Domain Rules

[Username17]

My intention on agricultural technology is to mostly ignore it. We aren't even checking whether farms are growing wheat, tomatoes, or apricots; I don't think getting into the minutiae of wheel plows and overshot mill wheels is really where the game wants to be. For the most part, vagaries of that sort are handled by Polities. Halfling farmers are +5 fertility in verdant hills and we don't have to explain what precisely they are doing to make that happen. Maybe it's because they've invented the grain cradle scythe, or maybe they are just more enthusiastic about barley. Elves have a higher farm cap in light woods and deep woods, and again we don't have to be especially specific about what the heck they are doing.

In addition, some polities can have special hex development options that are like "Level 4,but awesome.: But again, the precise reason for the agritech of an Elvish Moonbower doesn't need to be explained.

One thing I could see would be an administration requirement to do agricultural development. That you need a town hall before you can dam rivers and shit. That could kick in for Hex Development above 3. You do want purely rural communities to be able to do some amount of boot strapping.

In any case, developing a grassland hex that is filled with farms increases GDP by 5000 gp per month. Now at anything less than slave taxes, the farmers are going to take some share of that, and the merchants and specialists are taking in 2000 of it regardless. But we're still looking at the council getting some taste of 36000 gp per year, and the question is really how long we should expect for such things to pay themselves off. I'm envisioning it to be like two to five years to pay off the first level of investment and progressively more for the higher levels of development.

-Username17

[Dean]

If you wanted to it also costs you basically nothing game-mechanics wise to list some random ideas that people can identify Agriculture 3 upgrades with. So like

Agriculture Upgrade: Agriculture 3
Your Grasslands now produce 1000 per month from increases in your growing and harvesting technologies
Examples may include: Windmills, rice paddy's, complimentary crop rotation, magically infused seeds, irrigation aqueducts, etc

I agree they're not necessary but I could see how it would be valuable to people to get a visual for what upgrades mean and a little list of examples for some of them would probably help and be pretty low impact to add in.

[OgreBattle]

How do you deal with seasons affecting farmland, harvest?

[Username17]

How do you deal with seasons affecting farmland, harvest?

I intend to ignore it on the domain scale. There is a festival in the middle of each season, but we aren't keeping track of what is being grown in individual farms much less what their harvest seasons are (or in the case of dairy farming and the like, if they have harvest seasons).

When playing at the Harvest Moon scale, I think it's fair to get people to worry about harvest seasons and spoilage and stuff. But at the domain level having better granary storage is just one of the example Level 2 hex developments that Dean is talking about. Better storage is simply equivalent to producing more and the hex doesn't even distinguish.

Koku happen every month, despite the fact that gains are probably being harvested once or twice a year and getting stored while seasonal fruits and vegetables are coming online on different farms in different months. I don't think it makes sense to worry about incomes being larger or smaller in different seasons.

Now one thing that Birthright does is give you tax revenues once per season and give you actions to take every month. The nomenclature they used for that was a bit confusing, but I can dig it. Not having to recalculate your tax incomes every turn is something of a blessing. But I wouldn't have the winter taxes be inherently smaller than the autumn taxes, because that would be a pain in the ass to calculate at the table.

-Username17

[Username17]

So on hexes. I think that the tags you want are going to be what the polities you are looking to have care about. And so it's good to think both about what kinds of polities you'd like to have and also what kinds of terrain different games have made do with.

Dominions:

• Mountains
  Forests
  Farmlands
  Plains
  Water
  Deep Water

Heroes of Might and Magic:

• Dirt
  Grass
  Snow
  Sand
  Swamp
  Lava
  Rough
  Underground
  Water

Small World

• Grass
  Farmland
  Swamp
  Mountain
  Forest
  Water

Now personally, I don't think that there needs to be a difference between Grass and Farm as a hex type. The number of farms is a dynamic property of hexes and population, and any Grass hex can simply be farmed by settling farmers on it. I also think that you're going to want Cold and Hot tags because you're going to want Snow Elves and Fire Newts and shit.

Looking at it more, I think you want the basic Plains to have a Fertility of 20 and a Farm Max of 1000, and to have features that reduce the Farm Max. So let's say we had the following features:

• Forest
• Hills
• Mountains
• Bogs
• Frozen
• Scorched
• Desert
• River
• Water

Your standard Dagoba Swamp is both bogs and forest. I'm not sure if there's any point in having "arid" lands that are in-between deserts and plains. Rivers reduce the Farm max but increase fertility so they are very valuable.

-Username17

[Username17]

I believe that the number of polities has to be greater than the number of terrain types. Because you want polities that have an affinity for a terrain type, but you also want polities that use terrain normally and are special for some other reason. With 10 different terrains that can mixed and matched in some hexes, you could easily have 10 different polities that have some kind of terrain affinity for each one, plus a similar number that don't. And that leaves you a lot of room for expansion, and that's before we get in to palette swap races like how we could probably have good and evil Dwarves that are mostly the same but maybe unlock some different high end troops or some shit.

Let's think about Small World for the moment. There are 14 Races and 20 Special Powers in the basic game and many of them are related to the terrains and many of them are not. Further, you got the ones like "Swamp-" and "Humans" where they get a flat economic advantage in Swamps or Farmland; and you also got ones like "Mounted" and "Giant" where there's a benefit to combat related to Farmland or Mountains. And then of course you got stuff like Commando and Trolls that don't particularly give a shit about what terrain is in any particular region. The point being that having more than a dozen polities is not especially hard and even a minimalist playtest version would want quite a few.

The most basic terrain advantage is improved agriculture. Either increasing base fertility or farm max or both. I don't think this needs to happen with Rivers (because they are already an economic advantage) or Deserts (because even creatures that live in Deserts should live in big Deserts and not be high density farming communities). And I think it's OK for Dwarves to have bonuses for Hills and Mountains. Still, that implies a "farm bonus" race for the following terrains:

• Plains - Halflings
• Forests - Elves
• Bogs - Lizardfolk
• Hills & Mountains - Dwarves
• Hot - Fire Newts
• Cold - Frost Goblins

Water is a special case, because of course Merfolk can live there and farm at all, while non-Aquatic polities simply can't. But in any case, this means that there's plenty of room for polities that just don't have agriculture bonuses at all.

-Username17

[jt]

"Scorched" is volcanic evil lands?

I think you need some sort of "marginal plains" option(s?), like steppe and badlands, since those are where Mongol hordes and orcs live. And these are the bread and butter enemies in a kingdom building game.

I'd also recommend splitting water terrain up into a few types, because the ocean is huge and you don't want it to become homogeneous as soon as somebody tries to mix domain rules with their pirate campaign. Also because it's easy to imagine some future FrankTrollman-esque person ranting about how merfolk have exclusive access to 70% of the world's farmland (farm"land") and should've taken over the world by now. A nice thing about oceans is that you usually don't need them and you can completely placeholder it as "Various kinds of ocean tiles" until you actually do an ocean campaign. Though the land-neighboring ocean tiles, which are relevant to everyone, still might be better split up a bit. Pick different iconic ocean polities for sandy/rocky/coral beaches and then you don't default to an entire continent ringed with merfolk.

[OgreBattle]

Deep sea geysers are awesome: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/acti ... a-geysers/

Fantasy underwater nations built around them are cool


Most of the ocean is desert I hear: https://www.sciencealert.com/in-the-hea ... ives-in-it

[Username17]

I think the "Water Desert" tile can just be very common. The D&D declaration is that every Sahuagin city claims exclusive access to 50 miles of water in every direction and that thusly no Sahuagin settlement is less than 100 miles from another. If the majority of ocean hexes support 5 hunting families, that's fine.

Every Sahuaguin settlement in Greyhawk claims 169 hexes, but we are asked to consider a city of 10,000 Sahuaguin to be a big deal. That's a population density so low that you could feed the entire place if all of the hexes were ocean deserts with a family capacity of 5. Including the fact that you have a militarization of something stupid like 50% and the expected Koku consumption per person is like 1.5.

Now let's assume we go with the Greyhawk declaration that every Sahuagin domain claims exactly 169 hexes. We're still going to want some hexes that have more than a capacity of 5 and a fertility of 20. Firstly because the fact that the Sahuagin claim169 hexes doesn't mean they actually control 169 hexes. You might have some struck off for monsters or have some that are occupied by another domain that does not recognize Sahuagin districting. Secondly because obviously you are going to want some domains bigger than the 10,000 person domains described in Greyhawk. You're going to want underwater kingdoms that can make their presence known to the Pearl Empire and shit - and the Pearl Empire isn't going to wipe its ass with an opponent that can't field more than 4 digits of troops.

Fortunately, with 169 hexes in a typical aquatic domain, it doesn't take a lot of "kelp forests" and such to provide the kinds of food output you want for some proper Atlantis and R'lyeh action.

---

The temperature scales are just that. Hot areas have reduced food output unless you have a heat loving polity and cold areas have a reduced food output unless you have a cold loving polity. For the most part, Scorched and Frozen hexes can just be the kind of 5 family cap shit holes that nomads and hunter gatherers use. And there are Magma Children and Draconians and Bhuka and stuff that like to live in Scorched lands, but even their agriculture doesn't have to be super great. For the most part, we expect Draconian cities to be on the small side, and even the City of Brass has a very large area to extract food from.

Which brings to the next issue: marginal lands from which hordes of barbarians come from. Now Genghis Khan had a Mongolia of roughly twenty thousand hexes and presided over roughly half a million households. It works out to an average population cap of about 25 across Mongolia. That could be done with one hex of high intensity farmland for every 48 hexes of desert, but more likely this is to be done with vast spaces of hills, and moors, and light woods, and arid plains that have ag limits of 20 to 100 households.

As such, the Orcs don't need any special agriculture abilities at all. There simply are enough hexes of shitty marginalness for there to be enough Orcish swineherds, nut collectors, and orchard tenders to supply Orc armies that are however big you want. If the Orcs need any kind of polity ability it would be some sort of control spread ability where they can hold on to larger physical areas that don't have much development in them.

-Username17

[Username17]

The AD&D setup for "savage races" was that they lived in villages of 400-800 people that were highly militarized with a lot of hunting. This is actually pretty reasonable. That is about 160 households on the high end. If the village is harvesting from a 3 hex walk in every direction they have 37 hexes to draw upon. At a 2 hex walk they have 19 hexes to draw upon. And at a 1 hex walk they have 7 hexes to draw upon.

That's achievable with pretty marginal land. A 37 hex region could be ag capacity 5 and still cover things. A 19 hex region could be ag capacity 10 and still cover things. And even with just 7 hexes to farm the agricultural capacity of the average hex need only be 25.

This of course means that on the hex map the kinds of Orc encampments and Goblin warrens and such that are described by classic D&D works can appear essentially anywhere. They can't be right next to each other in the desert, but they can be in the middle of the desert or on a windswept fell or in a festering bog. Completely marginal pastureland with no improvements at all is actually totally sufficient for the kinds of random encounters with evil villages that you get in a random hex crawl.

But of course, you are going to want Orthancs and Mordors but also your Thays and Calimshans. Places where there are enough Orcs to have urban populations of Orcs, and that's going to take some actual farmland. But it doesn't need a lot of actual farmland. The biggest cities of Mordor or Thay can be fed with a dozen hexes of real farmland, and less than that if there's some actual civic improvements being made. Calimport and Orthanc need farms nearby, but they don't need to have a vast swathe of the map given over to feeding them.

Bullywugs. The Bullywugs need to live in bogs and their polity can only inhabit bogs. Large swamps like The Big Cypress of Florida are about 75 hexes, and most D&D swamps are going to be much smaller than that. I figure you want to have at least the possibility of maintaining a 100,000 person city off of 25 hexes of swamp given Bullywugs or Lizardfolk as the resident polity. That implies to me an ag limit of about 250 for those polities, which doesn't sound unreasonable at all.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Here's a neat article on "Iron Smelting in the Nomadic Empire of Xiongnu in Ancient Mongolia"

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/is ... l/-char/en

Article on ancient sites of Mongol farms: https://scfh.ru/en/papers/and-the-soul- ... id=3172984

So even the nomads have permanent settlements for metal work and grains

[Username17]

So even the nomads have permanent settlements for metal work and grains

This fits pretty well with the generic fantasy concept of nomads. Fantasy nomads trek around the desert and shit, but they also visit oases and trade camps that are permanently there. From the standpoint of the game, both the permanent village at the oasis and the desert wanderers who visit once per year are part of the same polity. The desert has a household limit per hex (which is probably 5), and the nomadic portion of the polity are expected to wander around enough hexes to cover their population. And the oasis has some much larger household limit and the settled portion of the polity lives in that hex and grows fruit and grain and such. The nomadic polities simply let you do both things, you don't need a separate polity to tend fig trees at the oasis.

Anyway, basic buildings. The arguments for reductionism and splitting are both very strong. It's easy to get lost in the weeds writing building types that no one cares about, but also too both AER and Birthright suffer noticeably from not having enough building types.

Military buildings. I don't think Military development and Fortification need to be made distinct. You want people to make castles anyway, and "soldiers come from castles" is a reasonable abstraction. I favor the "Fort" nomenclature.

Temples. The fact that it's a fantasy game and you can develop divine troops and such means that I think it makes sense to have Temples separate from libraries and theaters. A temple isn't a piece of flavor text for a cultural building, you actually get priests with real magic out of them.

Culture. That being said, you do want culture buildings like theaters and libraries and stuff. They create legitimacy and spread your rule over your domain. Culture level also unlocks Festival options.

Administration. Here's where things get ugly to me. I can see the argument for having separate mercantile upgrades and administration upgrades. I'm just genuinely unsure whether the Town Hall should be a different upgrade from the Guild Hall.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

How separate the town and guild hall are feels like a question of how much of a de-jure plutocracy your polity is. So if you were looking for things to simplify could assume that any administrative level simply comes with mercantile facilities regulated according to the economic model of the polity (or just is the mercantile facility if you're playing Carthage).

[Username17]

How separate the town and guild hall are feels like a question of how much of a de-jure plutocracy your polity is. So if you were looking for things to simplify could assume that any administrative level simply comes with mercantile facilities regulated according to the economic model of the polity (or just is the mercantile facility if you're playing Carthage).

The big issue is how the players are going to interact with them. It's trivial to imagine societies that are organized enough to dam rivers and build bridges but are economically primitive. And it's trivial to imagine societies that are anarchic hellscapes that can't organize a booze up in a brewery but have a lot of money floating around and rich and powerful guilds. But the question isn't whether such a fantasy society could exist, but whether players would plausibly make such things.

At its core, provincial administrative organization is the thing you use to allow you to do hex improvements and economic administrative organization is the thing that makes urban centers more productive. That isn't inherently a thing that has to be different, of course, you can just have the hexes all have an Admin cap, and some of the hexes are farmland and some of the hexes are mines and some of the hexes have frickin cities in them.

The big thing of course is that big cities are worth a lot more than hexes of farmland. The tax revenue of a full hex of grassland will be thousands of Koku, but a big city can make hundreds of thousands of gold. Developing a single urban hex could literally be worth more than developing every other hex in the domain. So there's obviously room for a Minister of Works to worry about regional improvements in the Bane Mires and a Harbormaster to worry about improving the economy of Bladereach.

The question then is whether that gives enough for the players to do, and whether that makes things too shitty for a Harbormaster in a borderlands domain whose 'urban centers' might literally not even exist.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I tend to think they should differ only at high-level, optional specializations.

At lower development levels, in most historical contexts, distinctions between public and private finance and administration don't really exist. So once you have a town hall (which is also a guild hall), maybe you have a city hall which is different from a bank.

I was going to write a longer post about corruption and finances in the Roman Republic but I'm having trouble finding what I remember reading about how it worked.

[Username17]

So I think it's probably best to think about what the players are going to want to build and what the players are going to be. The players are going to be 4-6 characters, which is basically failstate #1 of Birthright because in that game you can only have 3 different characters own holdings in a domain. But it is precisely that variance in number of players that means that you can't quite just hand out a basic holding type to each player and call it a day - the number of players might be more or less.

So your basic four person party is Fighter, Thief, Black Mage, White Mage. Now, it's not 1985, so the "White Mage" roll may very well be a Paladin, an Alchemist, a Bard, a Necromancer, or even a Warlord. The Fighter might be a Berserker, a Hero, or a Paladin - and that means Paladin could plausibly be on two different roles! But we can still say that it's probably not a stretch to imagine that a typical 4-character team is going to have two characters whose main shtick is stabbing fools and two characters whose main shtick is casting spells, and that both the sword and staff characters are going to try to differentiate from each other. And maybe that means that your team is Samurai, Scout, Druid, Illusionist - it's still diagrammable with four "roles" even though none of the original four character classes are used.

The magic users of the party are generally pretty easy to keep entertained. Even without access to a primary building like a Temple, they can go deep on Necromancy or Weather Control or some fucking thing. We don't need to have a "Wizard Tower" or something as a basic building because magic users have lots to do. And many of them are like plant mages and water mages and shit and could get down with the same kind of tasks that non-mages get up to by becoming gardeners or harbormasters or something.

Four our four person party we need there to be two things for a character who isn't interested in magic to be doing. The existence of castles and armies makes the first one easy. Somebody gets to be the General, Marshal, Castellan, Warlord or whatever and fortify the lands and train troops. The other sword user is probably a Ranger or Assassin whose martial shtick takes a bit of a back seat to some utility skill set. But whether that utility skill set is wilderness lore or thief skills is anyone's fucking guess. That while every party is going to want some kind of General or its equivalent, the next character could plausibly want to do one of several different things. There can be land management, cultural improvement, economic stewardship, and covert actions.

That last one is most difficult, because the Mission Impossible style covert actions are mostly the players going into adventure mode and having the characters go deal with these issues personally. Still, there is a desire for characters to become the Hidden Hand or the Spymaster, or the Head of the (sigh) Thieves' Guild or whatever. Being the character who manages the Domain's spy agency is something that is a natural progression for many Rogues - as well as many Assassins, Shadowdancers, Rangers, Scouts, Ninjas, Monks, Illusionists, Bards, and Shadowcasters.

This of course goes back to our six person party, where it's entirely possible that no one wants an explicitly magic job and instead all six people want one of the slices of government. Which is fine, the game should be able to handle that. You got the General raising an army, the Jester spreading Culture, the Gardener improving the land, the Guildmaster improving the economy of the town, the Chaplain overseeing the Temple, and the Spymaster gathering information. And that all seems to fit pretty nicely into a 4X style "spend resources to increase resource accumulation rate" model except for the Spymaster, whose minigame of gathering information and/or dealing with foreign governments seems like it needs more thought and work.

-Username17

[Username17]

So a deeper dive on the Hidden Hand character's position is I think necessary. First of all, there are several ways a character can be in on part of it rather than all of it. Specifically let's consider the Judge, the Herald, and the Historian, because conceptually I think the three of them together do all the things the Spymaster does.

So first of all, there are like internal plots and bandits and uprisings and shit. Barons withhold taxes and try to usurp stuff. Internal Security actions combat those things, and council positions like Dungeonkeeper, Executioner, Inquisitor, Judge, Sheriff, and Spymaster have Internal Security actions they can take.

Second, there's domain lore to be dug up. The sites of ancient empires and battles, important bloodlines, historical territorial claims, lost mountain passes and so on and so on. The fantasy world is in many ways a post apocalyptic world, and there's a lot of stuff to be gained just by finding out the backstory of various hills and bridges. Doing research about your domain can uncover resources as well as influence various polities. The Calendar Keeper, Chamberlain, Dean, Historian, Scribe, and Spymaster can all investigate the domain and come up with truths or lies about dungeons and alliances and shit.

Third, there's diplomacy. There are neighboring domains that you can trade with or conquer, and there are also polities inside your domain that you can try to get on better terms. Diplomatic actions are therefore both internal and external and you could imagine how the Adviser, Ambassador, Consul, Herald, and Spymaster could have special actions to take.

That seems like enough on the plate to justify the existence of a Spymaster even if they don't have an explicit "Covert Holding" infrastructure to build.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

That said, the spymaster should have a covert holding to build, although you shouldn't need it in order to do any spying.

First, because having a spy agency full of clerk-assassins is cool, and second because everyone should get buildings if anyone does.

Likewise you can do wizarding without a tower but you should still want to build one.

A spymaster-type building might give you free agents attached to your province defense (commisars?), diplomatic missions, and so forth. It should ideally be staffed by your flunkies which means you apply your own leadership bonuses to whatever spies you muster out of the covert holding.

A numerical bonus on spying rolls is pretty boring, but letting you take a second spy action at -3 levels would be a reasonable ability, if a bit generic.

[Grek]

Covert buildings should be a thing you set up in other people's holdings.

[Thaluikhain]

Still, there is a desire for characters to become the Hidden Hand or the Spymaster, or the Head of the (sigh) Thieves' Guild or whatever.

The Thieves Guild is sorta defined as being a group of people who break the laws of the society, and if you are running the society you are the law. Doesn't that mean (unless you are doing something clever) that they are off-limits in practice to PCs?

[Username17]

First, because having a spy agency full of clerk-assassins is cool, and second because everyone should get buildings if anyone does.

Likewise you can do wizarding without a tower but you should still want to build one.

Imagine that there are two kinds of things: things that are like a Castle and things that are like a Throne Room.

The Castle as a whole is part of the region's fortification level, which in turn sets your ability to convert Manpower into actual military units. You can have ten levels of Fortification, so there's plenty of space to upgrade the Castle or make new Castles or whatever.

The Throne Room is a piece of equipment that can be placed in whatever infrastructure building you want (Fort, Temple, etc.) and it gives you a modest diplomacy bonus when receiving petitioners. It comes in just a few distinct levels - the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook suggests three, but of course I could imagine unlocking a fourth divine throneroom for epic play.

The question for any character's building is whether they are best modelled as a castle or as a throne room. That is, whether the relevant shtick is something you want to track ten levels of or if it's just something you want to have one to three levels of and maybe build in as a room into a castle.

So things like the Fantastic Stables that let you recruit Griffin Riders, you probably only have a couple of levels of that. The Master of the Stables really cares deeply about them of course, but you aren't going to be concerning yourself with ten levels of Fantastic Stables.

The Thieves Guild is sorta defined as being a group of people who break the laws of the society, and if you are running the society you are the law. Doesn't that mean (unless you are doing something clever) that they are off-limits in practice to PCs?

An unfortunate Gygaxian legacy is that the original name for the Rogue class was Thief. And it's so deeply ingrained into the DNA of fantasy RPGs that the Thieves' Guild is specifically called out and parodied in the Disc World books.

Like, Thieves' Guilds are dumb, right? They don't make any sense, to the point that Terry Pratchett simply explained how they were supposed to work and that was the joke. And it was a good enough joke that he kept retelling it in book after book even before he was dying of Alzheimer's and using book writing as therapy to hold on to his mind and life. The closest things to Thieves' Guilds that actually exist are criminal syndicates, which as you've noted are pretty much by definition the kinds of thing that the PCs in a Domain game should be fighting against.

Which is not to say that Rogues shouldn't get their own shadowy academy where they train secret agents. They totally should. But I think it should be more like The Red Room and less like Oliver Twist.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

The Thieves Guild is sorta defined as being a group of people who break the laws of the society, and if you are running the society you are the law. Doesn't that mean (unless you are doing something clever) that they are off-limits in practice to PCs?

The entire draw of being a rogue is that you get to do things that are clever.

Anyway, Thieves' Guilds are a cliche but many players would be at a loss to tell you what they actually do. Hell, some of the players that do have an answer will basically describe the Ankh-Morpork Thieves' Guild, which I must stress is literally a fucking joke. The more workable approach is to emphasize that the "Thieves' Guild" or whatever is less of a training ground and more of a protection racket and arbitration system. Which is to say, the Thieves' Guild basically handles black market contract "law." It allows criminals to make "sanctioned" deals with other criminals and if one party tries to pull a fast one then the Guild has Giuseppe come over and start breaking thumbs. Thus my unironic suggestion would be that the Thieves guild and Magistrate hats are basically the same thing, except the former gets assassins and the latter gets marshals.


Dammit, frank ninja'd the shit out of me.

[Grek]

As far as the original question goes, I see it as self-evident that the Justice buildings and the Commerce buildings are on a separate track, with Justice having specialties like Courthouse (applies your legitimacy as a bonus to unrest reduction), Tax Office (allows you to move the tax slider one step higher without penalty) and Personal Guard (allows you to ignore unrest penalties to Justice actions), while the Commerce buildings have specialties like Market (increases gold from urban population), Guildhall (increases bonuses from resources) and Harbour (allows you to develop and benefit from water hexes).

[Thaluikhain]

I always thought the Thieves Guild was just the "historic" sounding name for "whatever sole gang operates in this area".

[Username17]

During the 'conquest' portion of the game it is natural that characters would become leaders of outlaws in the woods or rings of thieves or assassins or something. Once they become the council, they'd need to stop that. The Merry Men stop being bandits and start being the militia. The Mockers stop being a fake business and start being a real business.

This process of 'going legit' can take many forms. But whether the criminals become the army, the law, or the brewers' guild, they do 'level up' into an officially legitimate enterprise when the player characters level up into running the domain.

As far as the original question goes, I see it as self-evident that the Justice buildings and the Commerce buildings are on a separate track, with Justice having specialties like Courthouse (applies your legitimacy as a bonus to unrest reduction), Tax Office (allows you to move the tax slider one step higher without penalty) and Personal Guard (allows you to ignore unrest penalties to Justice actions), while the Commerce buildings have specialties like Market (increases gold from urban population), Guildhall (increases bonuses from resources) and Harbour (allows you to develop and benefit from water hexes).

The question is whether there's enough for the Courthouse to do that it deserves to be a leveled building rather than a tagged building. I get that since 'more money' is more than 'less money' and yet less than 'even more money' that there's actually limitless numbers of commerce upgrades you could have. Having the commerce buildings scale to 10 (or beyond) is easy. Trivial even.

But an administration level doesn't necessarily have the same extensible and divisible benefit. I mean, you could have a 'stability' level that adds to things and is generated by courthouses and administration buildings. But you could plausibly also just have one or two levels of Courthouses and call it a day. Unlike the commerce building, Stability isn't a given for something that has standardized levels in the system. But gold income definitely is, so regardless of how many times you could upgrade the courthouse, the guildhouse can definitely be upgraded a bunch of times.

-Username17