No doubt this will cause some of you some hilarity but here goes.
What is the generally accepted size of a map hex ( in miles or kilometres ) ?
Don’t ask why but I would like to know.
or leagues?
You are not alone in wondering. Having nothing productive to do, I once extimated (from various clues in Tolkien and this game) that a hex was 25 miles accross as the crow flies and 30 miles accross as the cowpath winds. So we are dealing with a huge area. Perhaps someone has a dirrerent result.
The problem with leagues is that no one can tell you how long one of them is which makes the rest of the exercise futile.
1 League = 4,828032 Km or 3 Miles.
King of useless information.
C
Doh !
plus extra letters to make the reply long enough !
Ed, I would guess quite a bit bigger. Each turn is a fortnight, cav can forcemarch 1 hex per day on roads, which suggests maybe 50-60 miles across. I feel sure reading that the map was constructed to just allow cavalry to make a ride in 1 turn had that been described in the book. This would have the journey from Bree to Imladris as about 400 miles, which feels about right?
Cheers
Mike
You might well be right Mike. Any other opinions out there?
That would be the eqivilent to, about, 900 off-road miles per month of movement. Guess we can compare that to Mongol movement in the conquest of Russia and the invasion of Hungary. I recall Swartzkopf saying American armored forces were approaching Mongol speed during the first Gulf war.
Mike, consulting my less than complete private library here is the best I could do:
A Mongol column, commanded by Kaidu, of about 30,000 men left Kiev on the last day of November 1241. This column defeated a Polish army at Cracow on March 3, 1242. Or, about three months of movement. The crow distance betewwn these cities is 450 miles. (By North American standards Europe sure is small) Roughly 5 crow-miles per day.
In ME terms the Mongols would be considered out-of-supply. All those horses digging under the snow for grass. In ME terms six turns of unsupplied movement equals 24 hexes. This would suggest we are both over estimating and a hex is, about, 20 crow-miles from side to side.
Also, sometimes a turn is only a 7 days and the army movement is the same.
Turns are always 14 days long, regardless of the turnaround time to/from MEGames. In other words, it doesn’t matter if your turnaround time is 3 weeks or 1 hour, each turn covers 14 days of time.
As far as the question of movement is concerned, during the Old West period of United States history, the movement accross the Great Plains (a trip easily more than a thousand miles depending on which route you were taking), a solid day’s movement for the wagon caravans was approximately 12 miles a day. Depending on incliment weather, water rationing, and health of the animals, that could drop down to the point where you would camp within sight of the camp from the night before. While mounted movement appeared to be far faster, if compared to the movement rate of a man in good physical condition, the horse actually turned out to be slower.
Many have been the times where I have conducted 12-24 mile footmarches at a rate far faster than would be prudent for a horse. The biggest consideration here is that the horse, being of much larger stature, would tire faster, recover slower, and require far more water than a man would.
Just my two cents.