Manpower

Manpower turns a country's population into military potential. Every country tracks two figures:

• Manpower capacity – the ceiling: the number of fit people the state could ever have under arms.
• Manpower pool – the reserve actually available now, not yet serving in a brigade.

Capacity

Capacity is a share of the national population: 4% in the 1946 scenario. Only provinces the country actually holds count. People in provinces under enemy Occupation drop out of the ceiling until the province is retaken or ceded.

That share is scaled by Max Manpower, which comes mainly from two military laws among the Policies:

Other sources, such as the Closed Borders emigration law (+1%), add smaller amounts. Because capacity follows population, a growing country's ceiling rises over the decades.

Spending manpower

The pool is the only source of soldiers.

• Training. Every new brigade takes its full-strength headcount from the pool when it is formed. Cheap formations such as militia still cost their men.
• Reinforcement. Brigades that lose men in battle or to attrition refill automatically from the pool, provided they stand in Supply: on home soil, or on friendly land connected to it.

Soldiers who die are lost twice over: from the brigade, and from the country's population at the next monthly update. See Wars and War Exhaustion.

Recovery

When the pool is below capacity it refills by 1/240th of the shortfall each month, a twenty-year timescale that stands for new generations reaching service age. Recovery is therefore fast when the gap is large and slows as it closes. Manpower Recovery Rate speeds it; the Public Health research project adds 5%.

The shadow of the Second World War

The 1946 campaign opens just after the most destructive war in history, and the hardest-hit countries start with their pools well below capacity. The deficit is a starting casualty figure set for each country, for example:

These countries keep their full long-term capacity; they simply cannot field it yet. The gap closes over the following decades, which makes the early postwar years a window in which the belligerents' real military weight lags behind their size.

Choices

Raising the recruitment and reserve laws is the quickest way to a larger army, but those laws cost money, Stability and growth, and a larger pool means nothing without the arms to equip it (see Brigades). A country at peace may prefer a Volunteer Force and let its pool fill quietly in the background.