GURPS Mass Combat Troop Strength Calculation
During the GURPS-based Braunstein game that I ran earlier this year, GURPS Mass Combat got plenty of action. Since I wasn't satisfied with the selection of troop elements from the book, I opted for a shoddily made conversion formula based on ACKS Domains at War. While it seemed like a decent enough way to approximate Troops Strength (TS) at first, it then became apparent that it was quite awful, and this caused some major issues. The issues also had snowballed into the demise of the game, because lots of factors were based on TS, such as wages, etc. It became clear that the bulk of "prep" for the next installment would be reworking the TS formula from the ground up. The formula had to be grounded in GURPS and not ACKS, as the translation step between the systems messed everything up. It took myself and AlexPsi more than two months to come up with a solution that provided surprisingly sensible results (what's even more surprising, that the results were also in some aspects quite similar to those in GURPS Mass Combat and ACKS). It's time to describe the approach in detail. Be warned - this is not necessary for your regular GURPS game. This is for those people who like to overcomplicate stuff (so, like a half of the GURPS community, or, in other words, ~5 people).
SPREADSHEET LINK (view only - make a copy for yourself if you want to use it)