Castellan draw a castle on the plan, watch it rise in stone

A rough game estimate, not a costing. Quantities come from the shapes on the plan: masonry (walls, towers, building walls, revetments), lime mortar (28 % of the masonry), earth for ramparts and ditches (ditches 7 m deep or more counted as rock-cut), timber (roofs, floors, framing, hoardings, bridges, palisades), roof area, and cartloads (0.7 m³ each). Labour uses all-in rates — quarrying, carting, lime-burning, scaffolding and laying together: rubble masonry 15 man-days per m³, ashlar 30, brick 22, earth 1.2, rock 8, timber 8, roofs 0.5 per m². Works of 1500–1650 take 0.8 of that, later ones 0.6 (organised early-modern sites). The rates are calibrated on Edward I's castles in Wales: Harlech, 1282–89, about £8,190 with up to 940 men (546 labourers, 227 masons, 115 quarriers in 1286); Beaumaris, 1295, about 2,600 men and some £270 a week in wages, £15,000 by 1330 (A. J. Taylor, The King's Works in Wales; Wikipedia). Money: about 5½ pence per man-day in Edward I's England (wages 2–4d a day plus materials), 0.14 Rhenish gulden in the 15th–16th c., 0.1 Reichstaler in the 16th–17th c., 1.05 livres tournois under Vauban (labourers 10–12 sols, masons about a livre a day; a toise cube of masonry came to some 30–60 livres). One rate serves each currency for its whole period, though prices rose within it. Shown with ±50 %. Building seasons of about 200 working days; winters stop the masons.

A rough game estimate, not a muster roll. Defenders: a medieval ring wall wants a man for every 1.5 m of wall-walk at an assault (recommended) and one every 3 m at the least; the Anglo-Saxon Burghal Hidage reckoned four men to a pole (5 m) of wall. Towers get 4 men (at least 2), gates 8 (at least 4). Rings inside the main one count a third: a reserve that falls back to them. A rampart follows Vauban’s rule of 500–600 foot for each bastion front, and a tenth as many horse (“il faut en infanterie cinq ou six cents hommes par bastion”: Encyclopédie, article Garnison, after Vauban’s memoirs; eight bastions: 4,000–4,800 men). A front is a bastion drawn on the rampart (a small one counts in proportion to its share of 351 m, down to a quarter), or every 351 m (180 toises) of its outline; small outworks near it are in that number. In peacetime: a man for every 12 m of medieval wall and two at each gate (Harlech, finished in 1289, kept 30 soldiers besides its constable, chaplain and craftsmen), a sixth of the siege garrison in a bastioned place. Beds: 5 m² of barracks floor or 15 m² of residence a person; stalls of 5 m² a horse on the ground floor. Floors: one every 3.2 m of height, the roof space of long buildings as a loft. Food: grain weighs 0.75 t to the m³, heaped 0.6 m deep (0.45 t to the m² of floor); a storehouse holds half that in mixed provisions. A soldier eats about 0.8 kg of bread grain a day (Vauban’s ration was 24 ounces of bread), a horse 4 kg of oats (hay not counted). With no granary or storehouse marked, the panel’s Provisions setting is assumed (3 months unless changed) and the result says so. Water: 4 litres a person and 30 a horse a day. A well gives about 6 m³ a day (as much as a windlass can raise; deep rock wells often less), a spring about 20, a cistern holds what you set (150 m³ unless changed), and two days in casks besides; rain is not counted. With no well, spring or cistern drawn the water is unknown and the endurance rests on the food alone. Endurance is the shorter of water and food for the recommended garrison and the horses the stables hold. Only the works standing in the timeline’s year count, finished and not destroyed; without the timeline, all works as built; arsenals hold 0.3 t of powder and shot to the m².