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Were there really so many samurai riding around?

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GC13

GC13

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I mean, we only have two ashigaru for every samurai we put in the field. That strikes me as an awful lot of your military being made up of your military elite. The Wikipedia entry for Samurai does say that they ended up at something crazy like 10% of the population. Even accounting for much of the expansion of the class occurring long after they ceased being warriors, that does leave potential for a lot of samurai in this era.

Still, 1/3 of the military would surprise me. Where did Paradox get that number from?
 
Historically samurai fighting on horse back would have retainers of his own following him to the battlefield, and I remember reading something here about samurai unit representing both the samurai himself, plus his own men-at-arms following him. Though I'm not sure if it was a dev or not who made that comment.

But if you take that into account, then the proportional amount of samurai does drop significantly compared to being 1/3 of the whole army.
 
All the manual says is that the samurai portion of your levy is "your elite cavalry". Besides, if it included their unmounted retinue then the whole point of them having their own stats would be lost.

I saw the post you're talking about, but I can't see anything to back that up.
 
There was no such thing as cavalry in Japanese warfare until the Bakumatsu era (1850's-60's). A mounted samurai would always be accompanied by foot retainers, the number of them being determined by his wealth-usually five, could be as little as one or a lot more for wealthy daimyo. The 'elite cavalry' represent these samurai and their retainers.

GC13, that 10% of the population represents all samurai-there were different classes, but generally ashigaru and foot retainers were considered low level samurai. The higher-up mounted samurai would be a much lower percentage of the population, substantially below 1%.
 
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