Domain Rules

[Username17]

Military holdings.

At the most obvious level, a military holding makes the area it is in harder to conquer. The fort has to be overcome before the region can be defeated. But players aren't likely to care all that much about that - while I could certainly imagine situations where holding out against a siege long enough for reinforcements to arrive would be a story, most D&D adventures are going to have the player characters on offense.

The player characters are going to want to invest in military holdings because it lets them build a shinier army. D&D troops go up to eleven with griffin riders and shit, but even then there aren't going to be enough distinct gradations of meaningfully different soldiers to justify the number of levels of castle you might conceivably want.

That is to say that within the context of a normal game you'd expect players to potentially want to fortify up from Level 0 to Level 10. But you wouldn't expect there to actually be 11 distinct levels of purchaseable troops.

The basic polity of recognizably Western European Humans is going to have Militia (either with spears or slings) which can be scrounged up with Koku alone at level 0 and by the time you get to level 10 you'd have picked up:

• Medium Infantry
• Heavy Infantry
• Crossbowmen
• Light Cavalry
• Heavy Cavalry
• Knights
• Cannons
• Hippogryph Riders
• Giants

And yes, technically that's a total of 11 troop types. But it would be clearly absurd to need to build a fort before you cold choose to give slings to your bullshit militia, just as it would be super weird if you didn't get access to ring mail and crossbows at the same time.

What that means is that the troop types can jolly well come 2 or 3 or 4 at a single level of fortification, leaving us with a fair number of 'empty levels' when it comes to unlocking troop types. The military holding therefore needs a numerical thing to do at each level regardless of whether the local Polities unlock relevant troops at that point of development.

My inclination would be for that to be recruitment rate and maximum standing army size. That seems like a reasonable thing for players to want to spend gold pieces to build up for their Domain.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

When some levels of economic development exceed the military, you probably have problems with banditry and such. Ie, if you have no military and invest entirely in resources that create extra gold your domain will be rich - that could potentially break domain management. But if your economic development is much higher than your law and order score, you probably lose the benefit of that extra gold production (or karma, or whatever). It doesn't have to be just military, but I would expect military to directly impact law & order.

[Username17]

The idea that you should need a certain amount of military and law enforcement to control a larger area is to my mind not particularly controversial. The way to actually model that is a lot more so.

One issue is that what you'd want to attract bandits and invaders with is not development level but income level. A higher population makes for a higher income over and above what having the next level of development would do. And if you have any weird shit like silver mines that present a fixed income, those wouldn't have much to do with the development level.

In any case, I've been hacking at it from a number of directions and I don't think we need a separate "administration" or "law" holding. Court houses can simply be subsumed into the Urban Development and Culture buildings.

You need to build Culture holdings to make culture. At its base, the production of culture happens four times a year and is tied to gross population (not merely urban or rural). As such, the base numbers on the culture buildings can look exactly the same as the numbers on the temples - you just get Culture instead of Karma. Festival actions would exist to gain or spend Culture just like they do for Karma. Since the core rough exchange rate is 1 Gold == 1 Karma == 1 Culture == 1 Koku, the basic festival exchange of spending gold or food to embiggen your festival and gain more culture would be reasonably self explanatory.

The main thing you o with culture is to absorb territory and add population. You can also pass resolutions to integrate Polities into your domain, increase Manpower ratios or get people to worship the pantheon you want them to. Passing resolutions has a cost proportionate to your population, so to a first approximation the number of festivals it takes to absorb the Bullywugs does not change when populations do. You get and spend more.

This does mean that players are encouraged to spend their Culture now and then expand their holdings rather than saving their Culture up forever to get big prizes that won't come before the campaign ends. But I regard that as a good thing. Negative real interest on Culture savings encourages spending.

-Username17

[Username17]

Culture might be better off getting called "Fame" or "Renown" or something. Because like Gold, it can be a thing you acquire in adventures. Slay the dragon? Get some Renown. Rescue the princess? Get some Renown. And so on.

This means that when the players are ready to settle down and carve a Domain out of the wilderness, they'll have a reserve of Renown to buy control over their starting hexes and population. It also means that players are incentivized to "start" their domain early when they first conquer an Orc village or whatever, because their quest-based Renown will count for more when they trying to integrate Orcs and Elves into a society. Bottom text.

This in turn allows players to ease into it, where they can start with a Domain that's just a few hexes and has a couple hundred households in it. Players can get some Renown early in the campaign and get themselves a keep on the borderlands pretty early. The standard 60 household village described in the old monster manuals has one half of one percent of the population of Menzoberranzan, and accordingly you can annex it with one two-hundredth of the Renown. In short, if at the end of pretty much any adventure if the players say "Can we set up shop here?" the answer is going to be "Yes." If they want to move in rather than butting the vampire baron's manor to the torch or smashing the support columns of the temple of Orcus, that is an option.

But if you don't go on adventures and slay dragons and whatever, you have a festival four times per year and that generates Renown. You can use it to slowly annex nearby wilderness hexes, incorporate unruly Polities, or invite settlers.

-Username17

[Dean]

I think what you want there is “Reputation”. So killing a dragon can gain you reputation but so can being a city with great philosophers and artists. It mixes the idea of being known at all with being known for good things.

[Username17]

I think what you want there is “Reputation”. So killing a dragon can gain you reputation but so can being a city with great philosophers and artists. It mixes the idea of being known at all with being known for good things.

I do appreciate the fact that Reputation has a natural 3 letter abbreviation "Rep."

-Username17

[merxa]

The idea that you should need a certain amount of military and law enforcement to control a larger area is to my mind not particularly controversial. The way to actually model that is a lot more so.

One issue is that what you'd want to attract bandits and invaders with is not development level but income level. A higher population makes for a higher income over and above what having the next level of development would do. And if you have any weird shit like silver mines that present a fixed income, those wouldn't have much to do with the development level.

In any case, I've been hacking at it from a number of directions and I don't think we need a separate "administration" or "law" holding. Court houses can simply be subsumed into the Urban Development and Culture buildings.

You need to build Culture holdings to make culture. At its base, the production of culture happens four times a year and is tied to gross population (not merely urban or rural). As such, the base numbers on the culture buildings can look exactly the same as the numbers on the temples - you just get Culture instead of Karma. Festival actions would exist to gain or spend Culture just like they do for Karma. Since the core rough exchange rate is 1 Gold == 1 Karma == 1 Culture == 1 Koku, the basic festival exchange of spending gold or food to embiggen your festival and gain more culture would be reasonably self explanatory.

The main thing you o with culture is to absorb territory and add population. You can also pass resolutions to integrate Polities into your domain, increase Manpower ratios or get people to worship the pantheon you want them to. Passing resolutions has a cost proportionate to your population, so to a first approximation the number of festivals it takes to absorb the Bullywugs does not change when populations do. You get and spend more.

This does mean that players are encouraged to spend their Culture now and then expand their holdings rather than saving their Culture up forever to get big prizes that won't come before the campaign ends. But I regard that as a good thing. Negative real interest on Culture savings encourages spending.

-Username17

I am curious on a number of fronts how you plan on handling some of the issues brought up here. I certainly don't know all the levers you plan on having, and tracking 14 months over 17 pages makes it difficult.

I would naively have a law score that when it goes negative turns to unrest, or something along those lines to determine the size and scope of banditry, black markets, ease of inciting riots and succession movements. There is also the question of corruption, and how far up and down it goes and whether the domain rulers benefit from it at all.

Ideally domain rules also provide fodder for PCs to visit another domain run by NPCs and interact with those rules as adventurers in some way.

Integrations of new cultures seems like it could have a few different karma spend categories from territorial incorporation to full cosmopolitan acceptance. It may be too difficult paperwork-wise for a ttrpg, but regions, cities, certain districts etc, could have unique modifiers that apply against an integration score, so a cosmopolitan city has a bonus that means certain fringe races are well represented while more homogeneous villages and farm hexes have a low integration score, tending towards various forms of bigotry.

Culture could also require a cultural upkeep, and as upkeep costs get too heavy to bear racial acceptance can plummet causing unrest to rise etc.

[Username17]

There is no limit in how deep you could go into the distribution and opinions of the various Polities. You could have Elves and Bullywugs have different levels of antipathy to urban expansion or Drow and Amazons be differently enthusiastic about performative piety by members of the ruling council. The goal however is to have things run as simply as possible, and the goal isn't to make a fantasy legislature simulator but a feudal 4X addition for a cooperative storytelling game about wizards and knights who fight dragons.

And with that in mind, the things we want to know about the Polities in your domain are:

• Are they literally in revolt?
• Do they produce Levies (Manpower)?
• Do they pay Taxes (Gold for Urban, Koku for Rural)?
• Do they observe the state pantheon (Karma)?

Now that could be put into a simple ordered list, where at Loyalty 0 they are still fighting you, at Loyalty 1 they don't pay taxes but can be hired to do stuff, at Loyalty 2 they pay taxes but don't show up to festivals, and at Loyalty 3 they go to your temples and give you Karma.

But I actually think it's valuable for Revolt levels and Pantheon to be separate. That you could annex a group of Halflings that would already be providing Karma at local festivals whether they were paying taxes or not. And I can see the advantage of having multiple levels of Unrest - especially so that you can spend Reputation to foment unrest in neighboring territories or respond to enemy factions doing that by counterspending.

I think that clamping down on revolutionary tendencies or integrating Polities to the point where they pay taxes should be a cost based on domain population. The Reputation cost of stamping out Demon worship seems like something that maybe shouldn't be? Like maybe it's just based on the population of the Polity in question somehow.

I'm not 100% sure how to do that, because honestly I'd rather not pie slice the rural population at all. That is, I'd like the Rural population to just be a number and the fact that there's a Bullywug Polity in the Domain be a separate set of information rather than have separate tax rates and population numbers for each polity. I mean, I understand wanting to be able to charge a Jizya tax on Gnomes, but I also think that the extra columns and addition steps that would add would not be worth it.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I know you can't eat gold, but I'm not sure why you need to specify that rural populations produce koku and urban populations produce gold. Outside of a situation where your kingdom is surrounded by hostiles, you can trade gold for food pretty easily.

Letting farmers generate gold and then deducting a certain amount to feed everyone probably gets you everything you need with more simplicity.

Ask Homer

[Whatever]

Would you want to have a general set of rules for "this could be a regular adventure but the players decided to delegate it"? Seems like smashing a bunch of demon temples would fit the bill there, in a way that tax collection would not.

[Username17]

I know you can't eat gold, but I'm not sure why you need to specify that rural populations produce koku and urban populations produce gold. Outside of a situation where your kingdom is surrounded by hostiles, you can trade gold for food pretty easily.

Letting farmers generate gold and then deducting a certain amount to feed everyone probably gets you everything you need with more simplicity.

The incomplete fungibility of gold and turnips is pretty important. The main issue is that higher end troops require both gold and food. This means that you can't just herd everyone into a city and invest in Urban Development, nor can you invest in Agricultural Development and decline to have urban centers. Or rather, you can do that but you'll be limited to militia that work for Koku if you do.

Would you want to have a general set of rules for "this could be a regular adventure but the players decided to delegate it"? Seems like smashing a bunch of demon temples would fit the bill there, in a way that tax collection would not.

I can actually see an adventure based around going to the Dwarves and shaking them down for money or troop levies. Indeed, I think I've played that adventure.

Ideally, most domain actions should be something that can be built into an adventure if the players want to zoom in on their characters or whatever.

-Username17

[ETortoise]

Yeah, one of the few things I liked about An Echo Resounding was that it was assumed that the party could always solve a problem or automatically succeed on a domain action by going on an adventure.

Do they produce Levies (Manpower)?

This may be my own personal hobbyhorse, but I’ve lately been interested in things like medieval muster rules and the Athenian social classes (hoplites, hippeis, etc.) Basically, that the troops that make up your levies/citizen-soldiers are based on both the total wealth and the distribution of wealth among your populace. For example, a domain with mostly yeoman farmers would get a lot of heavy infantry, while a domain where the farmers were serfs would provide an elite corps of knights and a pile of malnourished guys with pointy sticks. This could be tied into the slave/serf/tenant/free farmer status from earlier. That said, you’d then have to determine if your farmers had landlords, and how much money they were keeping. It might all be a little too much, especially since most players will probably just want to hire the units they want with gold.

[Dean]

That's kind of cool. Making your troop output determined by what society you choose. So "Democracy" gets you tons of hoplites and a "Slaves/Nobles" societal order gets you mostly shitty Helots but a small amount of spartan supersoldiers. Obviously you can then get griffins on top of either but deciding that the basic troop setup of your people is decided by your societal order is pretty cool. It's not necessary certainly but it would make people instantly care about the society style where they might have just hand waived it before.

[deaddmwalking]

The incomplete fungibility of gold and turnips is pretty important.

I'm not sure that you've made a case for this.

The main issue is that higher end troops require both gold and food. This means that you can't just herd everyone into a city and invest in Urban Development, nor can you invest in Agricultural Development and decline to have urban centers. Or rather, you can do that but you'll be limited to militia that work for Koku if you do.

If my domain is Gotham City, I don't have horses. If I want Griffins (who eat horses) I need horses. I'm going to have to import them (using gold). That's obviously a thing I can do - New York City and Chicago both have plenty of Steak restaurants but not a lot of livestock farms nestled among the skyscrapers.

If you have a bunch of rice farmers, you're not going to have Griffin Feed, either. You're going to have to trade it away.

The moment you're saying 'rice is interchangeable with beef' and 'gold is interchangeable with beef', you're also saying 'rice is interchangeable with beef'. There can be epicycles and exchange rates and commodity fluxuations, but ultimately you're interested in 'how many griffin riders can I have' and that question does care about how much food and how much you can pay in wages, but it doesn't REALLY matter if the wages are paid in 'free shit' or 'money' and it doesn't really matter if the food is 'gold that was traded for horses' or 'horses that were raised in the hinterlands.

In the D&D context, there's even less point to keeping them as distinct functions than there is in the real world. If an area is beset by famine, we know that money won't buy you food because people won't trade dollars for starving to death themselves. But if you can create food and water then gold is effectively perfectly transmutable to food.

[merxa]

In a functioning economy gold can be exchanged for goods and services, but even in our modern world it isn't infinite.

As demand rises immediately the supply costs rise, and then there's a delay as new supplies become available to meet raising demand, and again no good or device is infinite, eventually costs rise to where demand drops to zero.

And there's plenty of examples of non functioning economies, a city under seige, port blockade, closing of borders, famines, epidemics, monster activity shutting down the major copper mine etc etc etc.

Even magic isn't infinite, and it's expensive. Create food and water a lvl 3 spell, at 10xspell lvlxcaster lvl that's 150gp for enough feed for 15 people, 10gp a day to eat will backrupt 90% of the typical d&d population.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

A spellcaster might cost a lot to keep on hand, but what about a trap that casts Create Food & Water? You only need to buy it once and maybe hire a goon to guard it in exchange for free food.

Speaking of traps, I guess those would be a part of a domain's defenses. I'm not sure if city defenses besides military troops have been discussed yet, but I'm curious as to how I might go about defending my domain. Would defenses be granular enough to where I might care about putting a bunch of spike traps around my town to deter cavalry charges, or are we just operating with a singular Defense score? I'm concerned about defending an area without necessarily using a lot of troops. If I have control over a Bog hex and my only allies/subjects are Halflings, then I might want to field 100 halflings to cover the whole hex in traps and misdirect intruders with false paths and shit, to serve as a force multiplier or something.

Sorry if this seems like a total tangent.

[deaddmwalking]

In a functioning economy gold can be exchanged for goods and services, but even in our modern world it isn't infinite.

As demand rises immediately the supply costs rise, and then there's a delay as new supplies become available to meet raising demand, and again no good or device is infinite, eventually costs rise to where demand drops to zero.

It is not clear that supply and demand curves are being modeled.

And there's plenty of examples of non functioning economies, a city under seige, port blockade, closing of borders, famines, epidemics, monster activity shutting down the major copper mine etc etc etc.

That's also true, but koku generated in rural areas is just as meaningless as gold generated in the urban areas (and gold generated in the rural areas would be similarly useless) in those situations. It's really more apparent that those are situations where production is sabotaged, and it virtually doesn't matter what that production is.

Even magic isn't infinite, and it's expensive. Create food and water a lvl 3 spell, at 10xspell lvlxcaster lvl that's 150gp for enough feed for 15 people, 10gp a day to eat will backrupt 90% of the typical d&d population.

If you're able to command exclusive use of force, you don't have to pay market rates. If you're a cleric, saving the city in exchange for future favors to be called on in due course is probably worth more than the 'suggested tithe'. It's probably a good way to become the state religion if Wee-Jas is the only one that saved the polity. In D&D terms, casting create food and water costs nothing. The suggested price is 100% profit and has more to do with allocation of scarce resources (preparing that spell means NOT preparing this spell), but that doesn't mean as much when you KNOW what spells you'll need. D&D also doesn't worry about taxation - we don't know if that 150 GP is entirely used for Succubus-Attended-Demi-Planes or taxed at 33 1/3% by the state.

.....

We know that people are eating food to avoid starvation, and we're generally assuming that surplus food can be converted into value via trade. The reason we don't use bartering is that money is a very convenient medium to figure out how to exchange two chickens for a car. Even though it takes a long time to ramp up cow production, we have commodity exchanges so you can literally look up the gold value of cows.

Right now, beef is 216 cents per pound and gold is $1605.90 per troy ounce (or $51.80 per gram).

A pound of gold is 50 coins, so each coin is 9 grams. A troy ounce is 31 grams so is roughly equivalent to ~3.5 GP (3 GP 5 Silver). In any case, if we had 1 GP, it would be $466.20, which would buy us ~216 pounds of beef.

Which is a long way to say counting beef as gold is much easier than converting beef into gold (and vice versa). At virtually all levels of abstraction, it doesn't matter - as long as you have gold you can get beef - as long as you have extra beef, you can get gold.

Ultimately (and this is crazy) gold has value because people believe it has value. In domain management you don't really care about piles of gold - you care about GDP or some other theoretical value that represents the VALUE of everything. It doesn't matter if you trade chairs for swords and then a chair for two chicken; or chairs for gold and gold for swords, and then the person you bought the sword from turns around and trades gold for 2 chickens - the whole point of currency is to get to the point of abstraction. And if the Deep Gnomes don't value gold and instead exchange Amethyst crystals, the system STILL WORKS because you're only talking value and not actual piles of metal currency (or bags of rice). Nominally tying the currency to a fixed pile of metal does have value, but knowing that the system is measuring 'value' and that you can essentially swap things for other things of the same nominal value nearly indefinitely should be the key take away.


Edit - In the most basic terms, even a society that doesn't have currency creates value, whether that's walrus tusks or lumber. The system should be able to calculate the value even when we're dealing with ice or stone age cultures.

[merxa]

You live in a bubble of technobabble and comforts. I recommend reading some history.
~~

Anyway, in a 4x tabletop domain mini game, converting koku into gold seems totally fine, but I'd probably put a gold to koku conversion at a higher ratio, say 1koku to 1gp and 10gp to 1koku.

I am imagining access to certain troops would be contingent on access to certain hex tiles, or resources (rex..riding spiders requiring underdark nests and tamers)

If the 4 levers are koku, gold, karma (renown?), and manpower, I'm still curious on modeling certain conditions.

So there could always be events that just apply x effect, swarm of locusts eat some koku, bandits siphon off gold, religious cult remove manpower etc. I think I'd still want emergent system properties from domain decisions or player influences.

Will there be an upkeep cost for anything?

[Whipstitch]

That's also true, but koku generated in rural areas is just as meaningless as gold generated in the urban areas (and gold generated in the rural areas would be similarly useless) in those situations. It's really more apparent that those are situations where production is sabotaged, and it virtually doesn't matter what that production is.

My assumption was that in a minigame like this "wealth" at the domain level would be best understood as a catch-all term for production that doesn't readily lend itself to higher carrying capacity. You know, because in a fantasy setting it'd be nice to have tile regions where it makes sense that a given domain is sparsely populated but highly productive per citizen or vice versa, where "productive" is understood as producing bad asses and magical doodads.

[Username17]

Gold isn't dollars. There are no commodities markets. You can't buy steaks whenever you want because there aren't any grocery stores and no supply chains to support them. You can't use Gold to order food on Amazon or put your extra wheat up on eBay.

Koku isn't wealth that you can save. If your trees make plums, you have plums, but if you wait until next year you don't have twice as many plums because the old plums have since spoiled. Agricultural production is a flux. A budget. You can have a Koku surplus or a Koku deficit, but you can't have a Koku debt or a Koku reserve.

Gold is wealth that is in a form that can be left in or come from a vault. If you have Koku surplus, that just means you should have spent more. If you have a Koku deficit, people starve. If you have Gold surplus, it goes into the reserve. If you have a Gold Deficit, it comes out of the Reserve. If you run out of Reserve, there's no starvation - you simply can't pay any more no matter what obligations you think you have.

There are actions you can take to convert permanent Gold into transient Koku or vice versa, but those require certain events or infrastructure. It doesn't just happen.

In any case, military units that cost only Koku are functionally limitless in he rate you can convert Manpower to them. Gold requiring troops have a recruitment rate. But of course, leaving manpower unassigned and then springing them out as militia at the last minute isn't a killer app because you don't get anything for uneaten food. And avoiding wages by leaving knights unrecruited and then hiring them at the last minute is also not a killer app because knights have a maximum recruitment rate and you can't just pull all the knights you want out of your ass right before a war.

This may be my own personal hobbyhorse, but I’ve lately been interested in things like medieval muster rules and the Athenian social classes (hoplites, hippeis, etc.) Basically, that the troops that make up your levies/citizen-soldiers are based on both the total wealth and the distribution of wealth among your populace. For example, a domain with mostly yeoman farmers would get a lot of heavy infantry, while a domain where the farmers were serfs would provide an elite corps of knights and a pile of malnourished guys with pointy sticks. This could be tied into the slave/serf/tenant/free farmer status from earlier. That said, you’d then have to determine if your farmers had landlords, and how much money they were keeping. It might all be a little too much, especially since most players will probably just want to hire the units they want with gold.

I'm not sure there's any real room for that once you have various Polities. So you have Amazons and Derro and both of those can recruit Lamia out of their Karma pools, but they have very different troops that they can buy out of their gold pools.

Player characters are probably going to end up investing in the most elite possible military units they can get their hands on, because that is how they win (getting the most bang into the immediate vicinity of the player characters). And so the best way to get players to not end up with dumb monoculture armies is to give separate recruitment rates for different troop types. In short, you buy heavy infantry and heavy cavalry because you still have manpower, gold, and Koku but can't recruit any more heavy cavalry this month.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Koku isn't wealth that you can save.

I beg to differ.

There will come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt, but after them there will arise seven years of famine, and all the plenty will be forgotten in the land of Egypt. The famine will consume the land, and the plenty will be unknown in the land by reason of the famine that will follow, for it will be very severe....
Now therefore let Pharaoh select a discerning and wise man, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plentiful years. And let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to occur in the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine.”

That wasn't some miracle of God kind of preserving food. That was putting food in a granary.

Samurai were paid in Koku because food and money are interchangeable and grain can be stored. If you convert all of your rice farming to plum farming, you will create starvation. But you probably don't care whether you're growing plums or rice because you're not allocating food based on a well-balanced diet.

What you care about is whether your domain provides enough resources to feed everyone and how much you have left. But if you're producing enough of something else (like lumber) it's not crazy to assume that you can trade your surplus for the other things you need.

If you care about the division of food and (separately) wealth generated by painting pictures, it would make sense that you'd have to track other resources that are also limited (like quarries, and lumber mills).

For military units, rather than setting a 'procurement rate' which is obviously going to be a pain to track, you can achieve the same effect by setting a 'unit delay'. If you hire a whole bunch of knights today, you can't use them for a full year of domain turns. That represents training/etc. If you want knights for the war that starts today, you had to hire them a year ago.

[Username17]

For military units, rather than setting a 'procurement rate' which is obviously going to be a pain to track, you can achieve the same effect by setting a 'unit delay'

Oh ghost no! If you've ever played a hexes and chits game, like ever, you would definitely know that production queues are massively more of a pain in the ass than production rates. It's not even remotely close.

There are things that essentially need building times (such as castles), but even then it's a pain in the ass. And you aren't having multiple castles per region starting and finishing at different times. There's just one at a time. The very concept of having 17 Pegasus riders come online in 7 months, 8 Pegasus riders coming online in 8 months, and 14 more Pegasus riders coming online the month after that makes me want to kill myself. If you might want to pin a bunch of index cards to a series of drawn squares on the wall and repin all of them every turn to make things easier, your design is bad and you should feel bad.

No. You have resources, and there are limits to how many of them you can spend this turn, and that's it. You don't need to track how many turns it has been since you put in a purchase order on troops because that way lies actual madness. If you're doing World in Flames ship building, you are doing something fundamentally wrong.

What you care about is whether your domain provides enough resources to feed everyone and how much you have left.

No? I really don't understand why you're having problems with this. Granaries are just modeled as Rural Development, they increase your Koku output. You don't actually track grain rollover.

Also, you don't track where all the food goes. You check to see that there's enough food for the whole populace, but all the Koku that isn't taxed you don't have to track at all. Whatever food the farmers sell in the market or whatever simply doesn't matter. It's part of GNP, but it's not important because you're not a monetized economy at full employment. The Koku made in the domain is a cap on total population, the Koku that goes to the council as taxes is a cap on how much Manpower the government can mobilize into development or military projects.

And that's it. You don't have to track oranges being traded for coins at any point in that process. Which is good, because there isn't a mature monetized economy and the barter friction would be fucking awful to calculate. But we don't have to care, because we instead assume that people work and trade for food on their own time at some point during the year.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Tracking individual Pegasus riders makes me want to kill myself.

I see where the major disconnect is - I'd rather track units than individuals.

I'd imagine something like a Domain Turn that has phases:

1) Income Allocation
(get a pile of gold)

2) Maintenance Allocation
(spend gold on all the things that you built previously/units you recruited previously to keep them active. If you can't maintain something it goes to 'ruined' status, which means you can't benefit from it, but it costs less to repair than to replace.)

3) New Purchases
(Apply the remaining gold to acquire new units/buildings/upgrades). Most units would have a relatively expensive recruitment cost (buying armor and weapons) but a relatively low maintenance cost. Choosing to disband expensive to maintain units could end up costing you more if you have to recruit them again later)

Things like 'feeding the population' would just factor in as a maintenance expense. It doesn't really matter if the economy is based on barter or currency (though the suggestion of using GP implies currency) because you're assuming that people trade in their own time and if some peasants pay their taxes in turnips you apply that directly as food to your men-at-arms and some pay in coins and you apply that directly as pay. Either way and ultimately, you just want to know how much new stuff you can afford.

[merxa]

what part of 4x domain management isn't clear to you?

Yes, someone could try to design a 1x domain management system, all things are just gold pieces, but that sounds distinctly not to be the case here?
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I agree with Frank, at the table if someone says, 'I purchase 100 pegasus cavalry', as soon as you tell the player, 'sure, they will be ready in 3 domain rounds' you lose that player in your domain mini game.

[Username17]

Things like 'feeding the population' would just factor in as a maintenance expense.

What? No. Obviously not.

you aren't feeding the population. The subsistence farmers are feeding themselves and your tax revenues are some portion of the food they don't eat. You aren't playing "the civilization" in some nebulous fashion, you are playing the General or the Minister of Works or something - an actual person on the high council. You only have to track the food that actually goes through your hands. Koku only goes to you for you to directly hire people to do things.

If you mobilize Manpower to be a standing army or build a castle, you have to feed them. And the food you collect as taxes from the rural population needs to cover that. But the people who like work as blacksmiths and presumably trade nails and rakes for the food they eat aren't things you have to track at all. As long as sufficient food exists in the entire domain, everyone who isn't working for you to get it doesn't need their meals to appear on your spreadsheets in any form.

It's not just that taking the entirety of GDP and assigning end states for it in terms of literal and figurative consumption is a failure of simulation. It is a failure of simulation, because you aren't the geist of the macroeconomy, you're an actual person in the actual government. But it would also be a category error, because your spending would be part of GDP, because you are big G.

No. The way it works is that your income is the taxes you collect and your spending is the government spending. That's it. You don't have to calculate GDP. Since it's a medieval and perpetually depressed and under-capitalized economy with a lot of people living on the land, the fact that all spending is also income is not important. You're only tracking one end of the government's transactions.

-Username17