Related topic: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/592231-wwi-population--conscription/

WW I-II style strategy with focus on industry, logistics and management of resources. Each turn represents 1 month, the game last for 5 years (so 60 turns total). At the end of the first year a first short war starts then there are three years of peace then the last longer war starts.

The flow of the game is like that:
1) first the player builds army like mad to survive the first war
2) then he would demobilize majority of forces to get more workers and minimise upkeep and start accumulating supplies, equipment, etc
3) then one big mobilization and the final war which ends the game

Population is mostly static, around 30% of population are possible recruits. Each month you get a small number of conscriptable and non conscriptable population. Non conscriptable can be only workers, conscriptable can be workers or soldiers.

How to make mobilisation, training and demobilisation?

Things to consider:
- the player would want to keep the army low most of the time
- but it would be nice to assure all conscriptable had some basic military training, so the pattern would be to draft a portion of conscriptable population, train them and release
- should reservists (those released from army) "forget" training over time?
- how to discourage the player from drafting everyone possible, training, then releasing and never bother with it again?
- should there be a refresher training? How, why? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresher_training
- is it desired to keep some portion of army always drafted (excluding defence purpose, I mean for training and overall army quality purpose - like officers probably should be permanently drafted to accumulate max experience since their upkeep is rather low compared to effect on the whole army and rarity)?
- anything else that should be taken into account?