How many people does it take to attack Constantinople?
OK, the real question is how many goblins, but my goblins probably aren't your goblins, so let's just stick with humans for the moment. The Constantinople in question is late 4thc, so it's the Contantinian walls, not the much more impressive Theodosian walls. Even so, the walls stretched about three miles. It's not really a siege, it's a full-on assault.
Here's how I did the math.
Three miles equals 15840 feet. Call it 16000 to simplify the arithmetic. Any one human is going to need about four feet horizontally--two feet and change for his body, plus a bit of room on either side. That comes to around 4000 humans to stand at the base of the wall, not quite shoulder-to-shoulder.
I have to say, that's not nearly as many people as I would have guessed. Now, an assault is going to need more than that, but even if you figure five guys deep, that's still only about 20,000 to attack the city. That's well within the range of late antique armies. There would need to be the logistics folks and so on, of course, but we're still talking well under 50,000 for a total army.
That's just for general conversation. The real purpose of the exercise was to find a way for my MC to attack the commanding general (okay, goblin king) without being spotted. I had figured everyone was off attacking the walls. Not literally everyone, you understand, but leaving behind just the general staff, as it were. But with 200,000 bad guys, I find myself left with a *huge* surplus wandering around. My MC is sure to be found.
I have some ways around all this. I offer up this little exercise as a demonstration of how pure logistics--geography, siegecraft, whatever--can have a significant impact on plotting.
OK, the real question is how many goblins, but my goblins probably aren't your goblins, so let's just stick with humans for the moment. The Constantinople in question is late 4thc, so it's the Contantinian walls, not the much more impressive Theodosian walls. Even so, the walls stretched about three miles. It's not really a siege, it's a full-on assault.
Here's how I did the math.
Three miles equals 15840 feet. Call it 16000 to simplify the arithmetic. Any one human is going to need about four feet horizontally--two feet and change for his body, plus a bit of room on either side. That comes to around 4000 humans to stand at the base of the wall, not quite shoulder-to-shoulder.
I have to say, that's not nearly as many people as I would have guessed. Now, an assault is going to need more than that, but even if you figure five guys deep, that's still only about 20,000 to attack the city. That's well within the range of late antique armies. There would need to be the logistics folks and so on, of course, but we're still talking well under 50,000 for a total army.
That's just for general conversation. The real purpose of the exercise was to find a way for my MC to attack the commanding general (okay, goblin king) without being spotted. I had figured everyone was off attacking the walls. Not literally everyone, you understand, but leaving behind just the general staff, as it were. But with 200,000 bad guys, I find myself left with a *huge* surplus wandering around. My MC is sure to be found.
I have some ways around all this. I offer up this little exercise as a demonstration of how pure logistics--geography, siegecraft, whatever--can have a significant impact on plotting.