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[Mlamlah]

Military can't be stressed enough, and our own personal skills can't be stressed enough. Without a battle, there would be no noble house of Stone to begin with. Military is the raison d'etre.

I'm not interested in archers fighting fully from horseback, since that is a difficult skill, but there's no reason not to give all our archers and skirmishers horses. This speeds them up outside of battle at the very least, and gives them mobility on the battlefield as well. The skirmishers can actually be light cavalry of a sort, screening the deployment of our rangers and archers, who travel by horse and deploy on foot.

Archers and Rangers -- 10 man squad
Armor: Brigandine cuirass, Kettlepot helms, leather elsewhere
Arms: Longbows of a 150 lbs draw, 300 yards range, arm-strapped bucklers, and shortswords
Equipment: small fast horses, saddles with holders for longbow and three sheaves of arrows.
Skills: High draw-weight Longbow skills, Woodcraft, Trapping and Ambush, decent hand-to-hand and adequate riding skill   

Skirmishing Light Cavalry -- 5 man squad
Armor: Brigandine and chain
Arms: Spears, ten throwing axes, medium targe
Equipment: Fast light horses
Skills: Above average riding skills, combat riding training, excellent melee, throwing, and shield skill

Support and Engineering -- 1 per 10 soldiers
Armor: leather
Arms: short sword, buckler
Equipment: light horse team on light cart, 5 shovels, 5 axes, 5 10lbs hammers, and thin wooden panels and wooden stakes.
Skills: adequate teamster skills, above-average carpentry and other crafting.

Tactics: The archers are the backbone, the light cavalry skirmishes and delays any forces threatening the archers by skirmishing and harrying from the flanks as the archers rain arrows into the center mass; and the support can pass out equipment to the others and direct them in building improvised pit traps, stakes, barriers, pavises, etc. Given enough time, the force can dig in quite sturdily.

Tell me what you think.

Also, let's not visit Marna, because we want to be an ambitious young nobleman that she dreams about, not her puppydog. Writing is fine.

Our army is already a *significant* portion of our population. Our military is already well equipped. Any development of skills should focus on the skills our troops already have, not new ones. The little advancement i *could* condone would be to train our archers and rangers further in melee combat so that they can properly defend themselves, as well as training basic skirmishing tactics all round.
Beyond that? we don't need more military presence right now, we're already really tough given our current means.

Training ourself? Good, fine, i can handle that. More important is preparing for our marriage however, and improving our social standing to better secure ourself from the jackassery of the count.

[tryrar]

+1 to above. Guys stop with shooting for the moon where troops are concerned, we're already pretty well protected

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

I'm thinking civil war with the count may be inevitable. (And lots of fun ) Maybe we should start training all of the able-bodied men part time, like maybe a couple days a month. So if we need them to fight, they'll at least have some idea how to stand in a line and hold their pitchforks towards the enemy.

[tryrar]

...dude, NO. NO. Bad Urist, Bad Urist!

[GreatWyrmGold]

First off, there's no such thing as a "dukedom." The proper term is "Duchy."

Training our skirmishing force, making a mew, getting permission to improve our stuff, expanding the mine, etc, all sound good.

About attracting the intelligentsia...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's neither enough nor requisite to just build a library or whatever; we need to make our town seems a better place to live for them than wherever they live now. Doing so requires knowledge of:
1. Where these people live.
2. What this place is like.
3. What they like.

However, there are some things we can do that will almost certainly make people (including scholars) flock to our land.
1. Spread word of our low taxes and whatnot.
2. Use a good proportion of the money we do get on improving life for common citizens as opposed to expanding the military, giving ourself luxuries, or engorging our coffers.
3. Build some houses if needed. Until such time as we no longer want migrants, there should be houses for them to move into.
4. General beautification of plebeian neighborhoods.
5. Make it known that we are interested in such people.
6. Build facilities for such people, or at least start to. People are more likely to move if they know there's a job at the other end.

I'm thinking civil war with the count may be inevitable. (And lots of fun ) Maybe we should start training all of the able-bodied men part time, like maybe a couple days a month. So if we need them to fight, they'll at least have some idea how to stand in a line and hold their pitchforks towards the enemy.

Maybe. This has possibilities. Bring it up with our advisors, and maybe make it voluntary (something like the Army Reserve?)

[sammyo12]

We could probally do with a pair of breeding hounds for militarys/town partols uses.

I wonder would could we attract scholars to come and write books instead of wasting tons on buying them.

A good idea also would be to construct wagons so we can send them out to sell our goods on land and uses our ferrys to do that on river sides.

The mine could do with some mechanics type things or expansion.

[Mlamlah]

I agree, making the lives of our people more comfortable and more prosperous right now will have its own benefits.

[Gotdamnmiracle]

We could probally do with a pair of breeding hounds for militarys/town partols uses.

I wonder would could we attract scholars to come and write books instead of wasting tons on buying them.

A good idea also would be to construct wagons so we can send them out to sell our goods on land and uses our ferrys to do that on river sides.

The mine could do with some mechanics type things or expansion.

Okay. So build wagons

 and building many many more houses, nicer in quality than our previous versions, and offering to upgrade our previous houses with our surplus brick and stone.

Let's get some population up in here.

[tryrar]

Heh, and here I was about to suggest subsidizing the prices of brick so as to allow the citizens to rebuild their homes out of brick/build homes out of brick. +1

[GreatWyrmGold]

Heh, and here I was about to suggest subsidizing the prices of brick so as to allow the citizens to rebuild their homes out of brick/build homes out of brick.

That could work, too!

[Gervassen]

Let's not build houses. That's what builders do. We are not our craftsmen. We are a frigging lord. We ought to act as such, not bob the builder.

[GreatWyrmGold]

We wouldn't be building the houses ourself, Einstein.

Although...if we did spend some time doing "peasant work," like building or farming, sometimes (maybe one or two days a month, when there aren't higher nobles around?) would probably bolster our "Man of the People" image.

[Gervassen]

I don't know what your game is by calling me Einstein, but try to be a little more classy. Naturally, I meant authorizing the work from the top down. It never occurred to me that you could mean we're actually building them, because that's a retarded thing for a lord to be doing. Housing ought to develop from the ground up by demand. It's our job to generate demand, not build empty houses for no reason and pray people move into them.

No, housing is something that people can build themselves. We're turning from public works into private works here. Let's concentrate on large-scale infrastructure and making people want to build their own damned houses in our town, because we have added larger and more ambitious projects than mere houses. Also, in this era, a big military was a way of saying "your property isn't getting destroyed on our territory" and yet we've got people saying 35 men are enough.

[Gervassen]

You want a big idea? You want a big public works project that would make people want to build their own damned houses? Fine. Baths. Having a public bath in our town would set it apart as a place where people want to move and want to build their own houses with materials that, far from subsidizing, we could tax and people would still be clawing to be the first to build near us.

[Mlamlah]

Keep it clean guys, no need to get testy.

Residential housing isn't necessarily something to leave entirely to the whims of populace, some basic central planning is required, especially as towns grow. Without proper management, disorganization can abound, turning what would otherwise be a prosperous town into a collection of shanty-hovels with no rhyme or reason to placement.
Much of what was being discussed was merely to encourage the use of sturdier and higher quality building materials anyway. I don't understand why it could hurt to have a few better quality houses up for grabs by the populace either, it's not a big deal. 
Our military *is* huge, if you look at our population. If we grow our military any larger we might not even be able to support it.