SKM Development: The Land

ACKS, which is my leaping off point, assigned a given piece of land two set values, and one value intended to not be modified.

The first set value Land Value was representative of the bounty of the land, spices, trees, iron ore, wheat, etc, and generated a gold piece value as an approximation.

The second set value was Service, which was locked at 4gp per family (representative of around 5 people). Morale effects could increase or decrease this value.

The third value was tax, and was set at 2gp/fam. Increasing it caused morale problems, decreasing it gave morale benefits.  

Now, this system seems simple, but caused problems for me running ACKs as a Kingdom Management game for a few reasons.

Firstly, I had events occurring. Famines. Bandits. Windfalls. Stuff that modified one of the set values on a turn by turn basis. This necessitated that the players had the ability to modify those values per their various hexes and change what they earned in a month.

Secondly, the approximation of the land value made it difficult to represent an area that was ‘resource rich’ but damn near unlivable. The Martian surface for example might have a land value of 8 out of 9 because of its iron deposits, and so on paper you could live fine there, despite well, the fact you can’t grow jack shit in rust.

Everything being reduced to gold also meant that you basically had to pay your troops with the same thing as you might use on the (house ruled) research skills or so on. So when I was fiddling around and working on making my house rule Kingdom management system, I thought it might be a good idea to ditch the gold piece focus and instead focus on differentiating resources.

Tax is good. Tax is grabbable from a player mindset, so I kept that. I’ll need to rejigger the costs as I figure out costs for garrison, army, strongholds, upkeep and all of that fun stuff but..tax is good.

Land value I turned into ‘subsistence’ value to represent how well the land supports people living in it. I decided to make this value something along the lines of 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3 or so, to represent that 1 person working could generate enough food for 1, 2 or 3 people. Meaning that having a ‘bread basket’ hex was now possible. I also am playing with a ‘spoilage’ mechanic to keep you from having food supplies around for decades if you over produce (and to disincline players from going years without it). The idea of a ‘growth season’ however makes complete sense to me.

Service I eliminated. As the fun of a kingdom management game is managing the kingdom, I decided instead to let the players decide on how to divvy up their hex’s population, whether to put them into resource generation or subsistence.  

Which brings us to ‘resource.’ Resource generation was intended by me to be a commodity you could turn into other things. The idea being that Resource represents services as well as fancy stuff, and therefore you could turn say enough massages or shiny beads traded to passing travelers into food or gold, as you need it. So a resource rich area could try to make up for its lack of arable land through trading (represented by resource conversion into food) or become rich (by resource conversion into gold). I also like the idea that the stuff is marginally worthless until you do something with it. 

My major worry though is that conversion of a stockpile might add another confusing per-turn decision to the player. I’ve also debated just how expensive the resource conversion should be. 5 for 1? 100 for 1? Figuring out the specifics of economy will need to wait until I’ve shored up the costs for garrison, army, stronghold and so on.  I also considered using Resource to pay for things like stronghold and research, the idea that having piles of iron, stone and marble was ‘cheaper’ to build a stronghold out of then gold.

However, as a result of this, it can potentially be less ‘granular’ then the old gold mechanics were and have a nicer round number.

The idea of ‘expending’ the non-gold stuff to accomplish things definitely appeals to me.

Since the Land is key to this entire endeavor, we’ll be taking the monkey wrench to this stuff a lot.