Wagons MA

[phiwum]

A pack animal can haul a wagon with weight up to 200 x ST "all day" without problems, but at what MA?

Suppose the wagon and cargo (including driver, passengers, etc.) weighs 600lbs, not a particularly heavy load. That's 20 x ST for an average draft horse. If we were to naively apply the rules on p. 130, the draft horse would suffer a -12 MA penalty and so could gallop at the same speed an average person runs. (Draft horse MA is 22.)

That can't be right.

Now, the table on ITL 130 is for riding or draft animals, not animals pulling a wagon. Since the maximum load for animals without a wagon is 12 x ST, we could adjust the penalties by adjusting the ST multiplier by 200/12. But that would mean that the wagon goes at the horses full speed up to 33 x ST, which seems a bit much. I doubt a horse could gallop at full speed with an empty wagon just as fast as he gallops unencumbered.

Has anyone thought about these issues?

[hcobb]

I decided to adjust speed for terrain and load.


https://www.hcobb.com/tft/Cart_Wars.html

[Shostak]

I found this on the internet, so it must be true.

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by Shostak

I found this on the internet, so it must be true.

That puts the speed at a canter at about as fast as a sprinting man. The article claims that a horse galloping with a wagon, or even cantering, is rare.

TFT allows an unarmored human to move at about 5.5mph, which is at the low end of average speed for a human running long distance, if we can trust my site. A horse trotting with a wagon, according to your article, goes approximately 10-15 mph, so about 18 to 27 hexes. That high end is too high for TFT figures for horse movement. Again, according to your site, horses don't canter or gallop with a wagon often.

So, let's suppose that an empty (but for the driver) wagon in TFT goes 18 hexes for a moment, pulled by an ST 24 riding horse. The wagon and driver weigh 370lbs, which is bit over 15 x the horse's ST. He'd be going as fast a riding horse carrying, not pulling, 6 x ST. Thus, a simple approach is to multiply the weight of wagon+cargo by 2/5 to get the maximum speed.

I've fudged the numbers here just to get a simple multiplier. Note that the 30 ST draft horse would also have MA -6 for this same wagon.

For my example of a wagon loaded to a mere 600lbs (including the wagon itself), the riding horse would be at MA -10 (600 x 2/5 = 240, or 10xST), while the draft horse would be at MA -8 (8xST).

Of course, a simpler modifier is to divide the weight by 2. This would yield the following results:
Horse + driver (370lbs) -- Riding horse MA -8, Draft horse MA -8
Horse + driver + 230lbs -- Riding horse MA -12, Draft horse MA -10
Obviously, this yields slower results, which may not be desirable, but it's easy to use.

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by hcobb

I decided to adjust speed for terrain and load.


https://www.hcobb.com/tft/Cart_Wars.html

I replied to Shostak's post first, since it gave me simple figures to play around with. Then I looked up your post.

Most of my roads are simple dirt, so you're dividing the weight by 6, rather than my very simple suggestion to divide it by 2. As a result, a ST 24 riding horse could pull a cart with driver and 230lbs of cargo (total weight 600lbs) at MA -6, rather than my more drastic result of MA -12.

This is probably pretty reasonable. 230lbs in a wagon should be like nothing to the horse. If I were to adopt your suggestion, I'd probably change the divisor to 5 rather than 6 just to make the division easier. I'm not too interested in the level of detail you provide. It's nice to see, but it would slow my game down more than necessary unless the point is a wagon combat.

Using this method, an ST 24 horse with a rider would go slower (MA -6) than he would with a cart with a single driver aboard (total weight 370lbs). Now, I don't know nothing about horses, but that strikes me as unlikely.

If we go to your higher divisors (10 on a paved road), the horse is up to MA -2 when pulling the cart and driver, quite a bit faster than he would be with a rider.

ETA: Note that any round number divisor greater than 2 will yield the same result. An ST 24 horse is faster when pulling a wagon and driver than when mounted by a rider. Again, maybe I'm just wrong and this is an okay result, but it doesn't sound right to me. (My original suggestion of multiplying by 2/5 also does not have this issue, since any divisor less than 2.57 will do. Of course, this isn't foresight on my part. Just a coincidence.)

[Bill_in_IN]

I find this discussion fascinating because, in our TFT play of many moons ago, carts weren't all that much of a use or concern.

It brings up a question of how to deal with multiple animals/horses pulling carts. I admit in advance of not getting to this general topic of pack animals and carts in my new copy of ITL. We focused on riding animals (i.e. War Steeds) and some pack animals. I'm old enough to have memory issues with all of it, LOL!

I would say that for purposes of managing a game. Whatever weight and MA adjustments one ends up using, you could simply spread the load evenly among the animals. Thus, decreasing the overall adjustment on each animal with the slowest animal being the maximum for the cart.

This next point could be a topic for it's own thread.

Originally Posted by phiwum

..., but it would slow my game down more than necessary unless the point is a wagon combat.

Combat wagons. I envision wagons with high sides with slots for archers, arbalists, catapults, etc. Basically, a medieval version of an APC or tank. There was a John Wayne and Kirk Douglas movie called "The War Wagon."

[hcobb]

Note that 10 mph is MA 18, but I suggest imposing a turning radius restriction.

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Note that 10 mph is MA 18, but I suggest imposing a turning radius restriction.

A fair point in terms of realism, but I'm not sure I'll use explicit rules for that purpose, as they'd get quite complicated. Your rules for acceleration are sensible too, but I'd rather not have to record the speed of a horse and wagon each turn just to ensure that these rules are implemented properly.

[Axly Suregrip]

Also, top speed is very different than acceleration. Even if a loaded wagon's top speed is 18 MA, a loaded wagon won't be close to that the first few turns.

ITL is more about tactical situations. I would think you would want the speed in MA to reflect starting/stopping speeds and not the eventual full top speed with momentum on a paved surface.

For example, dragon flying speed mentioned in ITL for traveling across maps is disproportionately high compared to the MA used. ITL pg 80 "Dragons can fly. The speeds given here do not reflect the
dragon’s full cross-country flying speed. .... A dragon flying cross-country is at least four times as fast as a horse." And yet the top listed dragon flight speed is MA 24, same as a horse.

[JohnPaulB]

If you are driving a wagon casually from village A to village B, you are probably only going walking speed of MA 3 to MA 5, depending on the animals: Oxen = 3 MA; Horses maybe 5 MA.

I'm not using mathematics or even "animal knowledge", but what I've seen in hundreds of movies and tv shows.

If the horse-drawn wagon is being chased it will go faster; perhaps 8 MA.

It's probably possible to go 'full throttle' racing, perhaps 10 - 12 MA, but the wagoneer would be making his Driver Talent roll often and the horses would tire out or crash.