Creating a fantasy military

Alright so the main plot of my book follows this team of five soldiers in a kind of medieval fantasy war.
The war is between one country that is basically europe in the middle ages and another country that is loosely based of the middle east with some (for the time) fancy technology and maybe magic (haven't decided on that one yet).
What I am trying to do is create a somewhat cliche fantasy army with the classic swords and stuff but still leave some room for plot. I don't just want my characters rushing from one big battle to another. I would like them to go off on their own a bit more but I feel like that doesn't fit the medieval swords and big army thing enough. I have tried including some more modern elements like a developed rank system and the team being stationed at diferent places and stuff, which I have found works quite well and makes it much easier. However I am still having trouble mooshing these two very diferent concepts together.
Maybe it is dificult to help me here and I will just have to figure it out on my own but if anyone has a sugestion or anything that could maybe help it would be greatly apreciated.
Have a nice day!

 

I worked for a while on a similar type story that was based on a soldier in a medeival war. The first thing to remember is that combat in stories is inherently boring to read. Focus on the in between. Think of the movie Jarhead. Most of the movie focuses on the character's interactions while at camp and very little is actual gunfire. How do the different character's relate? Are there any relationships going on? Assaults or fighting within the unit? Who is getting promoted and why and how is that effecting the rest of the troops morale? Especially if this is a campaign and is drawn out, how do the characters change as the seasons and years pass by? Medieval soldiers spent muuuuch more time walking and camping than fighting. Also, because communication was difficult, often they would spend months following a general's orders with no word on how the rest of the war was going, and they would have to plan and execute their own strategies. In the crusades, one of the biggest and bloodiest battles happened weeks after the war was over because word hadn't gotten to them yet to stop fighting. I think what you are doing is very possible, I think you just need to focus on the character's and not on the combat.

 

Welcome to the forum!

How developed are your characters? As @Jak of Hearts is suggesting, you need subplots. I think that's what you're looking for. And subplots usually come from the character's personalities, backgrounds, secrets, etc. For instance, I'm writing something right now that's also about a war in a fantasy setting, and while the main plot is about liberating the country, a lot of time is spent away from the battlefield to examine my protagonist's drug addiction, her romance with another protagonist, how her problems and other character's problems affect their relationships, how the war affects their relationships, etc. That's the most interesting thing of all, and it will also make your battles more interesting because the reader will get to know and care for the characters. And so they'll actually start to worry about whether they'll get killed, and keep returning to your book with excitement to see what your interesting characters are going to do next.

Also, in terms of the characters going off on their own, I imagine they'd be split into platoons and such. So perhaps their platoon is sent off on a surveillance mission or something alone? Or they can be separated from the others in battle, go looking/pillaging for resources together...etc.

 

It's important to determine the magic and other fantasy technology, before you decide upon the types of battles and the characters' part(s) in them.

Magic and alternate technology alters how the battles would be fought...if there are dragons that breathe fire and are very resistant to arrows, spears and normal weapons...this would have a major impact. If a wizard could summon weather and have lighting strikes take out leaders behind the lines...if warriors can carry an anti-magic dome or umbrella, that has a limited time before it expires...all of these would impact the battles and storyline.

 

Medieval everything tended to be a lot less organized and regimented (no pun) than things are today, so the idea of a group of soldiers working more or less independently is pretty plausible. For example, soldier in the past "foraged" for food, which could in practice mean anything from hunting and gathering, to bartering, to outright theft from the locals of the area they were passing through. Modern soldiers depend on their MREs and face stiff penalties for collecting food from the populace.

See if you can find a movie called Flesh and Blood, starring Rutger Hauer. It covers a small band of mercenaries who take over a castle, sounds like it might provide some good references for you.

 

And I understand you are basing this in a fantasy world, but I want to point out as Iain mentioned that they were less regimented: soldiers ranks in medieval days were based on your social standing. If you had money you were automatically give high rank, if you were poor you were a soldier. It had very little to do with your actual military or combat experience and everything to do with how much money you had.

 

Technology and magic are going to be key to the military. Can people throw explosive fireballs? Suddenly tight formations are a lot less useful due to them concentrating people in a group. Chain lightning a thing? Better not wear much metal. We can enchant our horses to ride three times as fast as normal? Cavalary got a lot more dangerous, but suddenly logistics and messages are a lot more efficient, meaning easier control of larger areas of land.

 

This

In the Middle Ages, this grew to the point of warriors wearing full-body plate armor. Swords as an offensive technology became useless, so warriors started focusing on hammers and maces (not the spiked ball at the end of a chain, those have never been used ever; a mace is essentially a club with extra metal weight at the end) to smash through armor that could not be cut by swords. Fun fact, war hammers were a lot smaller than people today think they were.

When gunpowder became universal, people stopped using armor almost entirely. The armor couldn't stop a bullet, so why would you want the extra weight if it couldn't protect you? The defensive technology was rendered obsolete by the offensive advancements.

But gunpowder took a long time to become universal because early firearms couldn't be reloaded as easily as longbows. Longbow archers took a lifetime to train, and anybody off the street could pick up a musket and be reasonably proficient, but once you fired your musket, you were generally reduced to sticking a knife in the barrel and turning it into a spear.

Thus, even though long-distance weaponry was starting to become more easily accessible, the concept of the up-close battlefield – with hundreds of soldiers marching in box formations – was not yet rendered obsolete because these did not remain long-distance weapons.

Except that today, even the concept of a battlefield is becoming obsolete because long-range weapons which remain long-range weapons are so incredibly easy to make and to train someone to use.

Battles are won and lost by people. Battles are fought by technology.

If you don't know how the technology works, you won't know how the battle works.

 

I assume that that is more a numbers thing at the moment, as most countries haven't drafted large parts of their population. I imagine that trench warfare will come again once a full scale war breaks out. Doubly so now automatic and semi-automatic weapons exist in larger quantities.

 

Actually, trench warfare was rendered obsolete in WWII by the perfection of armored tanks and fighter jets.

Not least of which because everybody hated trench warfare in WWI and the world's military thinkers worked explicitly to make sure they wouldn't get caught in that again.

For that matter, I've read that a lot of American generals didn't want to get involved in WWI because we'd seen a taste of trench warfare of the Civil War and thought it was a waste.

 

Battlefields today are more about "hugging the belt" and mingling with the civilian population to negate the enemy's air advantage. I'm sure we'll see international army-to-army combat again sometime soon, but at the moment, it's looking like counterinsurgency and small wars for a while.

 

Trench warfare was temporarily rendered obsolete by WW2 advances. It came back in the later half of the Korean War. Simply put, trench warfare comes back whenever defensive tactics and technologies are better than attacking ones.

 

Intriguing

 

And Dien Bien Phu, which was lost largely (according to Bernard Fall, inevitably) due to the French not understanding the logistical demands of trench warfare.

 

Very true, but one of the points that Fall makes early on in Hell in a Very Small Place is the sheer tonnage of thick timbers (not available in sufficient quantities on-site) and barbed wire necessary to fortify the position they'd chosen. The book is back in the library, but basically it would have required every aircraft they had in SE Asia, flying non-stop missions, unopposed, for months. No room for food, ammo, fuel, or anything else, just barbed wire and timber. The only way the base could have held is if the Viet Minh didn't assault it.

 

Returning to the question posed in the OP, it would be helpful to determine how your armies are recruited.

Feudalism is common, both in the real world medieval period and in fantasy, but doesn't really lend itself to organized militaries with ranking systems or permanent postings and the like. There might be a warrior class who dedicates their lives to combat, but they probably still have estates to manage. And the common foot soldiers are going to be conscripted from the population at large, who'll have fields to harvest or shops to run or goods to make.

Volunteer professional armies were almost nonexistent in the Middle Ages, but existed before and after. Rome would be the most notable early example, and had the sort of permanent posts for units and clear ranking system you want. Might be worth looking at the Byzantines, who sort of blurred the line between professionalism and feudalism at certain points.

Then there are citizen militias, like the Greek city-states other than Sparta and--later--Macedonia. They had a clear rank system you could consider "modern" in style, but their soldiers weren't usually deployed too long because they had other things they needed to do.

Finally, you can look at mercenaries. They often had a fairly clear ranking system, and could certainly be assigned to specific posts for a long while, as long as they were paid. They can also be blended with any of the other recruitment systems.