SKM Development: The Turn

SKM’s development is nearing its end, but the last climb to the top isn’t going to be an easy one. It gets steeper, not milder, the higher this mountain goes. So, I decided to take some time to figure out what’s left.

I need..

• Initial “purchase” costs for troops.
• Stronghold component costs, upkeeps and AR/DR ratings.
• Detailed research trees.
• More mechanics...

When I say ‘mechanics’ I mean a revision of a post I made ages ago for the ACKs group called ‘what can you do in a turn.’

See, the idea was to balance out the month with what could be done, without giving a player choice paralysis by giving him too much to do.  Primarily, what you could do was:

• Resolve Events
• Go on Adventurer (this used your whole turn though)
• Send Explorers Out (using your garrison)
• Send surveyors out (costing money to get detail on hexes)
• Initiate building projects
• Survey the morale of a single hex
• Spend Money on Your Research
• Do agricultural investments.

Let’s table Events and Adventuring for now and go down the list in order of importance, so..

Alright, the primary, and most used turn option in the old system was ‘agricultural investment.’ This was ACK’s way of getting you more families. Blow 1k gold and get a 1d10 roll to add that many fams. Works well enough in ACKs, except in SKM kingdoms aren’t drowning in gold anymore. Since we have Tax, Resource and Subsistence now as income, only Tax actually generates gold (at about 2gp/fam) and based on my evil math, that’s barely enough to keep body and soul together for security requirements (again assuming our 100 fam territories), at least at the start. 

Blowing resource on it doesn’t seem sensible. Tossing around chairs, furs, and fancy metals doesn’t seem like the ideal way to lure more people in, which means our only real choice is subsistence. This makes non-mechanical sense as well since the idea is ‘that place has a lot of food.’ So instead of throwing 1k gp on the fire for a 1d10 roll, let’s go with letting the players buy themselves a 2d6 roll for 35 subsistence.  2d6 because the expenditure of 35 sub is a bit more then 1k gp, and because this way we don’t have the player tossing quite as many resources away and just ending up with ‘1. It also results in a more bell curve distribution and a less janky feast or famine (ha ha) response.

Since Subsistence isn’t something that the player wants to waste, this means that the “investment” for growth arises from actually, well, focusing on growth by dedicating more people to it as opposed to just tossing cash away. However, because I’m a jerk.. While the new families are attracted by food, they gravitate towards wealth. So new families generated through agricultural investment (buying them with 35 sub) end up in areas that have the highest resource value. So you don’t get to pick which hexes you’re trying to improve anymore, just your ‘realm’ as a whole.

In addition, ACKs used a relatively complex table for determining normal population growth. The smaller your realm was, the faster it grew, the larger, the slower, and so on.  Since this game is about managing populations and the like, we’ll do away with that and keep things simple, by again ripping off another part of ACK’s system. ACKs had you roll 1d10 for every 1000 people in your realm, and then another 1d10 for every 1000 people. One was your growth, one was your loss. I kind of like this mechanic, but I’m going to mess with it a bit. Instead of gaining 1-10 family across the entire realm (remember, unlike ACKs, we’ve got multiple hexes in a ‘realm’), I’m going to have the player roll a number of D6s according to the total number of hexes they have, for up and down. So 7 hexes is 7d6 growth and 7d6 decrease, and then let the player allocate loss and gain as they see fit. So at worst you lose 35 families, and at best you gain 35 families every turn.

Ok, that’s another bit of mechanics shored up.. I hope I’m not making horrible errors.