Ashgan

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

Heyitsjiwon said
3 seasons that last 4 months each. It's Waiting Season (Winter), Growing Season, and Harvest Season.

According to the document, it's actually four seasons. Waiting, Working, Growing, Harvest. You can check it out on the first page.

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

Out of curiosity, is it plausible if a kingdom were to have a female ruler instead of a male lord? Say the last lord only had a daughter and he passed away, and she somehow convinced the court to not let any of the greedy vassals claim the throne in her stead.

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

About armies; is there a good reason to have soldiers levied at the start of the game? We already went over that they don't farm and don't pay taxes, so is there any major disadvantage to having mostly token armies until you need them, and then levy en masse?

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

Fair enough; to be fair, I haven't gotten so far yet as to determine the exact size of my army and its corresponding upkeep costs, so it's possible I will agree with you once I get surprised by how tough the costs are. Either way I'm having a lot of fun just tossing numbers around for the moment.

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

Hell yeah. After my analysis of why food is pretty hard to have in surplus, I'd rather pay them in bullis, which are actually easier to get since nobody eats your money. ;P

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

All right, thanks Flooby. So those scale measures make a lot more sense; if you consider that 1 sq. mile is 640 acres, and the original estimation for a fiefdom was 200 acres, that's quite the difference to your statement of them being actually 250 sq. miles. These numbers work much better.

I'm not a historical expert, so maybe I'm just overestimating township sizes in the middle ages, but I'll bear that in mind, and be more wary of population numbers. I looked at some of the other sheets, and noticed a town of about 10.000 inhabitants, so that's where my original estimations for the size of a capital came from.

By the way, is it possible to buy crops from other actors? Also, is food production solely based on agriculture, or is "crops" merely a generalizing term for any kind of sustenance, which could include, say, fishing? With as many coasts as Lundland has, I would expect fishery to help out some lands with an otherwise poor soil.

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

5/1 means 5 bullies to buy the equipment in the first place, and the 1 is the upkeep cost you must pay... each season I suppose. Or annually. Either way it's a recurring cost. The costs listed are per weapon, or per man.

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

Oooookay, hang on guys. So I spent the last few hours doing some intense math wizardry, trying to understand the system, and I have come to the conclusion that it's... extremely difficult to have a positive crops production to consumption end result. Especially when you have a town where people live but do not produce, it becomes very problematic without commanding vast farmlands (which would ideally be maintained by robots). Now I want to believe that I am making some kind of mistake and that Flooby can enlighten me, but until then, here's my calculations and why they are problematic.

Crops Problem

Okay, first of all, let us assume a kingdom with 2 fiefdoms, defined as follows:

Fiefdoms
Exampleton; Fair
Population - 18.000 Inhabitants (9.000 countryside, 9.000 in Alicefield)
Resources - None
Infrastructure - Advanced
Lord's Demesne - Wooden Manor, No Wall
Harvest Output - 42.000 Crops per annum
Tax Income - 10.500b per annum
Point Cost - 6

Instancia; Fair
Population - 18.000 Inhabitants
Resources - None
Infrastructure - Advanced
Lord's Demesne - Wooden Manor, No Wall
Harvest Output - 83.400 Crops per annum
Tax Income - 19.500b per annum
Point Cost - 6

Towns
Alicefield; in Exampleton
Population - 9.000 Inhabitants
Wealth - Fair
Tax Income - 36.000b per annum
Point Cost - 21

So, we have two fair provinces, both costing relatively little since I ignored resources and manor options, as neither has an impact on crops production or consumption. We also have a reasonably expensive town producing a nice amount of bullis per annum (even though they are not too efficient, because they only produce ~1714b per annum per point cost, wheras a 1 point Sparse Resources investment yields 3000b per annum, as does a 1 point scrubland fiefdom with 3000 peasants...), meaning we have a total population of:

36.000 inhabitants, of which 9.000 are citizens.

Let's do the math on consumption, shall we?

36.000 inhabitants consume 36.000 crops per season, yes? Since consumption is seasonal, and not annual (this, in my opinion, is where the problem lies), we'll do the calculation on a seasonal basis. Instancia and Exampleton produce 125.400 crops per annum total. When totaled up against 36.000 eaters, that doesn't sound too bad, until you make the numbers seasonal, ergo divide by 4. That means 31.350 crops are produced per season.

31.350 Crops produced per season

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- 36.000 Eaters

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-4650 Crops Lack

As you can see, our population is, in fact, starving. Obviously, every peasant can feed himself; he needs to produce 4 crops per annum in order to feed only himself, and he produces 4.2 at worst on a scrubland, so the problem lies in the peasant to citizen ratio. Bear in mind that soldiers also do not produce food, and only make the problem worse; for convenience sake, I did not include them here. So in order to find out what the perfect ratio would be, I had to calculate how many citizens one peasant could feed, since he produces more than 4 crops per annum. Let's do the math for a fair fiefdom:

A peasant produces 4.6 crops per annum, meaning that's 0.6 crops he does not consume himself and is therefore in surplus. Now at first I thought "hey, that means he can feed 0.6 citizens! meaning that 5 peasants could feed 3 citizens!" But no, that calculation is in fact not correct, since, again, you must think in seasons. That means that 0.6 just gets divided by 4, and thus results in 0,15. One peasant on a fair land can feed 0.15 citizens, ergo 10 peasants can feed 1.5 citizens (and it takes at least 7 to sustain one). Again, bear in mind that when I say "citizens", that also counts soldiers since they function the same in this matter. So what this means is, in order to have a stable food economy, you need to take the sum of all your non-peasants, and add their number times 7 as peasants onto fair fields, in order to not starve. This ratio gets even more terrible on less fertile soil. One peasant on scrubland can feed 0,05 citizens, so it would take 20 peasants to feed one citizen or soldier.

If we stick with fair land ratios, and try to make my kingdom above work, let's assume I have no soldiers and only want to feed my 9000 inhabitants strong town. In order to do that, I will need 63000 peasants working on fair lands at all times. We would receive the following table:

72.450 Crops produced per season

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- 72.000 Eaters

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+450 Crops Surplus

As you can see, this works. However, that's a lot of peasants, it's actually 3.5 full fair fiefdoms (like Instancia), not counting the 600 crops bonus you get from advanced infrastructure (which, since you'd need 4 fiefdoms, would result in 2400 extra crops I guess). This leaves just barely enough surplus to laboriously build up a stock, that will probably be gone in about 1 or 2 seasons as soon as you raise an army or hire hungry mercenaries.

Now, at the end of it all, my question is: Am I making a mistake here? Has anyone else noticed this? Is this how it is supposed to be? If yes, are towns really worth it? As I pointed out earlier in brackets, towns aren't even very point efficient when it comes to producing bullis through taxes. Granted, I have not accounted for trade tariffs as far as income goes, as I haven't spent time with that yet, but I can only hope that the benefits outweigh having to support a single town with about 2 to 4 fiefdoms worth of peasants. Even then, I cannot see how anyone can sustain a war for more than a season or two without forcing peasants or soldiers to not eat anymore.

If you read all of that, thank you very much! I'd like to say that I hope I didn't come across as negative, or hostile, or any of that. It's just an observation of mine, and as someone who loves game design probably as much as the OP, I feel it's something that should be brought to light. Please let me know what you think.

While at the math... before I though about food, I quickly considered the whole scale thing I talked about earlier. I came to some similarly disturbing results, but as Heyitsjiwon said, he wasn't sure on the 200 acre measure. I'll quickly elaborate my points; trust me, it's less expansive than the whole exposition on food just now.

So a province is 200 acres, right? I looked up an acre and it's uh, roughly 0.004 square km, or 0.0015 square miles for you Americans. That's not terribly much, all things considered. So I overlayed a map of france over Lundland and essentially translated the scale of that map 1:1 onto Lundland's map. I adjusted the size of the scale a little, making it slightly smaller. In order to better demonstrate my point, here's the map:

Lundland Scale

The map should pretty much demonstrate why 200 acres feels a little small. An acre is essentially a square of 70x70 meters, less even than that, and a kilometers is 1000 meter, long. 200 of them would then be, if we try to keep the perfect square shape makes for a side length of about 14 acres worth, ergo 980 meters, which feels totally wrong, and I am awful at calculating surfaces apparently. Still, try to imagine a square kilometer on the map, using the scale I added... you'd hardly see it, and you could fit quit multiple fiefdoms into that, apparently. This feels really wrong on my part, but I can't really justify the numbers otherwise, without significantly reducing the scale of Lundland (which is said to be even larger than France). In light of this, either 200 acres cannot be right, or (and this is much more likely), I have no idea how to do math with surfaces and acres.

Thanks again!

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

Cool, that helps a lot for starters. Regardless of how correct that number is, it's a good mean value to work with, and if I overlayed a map of france over the map we have, it would be a lot easier to figure out realistic kingdom sizes. Thanks ^o^

To Lund ap Lunds [ Early Middle Ages NRP | IntChk and Sign-Ups ]

Thanks for the answers so far! About kingdom sizes, what you say makes sense, but it's all very vague in the rules as far as I understand it. The size a fiefdom covers isn't really detailed, and neither is how the number and size thereof corresponds to your size on the actual map. Like I could circle a huge swathe of land, but only divide it into like 3 or so fiefdoms, or in turn, I could claim that tiny island in the north and have about 20 fiefdoms or so on it - and the fiefdoms should, in theory, operate with the same efficiency regardless of their span on the map. Sure, I'll try to employ common sense, as should anyone, but it's got me wondering a little on how to handle it, particularly since the scale of the map is also pretty vague (having a scale indicator in a corner would be helpful in that regard).

That's an interesting detail about the church being a splinter group. With then owning so much land and power, I imagine they are still kind of like a substitute for the vatican in this RP, and it's not far fetched to think that they would treat faiths that are entirely apart from their divine canon as pagan heathens.