If they were a more modern army, yes. The undisciplined yucks that BM soldiers are? No. Remember that the difference between the people mobbing and the soldiers is that the soldiers have been handed a weapon and some armor and told to go fight.
World War II is irrelevant. This is the middle ages we're talking about. Professional armies by and large do not exist (and if they do, they're mercenary bands who are notoriously fickle).
BM soldiers tend to vary greatly and can represent just about any style of soldier seen from antiquity to the early renaissance. The peasant with a weapon and armor you describe would be a BM unit with a training of 10, which is really really crappy. As far as I'm concerned if a unit in BM is rated as having 80% training they're as skilled as a typical greek Hoplite or a Roman legionnaire. The BM world has always been more representative of advanced cultures and empires which would have had a well trained standing army.
Furthermore, think of the actual size of a region. A few units standing by in case of a riot means a.) they're not participating in takeover actions b.) they will receive word from the village your men are visiting on the other side of the region in time to come in and crush a riot before your men are overwhelmed.
In game terms the units standing by would be those who have already used up their time pool on a takeover action. Remember the time pool is never the same number of hours as there are in an actual day.
Takeover forces in cities and towns would likely set up the local inn as their base of operations so in addition they'd have a place to retreat to and hold up in. A mob getting pincushion by arrows fired from the rooftops is going to thin out pretty quickly.
If they've been starving that badly for that long the region has long since been depopulated, and then by feeding them you endanger them. They will eat what they're used to, unaware that their stomachs have shrank and their bodies have adapted to less food. Thus overeating, becoming ill and likely dieing. Reference the scene in band of brothers where they discover the concentration camp.
If you do over feed them the ones that survive know they only did so because you fed them while their previous realm left them all to die. However people in the BM world should all have at least second hand knowledge of starvation and know not to give them too much too fast.
The peasant mobs stopping battles yes. Peasant mobs stopping looting, no. Talk to Tim about that one.
The move is for peasant mobs to be more substantial so it's less absurd that they would stop looting. It's already happening in Dwilight. We now tend to see mobs with 800 peasants or so rather then 25.
Swords tend to be poor choices of weapons in a mob situation. Several peasants jump on one man, and he stabs the first (assuming he actually has a sword, which most soldiers of the time period would not have. Swords are a weapon for nobility or highly trained troops, usually mercenaries.) man. Uh-oh. The thing about stabbing and slashing is blades get stuck. Trying to pry your sword out of a man while several more are attacking you is difficult if not impossible to do before you are on the ground.
That's why you'd want a shield, a short sword and a dagger as a back up. Which in BM you can have. Even if you're stuck with long swords form a circle with the rest of the unit and you can withstand quite a few peasants. I wouldn't expect an average unit to fall to any less then twice their number of peasants.
We're not talking about a region wide revolt against an entire army, which you keep trying to insist. The entire army is not going to be effective in taking over the region if they stay together. When you go out to perform a TO action, you might run into other independent units, but for the most part you're undertaking an action alone. A mob of sufficient size will almost always overrun an individual unit in the midst of handing out food to the local population.
Did you say "sufficient size" because that's what I've been saying this whole time. It needs to be a big enough mob. There wont always be a big enough mob. Its not as if every village in BM or even every City is going to have the population density of time square.
Think about this for a second: everyone from your town is starving to death. Everyone you've grown up with, love and known your whole life is starving to death. All of a sudden, these foreigners come in with food. They hand out a piece of stale bread and some jerky, and return to camp and eat their fill. You're dying. Your wife is dying. Your son is dying. Your neighbors whom you've known your whole life are dying. You married their daughter, because you're a peasant and don't travel. Who are you going to kill for food? Those twenty men that just walked through your town? Or your neighbors? This is why insurgencies work so well. Its really, really hard to get people to turn on their own, especially when there is a foreign entity within in striking distance. What do I know though, I've only worked counter insurgency/counter terrorism for the better half of a decade.
First off in that scenario I'd probably suggest we all surrender in hopes of getting more food. Only if the soldiers didn't deliver would I consider attacking and trying to steal their remaining rations.
Second you've completely changed the scenario. We weren't talking about an insurgency we were talking about a freak food riot. I already said an organized insurgency was another matter which the game represents differently. In a freak food riot in a city or large town the guy next to you isn't what you'd call a neighbor, they're some stranger. It's either a stranger with a weapon or a stranger without one. This is assuming a freak food riot does break out and reach an extreme level of violence which is not a guarantee especially if you're careful how you give out the food.
Third Even if this were a matter of counter insurgency I don't think modern day experience is really applicable. For much of history counter insurgency meant slaughtering an entire village and piling up their skulls so the other villages surrendered outright. The Mongols were particularly good at this. That actually is an important element to this whole discussion. When a BM army marches into a town the villagers should be wondering if they're about to be slaughtered left and right. If the soldiers then give them food their first thought isn't likely to be "lets kill them for more food" it should be "thank the gods they're not raping and murdering us".
Now I'm sure you'll respond with another "but if they all band together" scenario, but I refer you again to the Mongols. Lots of people "all banded together" against the Mongols and they were slaughtered to the last man, then the last woman and child, then all their animals for good measure, then the buildings burnt to the ground and the fields sown with salt. The story of the peasant band driving off the wicked invaders is a celebrated one but it's the exception not the rule.
Most population centers are going to hold more people in them than a unit commanded by a noble. By population center, I do not mean the whole region. People in the middle ages do not live spread out willy nilly. They cluster for protection from brigands. Peasant farmers have all kinds of impromptu weapons as well (because plenty of weapons from the time period started out as farming equipment) flails, bows, and scythes.
The isolated population centers supports my point. Your army can go one village at a time, move in, pacify the populace and set up the new administration. Thus they avoid being outnumbered and if they're bribing people with food they avoid having too little to go around.
Having gone into rural regions where people are starving, sick, don't have clean drinking water I can tell you its a bad goddamn idea.
I'm pretty sure if the outcome you described at the start of this discussion was the norm there'd be much greater turnover for Red Cross workers and members of the Peace Corps.
A rioting populace is scary, also vastly different than a bunch of starving prisoners contained in a prison camp where the guards have fences between them and the prisoners. Body armor and automatic weapons help, but when a population grows desperate enough, they will turn on you. If you do whatever you're going to do and leave, you'll be fine. But if they think you have food on you... Its an entirely different ball game. Even well disciplined, modernly equipped soldiers will fall to a mob with enough truly desperate people in it.
Once again the scenario relies on a mob with a Goldilocks level of desperation, irrationality, and population size.
Do you remember when that jackass in Florida burned a Koran in 2010-11 (I don't recall the month, that year blurred together for me)? In Afghanistan the people went into a frenzy, protesting and rioting. They overran a UN compound in Kabul that was well guarded with armored vehicles, trained soldiers, automatic weapons, etc, etc and slaughtered everyone inside save for one person who spoke Pashtu and convinced the people that she was a muslim so they spared her. They beheaded each and every single person there. A local population will always behave differently than concentration camp prisoners, do to simple psychology. I could go in depth, but it should be glaringly obvious.
This anecdote is completely removed from the point on several levels.
Are you talking about this incident
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42376051/#.UnnPCCQTGfYUnless I'm reading this wrong it was a total of seven people killed, only four of whom were armed, by a crowd of hundreds which were likely organized and incited to riot by insurgents.
