Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Those, 1 and 4 hours, are base times. You can use GURPS rules for rushing or taking extra time, and taking extra time is of course very valuable if it can mitigate intrinsic difficulty penalties.

Also, I think it's fairly realistic. I'm no expert on H.R., "human resources", but my guess would be that the reason modern day companies often have huge H.R. departments is in order to comply with huge amouts of laws, including anti-discrimination laws created to protect minority applicants. Well, that, and maybe also screening hundreds or sometimes thousands of written applicants, many of which may have been submitted simply to meet a quota from welfare recipients, without the sender actually being genuinely interested in the job, let alone meeting even basic qualifications.

But if the huge government-iduced workload is removed (not that I don't sympathize with attempts to protect vulnerable individuals against discrimination and bias), and if there's no flood of perfunctionary "welfare requirements" applications, then I don't see why a qualified H.R. admin can't screen 25-30 applicants per week, on a 40-day work week.

Yes, of course.

I read a BBC news article a day or two ago, about the transition in the UK from nepotism to merit-based hiring (they called it meritocracy, but I use that word in a different sens), inspired by the Confucian Chinese examination system.

That's hiring on the basis of intelligence tests, in a roundabout way (where instead of testing IQ directly, they test whether you've graduaded college), and looks a lot nicer than nepotism, but I do think nepotism may have a little merit. If you've hired one really skilled engineer or physician, you might be able to ask him for recommendations about who else to hire, in his field (just keep in mind that Albert would never recommend Bob, and vice versa).

The article also touched upon subjects such as loyalty and trust. If you hire your friend's nephew, and your friend knows about it, then there's a lot of pressure on the nephew to stay loyal. If he screws up, or even more so if he screws you, it'll reflect badly on his entire clan.

GURPS core already has a Loyalty score concept, intended to be used for hirelings, although much isn't done with it. And I haven't read SE closely so I can't say if the Loyalty rules are expanded on there. But even as just a basic stat, it's something you can roll for during difficult time, and your chose of hiring procedure can also skew the Loyalty tendence of your hirelings. Upwards or downwards. For instance, if you cast spells on the applicants, that may have an offputting effect.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Also, it's very probable that a lot of things done in real life are done at +2 to +5 for Taking Extra Time, simply because the consequence of failure are thought to outweigh the costs of extra labour.

Hiring people who will have a lot of responsibility seems like it would be one of those things.

Of course, the particular situation of the PCs and their allies is that they'll see a flood of 'applicants'* who are desperate to escape refugee camps or at least improve their position to something approximating their pre-war one.

There's a huge horde of qualified (mostly slave) scribes, accountants, administrators, translators, artists, servants, scholars, teachers and even spies and assassins out there, who are out of a job because their noble masters are dead, fled or at the very least in such straitened circumstances that they've had to leave slaves with valuable-but-not-immediately-so skills to fend for themselves.

For the purposes of my campaign, I want to see the PCs have established functioning institutions and organisations after the ca 2 month break in our game. We'd all like to see emerging military units develop their own traditions and espirit d' corps, the new type of adventures made possible by capable bureaucrats taking over boring jobs, an intelligence service with all the concomitant adventure possibilities, etc.

I just want to avoid having everything happen faster than plausibility allows. Yes, the PCs and their allies are probably as good as any empire-builders in history and in terms of finance, they may be better. And they have immense reserves of wealth, courtesy of some distinctly non-real adventuring and dragon hoards and such.

But I still want the base rules that they use to be realistic, so that their superiority is the result of having higher skills than most everyone else and certain Advantages that place them ahead, not of the base rules being skewed and alllowing everyone weird results.

Since the PCs and their allies have high enough skill to be able to afford not to use Take Extra Time, unlike most real administrators, I guess that it wouldn't be implausible, at least not to you, if the first week resulted in them hiring several dozen people who can, in turn, act as interviewers and recruiters.

So, after a month, it would make sense that they'd have thousands of employees. And in two months, as much as they'd like.

Of course, given security considerations, there would be a bottleneck for trusted employees.

*More like supplicants, in that they'll turn up and beg for alms, jobs, loans, favours, consideration for family members, etc.

Oh, yes. Hiring on the basis of kinship and clan ties will be very common for the PCs. They'd very much like to be able to hire entire clans for warfare, for example.

The potential off-putting effect is why such spells are used by hidden wizards who try to keep it a secret that they screen people at all. Only if they get a sense that something is wrong will they cast spells directly on applicants, instead of using passive spell effects.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Well, that's the other side of the coin. GURPS (like Sagatafl) has a rules option for how you can rush an activity, performing it faster than normal in exchange for a penalty to effective skill. I don't recall GURPS exact rules for it, but they struck me as decent.

A highly qualified screener could use those rules to quick-screen a lot of people, e.g. by working 4 times faster than normal, and still be able to roll at a decent effective skill. He'd be doing that as a 1st-layer-process, to screen out the clearly unsuitable, those who lie about their qualifications, those with stark disabilities, or with serious mental problems (ones that are far worse than the wearing of bunny ears). Then everyone who didn't get weeded out can be made subject to a 2nd screening process.

Or perhaps a 2nd process at normal speed (no modifier) to weed out even more, or to "sort" those off to lesser jobs, designated as "usable but not gold", and finally a 3rd process done using the taking-extra-time rules to find your generals, your university headmaster, your chief physician, and so forth.

If the PCs in your campaign are going to hire NPCs to take over the hiring process, though, there'll need to be laid down some guidelines, for each kind of hiring process. Maybe the spy service hiring process is quite tolerant of eccentricities, while the military engineering department only wants absolutely square pegs? Although I'm not sure how easy it is for the PCs to influence their H.R. underlings, except perhaps by setting an early precedent.

Well, that's not my sort of campaign. While I have an interest in something a bit like that, as seen in the threda over i Roleplaying some months ago, about economic simulation, my intersted would be in a lower level of detail, where most such subordinate NPCs are defined by perhaps only two values, their Primary Skill and the Loyalty.

Going for a much higher level of detail, I think you'll end up with a hierarchy of definedness, where the top NPCs have full character sheets, at one end, and the NPCs who just barely have names have very sketchy character sheets, probably with intermediate 1-3 tiers of decreasing detail.

Top recruiter NPCs can bring in more manpower faster, or bring in better manpower. I don't actually think GURPS CPs are ideally suited for that (nor are Sagatafl's GPs), but as a better-than-nothing solution, you could define that a recruiter at skill level X, working full-time (45-60'ish hours/week in a medieval setting), can bring in Y CP per week, that Skill level X+1 can bring in Y+Z CP/week, Skill level X+2 can bring in Y+2X CP/week, and so forth.

You'd be better off devising some simple point buy system specialized for this purpose, I think, and including disads that will have to be accepted, because they weren't seen as being partiularly harmful during the vetting process, or weren't discovered during the vetting process, and because flavourful underlings are more fun than problem-free drones.

I don't know how much historicity you want to have in your campaign. Maybe not much. But if you do, it was often extremely difficult to fire someone, in many medieval or iron age cultures. Jobs were usually undersood as being for life, at least at court and in rural settings, although not so much in towns and cities. Even if it is possible to fire someone, it's not an every day occurence, it's hard to get a new job without good references, and many might view it as a personal insult. Or even as an insult to the clan, as in a blood feud that'll last for many generations.

On the other hand, people who have hard time fitting in, people who have high ability but als features (such as certain disads) that make potential employees reluctant to hire them, can sometimes react very positively to actually being given a chance, as in a much-higher-than-usual Loyalty score.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

Those rules might be legacy material from 3rd Editon. I remember there were some finding-hirelings rules, probably in GURPS Basic 3rd Edition Revised. Maybe that material was just copied over, without any revision or scrutiny?

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

What you'll have to do is come up with some system to define how rare different tiers of hirelings are in in-world terms. Or not necessarily a system, you could wing it, but I doubt you'd want that.

Sagatafl has the benefit that a lot of stuff is nailed down, as Human biology. Charisma 4, 1 step above average, is defined as being 1 standard deviation above average, thus roughly 1-in-6 has that. Intelligence 4 is likewise +1 SD, and since the two don't correlate (generally, attributes don't correlate), you can just multiply the fraction, and find that 1/6 times 1/6 = 1/36 of the (healthy and adult) population has both Intelligence 4 and Charisma 4. So if that's all you want, your "recruitment base" is roughly 3% of the population. That's extremely doable, although of course since skills start at zero in Sagatafl, most of those 3% you can dig up won't have the skills you want at all, although they'll be trainable.

If you want something rarer, like Will 4, Charisma 5 and Intelligence 6, that's 1/6 times 1/44 times 1/700 = roughly 185k. So in a population of 50k healthy adults, you can find about 1.3k of the first type and you have a roughly 1/3.5 chance of finding one of the second kind (or 1/7 if you absolutely want a man, or absolutely want a woman). But if you do, you can train him to be your spymaster.

Likewise, educations can be measured in Skill Points. An apprenticeship as a craftsman can be defined as a certain number of Skill Points, derived from the quality and amount of teaching, and the length of it. A university education likewise. And those, and other "training regimes", can then be assigned rarities. Although at that point you're going to have to make some assumptions about the extent to which people gravitate towards apprenticeships, educations and professions that they are suitable for. Clearly it's greater than 0. I think it's quite large, but you as the builder of your world may think differently.

Potentially relevant disabilities can also be assigned demographic occurences, e.g. 1/20 might be Hard of Hearing (thus 19/20 are not Hard of Hearing), so that even if you go looking for NPCs with high Perception and high Thinking Speed, you'll have to weed away 5% of those for not being good body guards or good scouts.

Sagatafl isn't published yet, so you can't crib off the material there.

But you can try to apply the same method to GURPS. It's a big problem that DX and IQ are trainable, and you're going to have to cope with Talents too. Presumably for every NPC who has IQ 12, there's at least a dozen with IQ 11 and 1 level of a Talent. Quite possibly 2 or 3 with IQ 11 and 1 level of a Talent that almost completely fits what you're looking for, so that in your eyes, the IQ 11+1 guy is no less desirable than the IQ 12 guy (or is actually more desirable, if you take the learning speed bonus from Talent into account).

So you're going to have to nail down some demographics. How many in the setting are IQ X? DX Y? IQ X and DX Y? How common are Talents? How often are people much more Perceptive or much more Strong-Willed than their IQ? How often are they much more Manually Dextrous than their DX?

Also with skill levels. Since attributes are trainable, you can't just say that an apprenticeship as a craftsman is X CP while an apprenticeship under an engineer is Y CP. But you can try to nail down some definitions anyway. Skill 11 for a freshly graduaded journeyman, 13 for a craftsman qualified as master, 15 for a "true" master, and so forth. Or whatever fits. you know GURPS better than I do.

There's a lot of questions you'll have to deal with. And you'll have to wing a lot of figures.

But once you have those figures, you can start applying them to your recruitment base, divide the size of the recruitment base by the occurence, e.g. if the grade of metal you're digging for is 1-out-of-5k, then 5k is your divisor.

Characters can't actually see the stats, of course. Sagatafl is coarsegrained enough that it makes sense to treat attribute X and attribute X+1, or skill Y and skill Y+1, as being clearly observably different. GURPS is about twice as fine-grained, so that may or may not affect in-character speech.

A bigger problem, for either system, is that when you're looking for a top official, such as your spymaster, you're rarely looking for a very particular combination of traits. Int 6 Per 5 Will 4 might be what you have in mind, but what if you find a guy who's Int 5 Per 7 Will 7? some recruiters do have a very rigid idea of what they're looking for, and for low level hirelings, like common soldiers or workers, I think it's best to not simulate in detail, but for top level functionaries, overly rigid recruitment targets are harmful. I hope that's obvious.

I don't have much of an idea for how I'd cope with that.

In a Sagatafl campaign I might just show the player of the recruiting character half a dozen sketchy character sheets, showing relevant attributes, sub-attributes and skills, and asking which ones the player's character wants to hire, cautioning that there may be hidden information (disads, e.g.) and that what's shown reflects the player's character's impression of the NPC, rather than what the NPC is truly like.

For GURPS, you could do much the same, but state that all skill values are rounded down to the nearest even number, e.g. Intelligence Analysis 13 becomes 12, and so forth, just for the sake of simplicity. You might also want to conceal attribute values, or just give a very coarse-grained indication of "average", "above average", "high" and "impressive" (or just rounded down to nearest even number, again). And you're going to have to decide how to indicate Talents. I'd suggest you can safely neglect to indicate single-level Talents, but I don't currently have a recommendation for what to do with potential hirelings who have multiple levels of Talents.

Another option, in GURPS, is to define most potentail hirelings by just one attribute, along with relevant skills. In most cases, it's a mental job or a physical job, so you define only IQ or only DX, some cases adding in all levels of Talent if the Talent is strongly relevant to the job. Some jobs, such as your court assassin, require both, in which case you define both. In many cases, HT and ST are irrelevant. Fit/VF can be subsumed into HT, showing a higher HT, or you can re-name it as Constitution to make it clear it's a combination trait that takes into account HT and Fit and perhaps also Extra Fatigue.

Or you can combine ST and HT and a lot of physical advantages into a single simplified Physicality attribute. I do a bit of that in Sagatafl, where 9 Primary Attributes, many sub-Attributes, and several Secondary Attributes are simplified into Body, Mind and Spirit stats, for use in some cases when simulating NPCs that aren't fully "individualized".

Regardless of system, you also need a way of dealing with potentail hirelings who far exceed what is being asked for. If you're looking for a guy with Charisma 4 and Intelligence 4, but you find one with Charisma 7 and Intelligence 6 and Dexterity 6, what do you do? If you offer him the pay (or, more medieval-appropriate, the supported-lifestyle) that you had in mind for the run-of-the-mill 4/4 guy, the 7/6/6 guy might take that as a strong personal insult, or he might say yes to the job but see it as a temporary thing, and spend a lot of time looking for a better paying job, one that better suits his personal qualities. Or maybe he doesn't give a hoot about pay/lifestyle as long as he's not starving, but he's dangerously likely to get bored if you only or mostly give him routine tasks, tasks suitable for a 4/4 kind of guy, but trivially easy for a 7/6/6 person?

To be continued...

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

... continued from previous post

Anyway, for starters, try to think in terms of demographics. How rare is that which the PC is looking for?

How rare are those veteran mounted archers?

You might be able to do it in stages, thinking in terms of GURPS' "Lens" concept.

You start with "archer" (as that's the "Template", rather than being a "Lens"). How rare is that?

X?

Okay. Next you apply the "mounted" Lens. How rare are archers who are skilled enough to quality as "mounted"?

Y?

Okay. Finally you apply the "veteran" Lens. How rare are mounted archers who have achieved veteranhood?

Z?

Okay. What's your recruitment base?

W?

Okay. Then your answer is:

W/(X*Y*Z)

That's how many potential recruits there are. You're not going to get 100% of them, but with skill, persistence and offers of generous pay (or support for an attractive Cost-of-Living) you can get close to it.

At some point, you might get fed up with the fiddly details, and just nail down some very coarsegrained tiers, like 1-in-20, in-in-400, one-in-8000, one-in-160k and one-in-3.2M, and then whenever one of the PCs wants to hire an underling, you estimate which "tier" the underling alls into, depending on how outrageous the PC's demands are.

"Dude, you're asking for a lot. What you want is a six-in-a-milion. I'm not saying you can't find one of those, I'm not saying it's completely pointless to roll for it, but if you lower your standards, maybe if you say you might be willing to compromise [here] and also compromise at least slightly [here], I'll lower it to the 1-in-8-thousand grade, which is much more doable. Yes or no?"

Sagatafl has formal area designations, Village, Town, City, Megapolis, et cetera, but they don't correspond to population sizes (although if you divide them up into urban and rural, and include Tech Level, then they could be used like that). You could define a scale of population size categories, or just use GURPS PR system, which I understand is logarithmic or something. Each time PR goes up by 1, the recruitment bases increases by a factor of 10.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

They are simple, but perhaps not ideal. A flat -1 per -10% of time taken. Which is very much not worth it for -1 to -4 or so, prohibitively difficult at -5 to -8 or so, but for people who can afford the penalty, awesome in that perfoming at -9 is twice as fast as -8 and five times as fast as -5. And, of course, -10 is effectively instant, i.e. probably a minute or so in this case.

All in all, much more sensible to use the base time as the fastest their recruiters are prepared to work. That's already a huge speed increase over the Take Extra Time process that's probably standard in normal corporate recruiting.

Or, you know, hire four times as many 'ordinary' screeners to perform the first layer of the process as you have highly qualified people to do the second layer. People with Administration -12 are probably much more than four times as common, not to mention much cheaper, as those with Administration -19 to -20.

Of course, given that Administration -12 people probably prefer to use Take Extra Time to get to at least skill 14 and more likely skill 16 for important recruits, they'll take between x4 to x15 base time for a standard recruiting process. From that point of view, being four times faster than standard means having Administration -14 instead of Administration -12.

Instead of using Take Extra Time for the top jobs, potential hires for them are passed on to one or more of Ankhapet (Administration -19, Intelligence Analysis -16, IQ-based Leadership -17, Psychology (Applied) -14, Teaching -16), Tiglath (Administration -20, Area Knowledge (local) -14, Current Affairs (local) -14, Detect Lie -20, Interrogation -23, Intimidation -25, Leadership -20, Psychology (Applied) -20, Teaching -20), Kyros (Administration (Military) -18, Intelligence Analysis (Military) -18, Leadership -18, Teaching -16), Kehlynn (Administration -18, Current Affairs (Headline News) -14, Current Affairs (People) -15, Current Affairs (Politics) -20, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -19, Psychology (Applied) -15, Teaching -15) or Murlak (Administration -26, Current Affairs (Business) -16, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -14, Leadership -16, Merchant -27 and Psychology (Applied) -17*).

The political implications of the hire of high officials are dealth with by Politics -20 (Ankhapet), -20 (Murlak) and -21 (Kehlynn). And the recruiting campaigns are masterminded by Propaganda -17 (Ankhapet), -19 (Kehlynn) and -23 (Murlak).

Any hints of potential disloyalty, plants or other deception is ferreted out by Waelstar (Administration -14, Area Knowledge (local) -16, Current Affairs (local) -16, Detect Lies -18, Intelligence Analysis -15, Interrogation -17, Lip Reading -17, Observation -19, Pscyhology (Applied) -12, Search -17, Shadowing -19, Streetwise -18, Urban Survival -19) and his small band of loyal spies.

Waelstar (Magery 2, magical espionage spells at 13-15), Kehlynn (Magery 3, wide range of spells at 15) and a small number of other trusted mages (with up to Magery 3), as well as mages from a firmly allied** faction who are even more powerful (up to Magery 5 and skill 22 with spells) will also screen applicants in potentially dangerous positions of trust, by casting passive detection spells from hiding and occasionally even interrogating them actively with magic, should cause be given.

The actual interrogator, as opposed to the spellcaster, in such interviews is usually either Waelstar (for inner company issues) or Tiglath (for local political issues). Should they be otherwise occupied (common for Tiglath), there are also several military men among the semi-retired veterans who provide headquarter security who have Interrogation -12 to -15.

*I decided that Smooth Operator ought to apply to it.
**For recruits to positions up to a certain level of trust.

They'll want to hire NPCs to take over the hiring of labourers, at the very least. And I doubt they want to actually hire every scribe, craftsman, overseer, servant or guard themselves, either.

For the fleet, naval captains and their officers manage the recruiting of new sailors for their crews, to make good losses. Several of the newest captains will be assigned a newly captured ship with a skeleton crew and a squad or two of marines and told to sail to an allied city with a decent population of sailors* and assemble a crew. They'll offer very good wages and benefits, as well as having handbills and pre-written town crier messages prepared by someone with Propaganda 19+.

The soldiers are already recruited by NPCs, very carefully chosen and firmly loyal for a long time, but I imagine that since the PCs want to expand locally, they'll have to have more than one or two recruiters on site.

Tiglath can choose a few people to recruit soldiers, I imagine.

In the two months I'm 'fast-forwarding' over, I'm trying to determine how far along the local recruitment of soldiers will come.

*The city where the fleet is based mostly lacks sail-handlers for the kind of advanced rigging the PCs are using. In game terms, TL2 to TL3 ships are what what most of the locals use while they are using firmly TL4 ships and rigging, with early TL5 (not too different from TL4) in prototype use.


[rest of post answered later]

What the PCs want, in terms of military recruits
 

What the PCs want in military terms

I'm fast-forwarding the time line in the campaign ca two months. Prior to that, we've dealt with a lot of administrative, training, financial and organisational issues by making a few skill rolls and a few statements of intent, without establishing precise details, which is what I'm doing now.

Ankhapet's player has stated that he is willing to find a way to pay for anything up to a legion of locals. He did not specify the size of 'legion', a very storied term with very different meanings depending on eras. But I know that he's much more interested in quality than quantity, seeing as they aim to move their soldiers around on ships and boats and anything over a few thousand would introduce terrible supply problems as soon as they left the coast.

First and foremost, Ankhapet needs someone trained in the three hundred new wheellock carbines that the PCs now own from converting their prototype matchlocks, to supplement the 300 magelock calivermen they already have. These may or may not be the same soldiers as the ones he wants chosen for loyalty and trained as 'military police', i.e. enforcers of discipline, military law and good order.

For that role, I was thinking that the 300 Artisans' militia were perfect, as they were already experienced 'cops', peacekeepers, security forces and barricade fighters, who had also been through two sieges and even a field battle, fighting as spear-armed militia infantry. And they've been training for sixty days in the service of the PCs even before this two month period, without us having established in what, and given the high organisational skills of the PCs and their allies, it makes sense to say that they were training with a few spare carbines as well as mockups of them.

Aside from these three hundred people whom the PCs have already secured, most males with any kind of military aptitude would already be conscripted into the armed forces of various factions. This includes many slaves, but to a lesser degree than free men. Slaves, however, other than gladiators and slave-guards, both of whom are already conscripted, are very unlikely to have weapon skills, Soldier or other useful skill sets for military recruits.

So the potential recruits would be those from factions who don't have conscription and people newly arrived, as refugees. That would include a lot of rural people who were too far away (or too valuable as food providers) during the winter to bother, but are now starting to arrive near the city bringing the first gleanings of the spring harvest to sell.

Given that there are a lot of shepherds in the surrounding countryside, it makes sense that slingers would be easy to obtain. They might not have Soldier, but they can have Sling -12+, Survival (Plains and/or Mountain) -12+ and even Camouflage, Stealth and Observation, given how many 'shepherds' have turned to banditry (or just have to defend themselves from said bandits).

Ankhapet is interested in a unit of fustibali (staff-slingers) who could deploy incendiary or explosive alchemical grenades. He also wants scouts and skirmishers, but they have to be very elite ones, to make it worth carrying them on ships, since they take up almost as much volume as the discplined heavy infantry that they could carry instead.

He's arranged for being allowed to select 500 prime veterans from among the tens of thousands of armed men under the remnants of the army high command of the former regime. This cost him a lot of money, but is worth it to him.

He also has access to some 3,000 volunteers from Lord Dama's Non-slaves* and their allies of the White faction of chariot-fans, of whom around 500 from Lord Dama's Non-slaves are not only actually very dangerous street-fighters, but also fight in units and appear to obey military discipline**, or at least their own version of it. There are maybe 200-500 of the others who might do in a fight, being murderous thugs who have fought street-to-street as the city was invaded, as well as fighting for territory, but their discipline is non-existent from a military point of view.

One thing that Ankhapet wants to do is circumvent the problem of the best male recruits being already serving someone else is to recruit women. Sure, they are much less likely to have the necessary skills and Attributes (primarily ST), but when you're recruiting from a pool of 1-2 million people (depending on how fast word spreads), even 1% of 1% of the abnormally strong, aggressive and otherwise qualified is still a number you notice. And it's not as if their other career prospects are bright.

Added to which, many shepherd women will already have at least Sling and Survival, with scouting skills not being impossible. Some might have hung around with bandit groups or fought as partisans.

In two months, what what is plausible?

How far along will the Artisans' militia be, assuming that they are been trained as TL4 line infantry, in addition to being trained as staff-wielding security and police? With sixty days of training in unit tactics and service culture of Purple Reign having preceded these two months and them being chosen, for quality and loyalty, from among a very experienced militia already.

What kind of units could the 500 prime veterans, 500 disciplined street fighters and 500 undisciplined street fighters be formed into? At least the veterans would be used as a cadre for recruits, but it might make sense to keep the street fighters together and have them be in the front lines when the PCs carry out their insane scheme of landing on the docks of a fortified city and taking it.

How many other recruits are plausible? And which of these would be useful after only a month or two of training?***

How many women who could make prime soldiers would have been gathered in that time? Would any of them be useful right now? As fustibali, perhaps, assuming they already had Sling -12+ and just had to learn Soldier (and that only the best, most intelligent and adaptable women were accepted, since there were so many potential recruits there)?

*Revolutionary anti-slavery organisation, mostly consisting of former slaves, who now rule most of the docks as a mafia-like organisation.
**Ex-gladiators or trained by ex-gladiators, mostly. Also have the luxury of having been shaped as fighting organisation by 20 'NCOs'/underbosses who are military veterans trained by a gifted general, with fifteen years of hard service behind them.
***Meaning that they already were veterans or at least bandits (or shepherds defending from bandits) with most of the required skills already.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

That might explain GURPS Basic Set. For GURPS Social Engineering, I would have expected that the fundamental paradigms of the rules were examined before they were built upon and that actually useful addition rules were added.

As it stands, those rules might do for one PC who wants to find one* more-or-less common hireling in a setting and locale where they might be more-or-less available. They are not generic and universal and they don't lend themselves well to other situations.

It wouldn't have been all that hard to add in some guidelines for modifying the rolls for rarity of skills sets, local culture, job market, etc. Instead, the rules for hirelings are more or less a copy paste of the simplistic Basic Set chapter.

*Though they include rules for seeking more than one hireling at a time, those rules are not good ones. Given that for a skilled recruiter, raising your pool of applicants by four orders of magnitude reslts in a doubling of the recruitment rate, something has to be off.

Re: Skills and skill levels for building an army, intelligence service, bureaucracy
 

The whole point of playing that sort of thing out in an RPG is that everyone is people, not merely statistics, and that PCs can get to know characters who range from their top military or civilian executies down to their kitchen help or a common soldier whose life they save (or vice versa).

A great majority of NPC retainers have only a single skill score (or even just a descriptior, such as 'competent') as their stats. But I'm always trying to provide some way for the PCs to notice and remember them. Whether that's personality, a catchphrase, relationship with someone they already know, etc.

Even very important NPCs are usually only 'statted' to the extent that it has become necessary to nail down one or more of their skills or attributes for some reason, but may have detailed descriptions, personalities, history, lists of relationships, goals, etc. Mostly in my head, of course, but I try to keep notes.

While it may on occasion prohibit serving in certain roles, Disadvantages like Broadminded, Charitable, Code of Honour, Honesty, Selfless, Sense of Duty (friends, comrades-in-arms, anything allied to the PCs), Truthfulness, Workaholic and Xenophilia are usually a net benefit. So point values are more or less meaningless.

The campaign isn't historical, but as historical analogies, the PCs might be viewed as the Dutch East India Company, coming from a more-or-less Dutch 17th-18th century culture. The local culture would be an ahistorical Mesopotemian (Sumer-Akkadian) analogue that never fell, but instead conquered the Greek world and reached Byzantine/Ottoman (Ottoman in feel, TL2-3 in most actual technology) levels of technology and organisation, but has now lost all of its colonies and is nothing but the ruins of a polity now, about a TL behind the cutting-edge.

The PCs are counting on that happening, given their high Reputations, Status and often good Charisma and Leadership scores. They are shamelessly targeting disenfranchised groups under the prior regime as well as victims of the wars, giving them new opportunities and judging them based on merit instead of birth.

This includes former slaves, with the PCs having decided to cast themselves as liberators and opponents of slavery. This is from ideological motives in many cases, but for at least three of them, it is to some extent purely guided by their assessment that the old system of slavery, serfdom and a privileged clerical and noble class cannot survive the war and that it is better to be on the forefront of social change than fight it.*

*High Politics and Propaganda skill.