SKM Development: The Grit of the Grub

Most of our philosophical girders are in place, and that brings us to the tricky part. The math.

See, this is tricky because its inter-related.

The upkeep cost of a stronghold, the costs of hiring and replacing men, the discounts you might earn through research, the cost of that research, the exchange rates of Resource for Gold and for Subsistence, and how precisely to accomodate all of that on an easy to read and manipulate spreadsheet.

That's the dragon at the end of this proverbial dungeon. The spreadsheet.

Our goals, as stated are 1.) Choices matter and 2.) Simplicity..and so today, we start unpacking Subsistence.

Previously stated, each hex has a subsistence value. One point of subsistence represents one fed family (5 people). That's easy to accommodate. So, how do we determine a hex's subsistence value?

Most hexes should not have a 1 rating in subsistence. That would require the entire hex's population to be focused solely on food production just to feed the people in the hex, meaning that the player won't really have assets available for stuff like resource production. However, too high of a subsistence value would mean that there'd be little need to worry about your folks starving if you mis-dedicate resources. Therefore, I think the idea mean hex rating should be 2. This means that you can feed your hex with half of your workers dedicated to subsistence.

Sensible, no? Well, there's a hidden problem to the subsistence system. More people equals more food.  Simple sensibility rapidly goes crazy.  But we already figured out our maximum pop size in a hex (750), so that becomes our hard cap. You can never have more then 750 families's work worth of subsistence from a hex.

Still, since subsistence is a resource, it accrues, but we don't want people doing stuff like switching the entire kingdom to farmers, and then back again once the graineries are full. Agriculture is a 24-7, 12 month process, after all. The answer I thought for this was spoilage.

Let's assume we have 9 hexes, each with sub value of 2 and each with 100 people. This means we pump out  900 subsistence value in exchange for half our work force. They make just enough to survive. Nothing goes into the coffers however, so if we get a bad event like a famine, or burned fields, or crop blight, then well, we end up starving and losing fams and morale.

So lets assume our player decides to focus ENTIRELY on subsistence. That's 1800 subsistence. 900 of which passes into storage. That's an entire month stored up. Nice and simple, and too nice and simple. It'd tempt players, unwise ones admittedly, to switch on and off. A growing season approach of six months of subsistence might be a wise action for a player though since a 2 subsistence would fill in 6 months of stored stock if he put everyone on farm duty.

Food wastes away though, so, if we assume a 75% spoilage rate per month, the numbers get a little trickier. That would mean that our total-farmer dude would produce 1800 food, consume 900 and store 225 (the rest rotting away/fed to pigs/eaten by pests). We're being a jerk with the spoilage rate for multiple reasons. It makes the player want to invest in agriculture. It also incentivizes him for preparedness and constant-production (at least early on). We want hard choices to be a thing for the player. And 'can I feed my people' is an important thing. It also prevents him from accidentally growing too fast, attempting to found a settlement and then discovering that due to one error he can't feed it.

Still, how do we determine the value? Well that can be complicated. It's a DM side thing. Terrain should have a major effect on it (you can't really grow food in the mountains, not enough to feed al ot of people). There's a reason that tractors are associated with plains of grain, and not deserts, and so forth.

The issue is that a straight die roll will produce effects that are, to put things honestly, crazy. 3 and 4 sub values are outrageously good and 0.25, .5 or god help you 0s, are pretty terrible. 

And this, this here? This is a pandora's box.

We just stumbled onto a horrifying thing. We took down ACK's fence and found ourselves in a forest.

We need to figure out modifiers to resource and subsistence generation based on what kind of hex we're in.

I'm going to take some time to scream.