My friend, Gloomspire, is starting an ACKS campaign. He was asking me some world building questions this weekend, and I didn't have a ready answer for one of them. He'd been looking at the Hireling Availability by Market Class table, and he understands how it works. However, he wanted to know how many of each type of unit on the table were actually present in the particular market, not how many were available for hire. I didn't know.
I knew that the total available for hire in a particular month would be divied up between the first three weeks of the month and then replenish on the last week, so that you could start the process all over again. But, this doesn't tell us how many are actually present... just how many are available for hire in any given month. Who knows how many are actually in the market and surrounding environs, but are otherwise employed?
So, I started doing some research. One thing that I dug up, which I felt particularly pertinent, was a reply by Alex in the forum post, Commissioning question by jedavis about how much of a given thing could be commissioned at once in parallel. At one point, Alex replied with an updated ruleset for Commissioning Equipment wherein he stated, "The advantage of commissioning equipment is that ten times more equipment can be commissioned than is available as inventory."
This gave me the hook that I needed to determine how many of a given professional are present within a specific market, at least for certain types of specialists. The answer is, an order of magnitude more than are available for hire, or x10. I decided to apply this formula to all of the entries in the Hireling Availability by Market Class table and see how it turned out. Here's a link to a picture of the resultant table:
Professionals Present by Market Class - Order of Magnitude - v1.0 table
I believe that it works out really well for the Mercenaries and Specialists sections. For example I checked rough estimations for some of the mercenary types against the Mercenary Availability by Realm Size table in Domains at War: Campaigns, pg. 10, and it seems to be in the ballpark. The numbers for the specialists also seem reasonable within the context of the total populations in these markets. Where it breaks down is for Spellcasters & Henchmen.
According to the Demographics of Leveled Characters table on page 235 of the ACKS core rulebook, there are a great deal more level 1-4 NPCs present in these markets than are available for hire. Far more than x10, in fact. I created a new table that looks at these numbers from the largest sized hamlets all the way up to the biggest metropolis. Here's a link to a spreadsheet since it is far too wide for a picture to be of use.
Breakdown of Leveled NPCs per Settlement Type table
Apologies that the formulae in my original Numbers spreadsheet didn't copy over to the Google spreadsheet, just the resultant sums.
The numbers that I generated consistently show that roughly 8% of a given market/settlement's NPCs are 1-4th leveled NPCs. My numbers also very closely matched those found in the Maximum NPC Population by Realm Type table, also on page 235 of ACKS. Take, for example, a maximum-sized Hamlet with a population of 370 persons. My numbers say that there will be 19 1st-level NPCs, 7 2nd-level, 2 3rd-level, and 1 4th-level NPC, and the remaining 341 as normal 0-level NPCs. However, if we look at my attempt to duplicate this in the Professionals Present by Market Class table, by using a x10 order of magnitude multiplier, it only results in 10d2 Normal Men, 2 Level 1 NPCs, 1.5 Level 2 NPCs, 0.5 Level 3 NPCs, and no Level 4 NPCs at all. These numbers are off by two orders of magnitude.
Question 1: Does the x10 order of magnitude to determine mercenaries and specialists actually present in a market pass the sniff test and is it a reasonable extrapolation of Alex's updated commissioning rules?
Question 2: Am I doing something wrong with the calculation of Level 1-4 NPCs present in a given market/settlement? Clearly the numbers presented as x10 values in the first table don't come close to the expected values that I generated in the second table. Maybe I should just accept that it's apples and oranges, and not try to unify total number of mercenaries, specialists, and henchmen/leveled NPCs under the same simple formula?
Thanks in advance,
Malo