fulk

Hi,

I've been following the new thread on castles and might be able to provide a little insight on the areas given for some castles and cities.  Back in 2010 I was helping Greg on the Book of Castles and we discussed needed to making areas a bit less abstract so that we could all tell how big a particular castle should be, so that we could have some means of comparison.

Greg had the typical AREA 30 city based on Lincoln. So his idea was to compare other fortresses to the old Roman Fort of Lincoln. We were tossing around the idea of one area being about half bow shot across, based on the spacing of towers. 

But giving areas actual measurement started to cause difficulties because larger castles ended up needing a lot more defenders once area got defined. Basically a fort that was twice as long and twice as wide would take four times the area (2x2) and need four times as many men to defend.  For instance a city with area 30 (say 5 areas by 6 areas) would need 30 times them men to defend it, even though about 20 areas of the city would be interior sections away from the walls. 

But anyway, the original AREAs were based on Lincoln.