that way. That further limited our routes and campaigns, but it made sense when we did a campaign in Italy. There isn't much grazing in the Alps.

This simple rule gave us supply rules that were easy to remember, accurate to a first cut, and influenced the campaign. When we went to the ACW, you put in a railhead, and that was your depot (railroads extend your forage infinitely to the rear). And when we gamed in Ancients we used area movement and a rough form of the supply rules outlined in the article that's available from me for the asking.

Troops fight better when they've had a hot meal. Now you can provide it for them.