Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

[Grek]

All of that onyx is expensive, and your control over your wights is too fragile for an economy to survive even a normal rate of accidents and mishaps, let alone intentional sabotage from anti-undead activists (AKA paladins).

[maglag]

A Wight has 26 HP and is stronger, faster and wiser, so accidents that would kill normal workers will only scratch them, like meeting an angry cat. Skeletons have DR and cannot be defeated by cats at all. Neither undead worker need to breathe too which nullifies a lot of other dangerous hazards.

"Leader" wights should be kept safe of course and probably focused on just going around making more wights. And even if something goes wrong, there's always normal Control Undead magic to get them back under control.

As for any paladins terrorists, you can just wightify them to cover the losses. And then their families. And then their hometown. And then their country. A battle of attrition will only profit the side that can convert losses into gains. If the neighbours complain, you can always point out the paladins struck first and with no provocation, then threaten to cut off your super-cheap product exports.

And the 50 GP onyx is chump change when compared to the salary even a basic farmer would cost over their average lifetime, let alone multiple lifetimes.

[Grek]

Right, but you don't care about the peasant's lifetime, you just care about however long it takes you to finish extracting all of the gold economy resources you'll ever need from the economy. Which could well be a short enough time horizon that undead aren't worth it.

[maglag]

Should scale size to basic currency? Like, copper pieces will handle most trade at a village, silver in a town, gold in a city, platinum in a kingdom, etc.?

At the level you're caring about farm output, you can mostly concern yourself about Gold, because it's already aggregated across the year. Yes, for individual farmers they are trading a Copper Piece for about 500 calories of cooked food, but over the whole year that's about 1200 Copper Pieces per person - at which point the ledgers that the player characters care about might as well denominate that in gold. It's 12 Gold worth of inputs to feed a peasant for a year, 24 Gold worth of inputs to feed a specialist, and 36 Gold worth of inputs to feed a soldier. And yes, the actual experience of this is Copper pieces and horse shoes being exchanged for bowls of soup and crusty bread - but when you care about the year, you might as well aggregate it to Gold.

Now at the level of owning an entire Hex with a major holding and some farms in it goes, you're looking at revenues measured in the tens of thousands of Gold. An arable hex has about 8000 hectares under cultivation, which is about 800 farms if it's full and doesn't have any space filling ravines. That's almost fifty thousand gold worth of tax revenues even without oppressive taxation or magically enhanced crop fertility or special resources or anything. A lich king or an elder druid could be squeezing over a hundred grand per hex per year if they have fully cultivated regions. Obviously you're going to have administrative and patrol costs, but it rather underscores how severely large the piles of money get with respect to the costs of magic swords.

The original example from Frank was talking about a Lich King's yearly income, meaning a long enough time horizon.

Besides, why bother developing a complex gold economy system in the first place if it was going to go obsolete fast?

[Username17]

Necromancy is a complex issue. First of all, as has been noted the fundamental capabilities of skeletons and even ghouls are wildly inconsistent across different writeups. Skeletons by the rules have virtually no capabilities, having no intelligence and no skills, but they are also shown doing manual labor in examples so who knows? Ghouls on the flip side, have very good stats and by the rules are very competent, but there are examples that seem to think they are essentially mindless fast zombies who wouldn't even know what to do with a rake. Moving forward, you're going to have to make an executive decision on how competent undead actually are. I would submit that the goal would be to have zombie workers be a supplemental work force that was situationally useful but not economically mandatory or useless.

The basic D&D skeleton costs 50 Gold to make. Now a generic laborer makes about 3 Gold per month, so that Skeleton has paid itself off if you can get 17 "free" months of work out of it. That seems fairly achievable, but it also doesn't seem like it's exactly breaking the game in terms of investment power. Recall that this is a game where you can plausibly conquer a Barony in a day and pick up 7 hexes with their associated resources, farmland, and population - so having a magical ritual that pays off a year and a half later with a free peasant isn't beyond the pale.

Now there's another issue, which is the numbers involved. 3e D&D presents skeleton hordes that are a rounding error on the umber of peasants in a town. Even with large caster levels, you're still controlling a few dozen boneheads, and we don't even track towns until they are measured in the thousands. The rural population of plains is capped at 800 households, which is about 4000 peasants - your 40 "free" dudes are just 1% either way. On the flip side, Ghouls and Vampires, who are supposed to be the elites of the undead army and those fuckers have uncapped spawn powers that can make essentially uncontrollable chain letters with hundreds or thousands of undead badasses in them. Obviously that's wrong. When the actual authors of the edition get this brought to their attention they all agree it definitely doesn't work like that and just trail off as to their explanations.


Excuse me. You didn't answer my question, you just trailed off.

Anyway, clearly the way necromancy works is:

• Hero level Necromancers can have a small handful of skeletons, zombies, or bullshit ghosts and possibly a cohort who is an elite such a wraith, ghoul, or vampire.
• Bullshit undead such as skeletons or zombies do the work of peasant laborers. Elite undead could do specialist labor, but generally want to be paid comparably to what a dwarven smith or human scribe or whatever would cost, so whatever.
• Lord level Necromancers can maintain an army of bullshit undead and an elite squad of special undead. Their army is comparale to the size of their domain, so they need to claim resources from wastelands to increase the army size for whatever reason.

And then you have Necromancers who can grow their army by taking deserts and swamps the same way that Paladins can grow their army taking plains or Druids can grow their army taking forests. But regardless, the Necromancer is probably going to want to use their skeletons as their army, since the ability to not eat food or get paid is just worth 5 Koku if they are acting as militia and 3 Koku if they are acting as laborers. But if you don't have military needs at the moment for whatever reason, by all means have your zombies harvest sugar cane or saw logs.

-Username17

[mlangsdorf]

But a kingdom that spans 40,000 square miles still really cares where its forts and major roads, because that determines where you can quickly and easily move large masses of troops and defend against invasions.

I'll grant that you care what County the grand temple of Lolth is in. And you care where the major cities are. And you care which counties you can lose before your strategic access to black lotus is cut off. But I submit that if you are managing a kingdom then the exact placement of roads and towns and minor forts and shit can and should be abstracted.

My experience is that even on the kingdom scale, you're dealing with maybe a dozen cities, fifty or so large towns, and a couple of highways and major rivers that are still relevant to your plans. You may not need to know exactly down to a 6 mile hex where each town is, but you do need to know roughly where it is - down to at least the county level. Similarly with major roads.

The PCs in my fantasy Mass Combat game control 75+ of my game's zone of control hexes (which are 50 miles face to face) and a major issue in the game right now is that only avenues of attack for enemy forces is across a pair of heavily defended river crossings, and thus the enemy is having to put his assault plans on hold while he extends a road to the point where they can outflank the river defenses without starving.

The problem I have with hexes that are 80 kilometers across is that the distance from London to Windsor Castle is roughly half of that. If your hexes default to 5000 square kilometer things, then they are pretty much useless for actually placing things in relation to each other.

Right, but this is the 21st century, we play online and use MapTools, and MapTools has an option to go gridless which we use. Which means locations are tracked down to the mile (actually, 0.1 miles, but margin of error is greater than that) and the 50 mile hexes are used to represent the rough boundaries of counties/provinces and for quick eye-balling of strategic distances. it's easier to look at the map and see that Onigedu is about 3 hexes away from Fiona Ard Mara than it is to count 23 hexes to get the same answer of roughly 150 miles.

I think you're losing track of important details 1-2 levels of zoom too early.

I could certainly be persuaded to that effect.

But let's do a thought experiment: you own the county of Tookenshire, a primarily Halfling county that is mostly agrarian. At the hex level, it is a total of 40 hexes, 8 of which are wilderness and the other 32 are partially or fully cultivated. It has fifteen thousand farms in it. Are you honestly telling me that you think that the villages and small towns of the Tookenshire should be itemized when figuring out the tax revenues and investments of the county?

So that's the actual campaign map from the early stage of my game, when the PCs were launching a rebellion against their county and the neighboring counties. Scale is 8 miles to the hex for reasons I don't remember. Solid black circles are towns of around 3,000 people; small black circles with a white border are cities of 5,000 to 15,000 people, small black squares are large market villages of perhaps 800 people. Otern County in the center of the map is ~40 hexes, and yes, we did track control of the town of Flostrund and the major villages of Mayla, Nesna, Dons, and Lelund and we did the same for all four counties on the peninsula. That's only 20 entries in the spreadsheet - it's very manageable.

When the PCs conquered all of that map and had a baby kingdom, we zoomed out one level to the Hanist map:

and started only tracking control of major towns and fortifications at the county level and stop tracking minor strongholds and villages.

So far, we haven't zoomed out any farther than that. At least while you're conquering territory, county level abstraction is about as far as I feel comfortable abstracting.

[Username17]

Right, but this is the 21st century, we play online and use MapTools, and MapTools has an option to go gridless which we use. Which means locations are tracked down to the mile (actually, 0.1 miles, but margin of error is greater than that) and the 50 mile hexes are used to represent the rough boundaries of counties/provinces and for quick eye-balling of strategic distances.

That sounds completely useless. If you're gonna put pins in a map and handle everything with measuring tape like you were playing 19th century wargames, be my guest. That's a very reasonable thing to do. But if you're gonna carve things into hexes, those hexes should be the unit of movement. Because fucking obviously.

In a world where characters have daily magic reserves, you need to know where troops have marched or could march on a daily basis. A hex base that is substantially larger than the distance infantry can travel even on a forced march is simply without value. London and Winchester castle are just over a day's march apart, if your hexes are large enough that they are in the same hex as each other your hex grid does not impart information and you aren't actually using it for in-game function calls.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

A bit off-topic, but would using hexes by more historically accurate(ish) than measuring? Up until fairly recently, maps and distance measuring weren't terribly accurate. Would it be more accurate to move from "the vicinity of Castle X" (the hex with the castle in it) to "close to Port Y" (the hex with the port in it)?

[Ancient History]

All of that onyx is expensive, and your control over your wights is too fragile for an economy to survive even a normal rate of accidents and mishaps, let alone intentional sabotage from anti-undead activists (AKA paladins).

See, this is why blood magic is in vogue among druids. Blood is a renewable resource.

[mlangsdorf]

Frank, I don't give a shit if you want to 15750 hexes on your map of Texas and then collect them into 246 counties. Knock yourself out.

I am not theorycrafting here. I am sharing some of my experience from running a game something like what you propose. And my experience is that on the county and kingdom and empire scale, it makes sense to have a smaller number of very large super hexes for some purposes instead of a huge number of small hexes.

When we actually move armies and people around the map, we use a smaller hex size. Which we generate on the fly because computers in the 21st century. But for strategic planning and basic resource allocation, it is helpful if the large scale maps use large hexes.

[Eikre]

"The Wilderness" is also predicated on a civilization model where towns and farms and shit are things you aim for. Which is not, historically speaking, every civilization. The Mongols didn't need to know the dark arts of carrot farming, the Norse peoples did know the dark arts of carrot farming, but also were predicated on periodic periods of going viking and pillaging other communities. In the Roman era, a lot of Brittania, Gaul, and Germania was fairly un-cultivated - communities subsisted in larger part off of hunting game and gathering material from the forest than sowing crops or keeping herds.

Clearly, Paul Atreides should have the creditable option of founding his domain in the deep desert, where he underwrites the the the poor productivity of Barren Sand tiles or the Sietch mode of agriculture but also gets to raise superior Fremen troops and facilitate his personal Kwisatz Haderach training.

Raising a certain number of nomads (or whatever other group) from a tile instead of a multitude of shitty peasants is a resource allocation decision that can be incentivized with tile attributes. Steppes ought to carry a better potential nomads:peasants ratio, and for that matter a better nomads:sailors or nomads:cavepeople ratio, but Kublai Khan doesn't need to choose between securing those hexes and perpetuating a culture of Horselords.

Wilderness necessitates that population remain low but also that the individuals of that population be sufficiently hardcore, so if your primary interest in a territory is barbarian auxiliaries or rare local beasts, you might as well leave that place disorganized. In contrast, when people are given safety, most of them are content to join a multitude of absolutely unimpressive personages; this is a pretty good definition of "civil". People only do that on their own if absolutely everything else is equal, though. If you need to keep a sacred glade at the center of your empire to make druids, you can pay to secure the hex without clear-cutting the forest and fucking everything up. You still don't get to exploit it for farming, but you do have the privilege to assign park rangers instead of a constabulary. The place remains inhospitable to assholes whose highest aspirations are a daily beer and bowl movement, but the next-door capital can attain the "Civilized" quality and assume that Ents are not going to show up and knock over all their fucking towers.

[Username17]

I am not theorycrafting here. I am sharing some of my experience from running a game something like what you propose. And my experience is that on the county and kingdom and empire scale, it makes sense to have a smaller number of very large super hexes for some purposes instead of a huge number of small hexes.

When we actually move armies and people around the map, we use a smaller hex size. Which we generate on the fly because computers in the 21st century. But for strategic planning and basic resource allocation, it is helpful if the large scale maps use large hexes.

See, I can see the advantage of dealing with things on a larger scale, I just don't get what advantage there is to things being actual hexes at that point. Counties can just be weird shaped blobs, there's no reason to treat them as spherical cows. When you aren't marching soldiers around a county you don't actually care what shape it is, but that's not a good excuse to declare that it is hex shaped.

So Counties are generally going to be irregularly sized. And that's fine. They are weird shaped blobs on the map, and that makes the map more verisimilitudinous. Counties are actually weird shapes in the real world and it's fine for them to be weird shapes in the fantasy world. And when the player characters are marching soldiers around they can zoom in to 10 kilometer hexes, and when they are doing abstract administration or acting in another province entirely while stuff is going down in the county in question, you can just not have any hexes. Once you stop caring about where things are in relation to one day marches from each other you can also stop caring about the grid. The 80 kilometer hex doesn't add anything that just dropping the hex map altogether doesn't do better.

The Tookenshire can just be a number of plains hexes and a number of farms and a development level and a patrol level. It doesn't need a big blobby hex drawn around it, because the big blobby hex doesn't add anything. If you don't zoom in to the little hexes you're going to handwave that crossing the Tookenshire is going to take "a few days" and that answer is going to be exactly the same whether the Tookenshire has a big hex dedicated to it or not.

"The Wilderness" is also predicated on a civilization model where towns and farms and shit are things you aim for. Which is not, historically speaking, every civilization. The Mongols didn't need to know the dark arts of carrot farming, the Norse peoples did know the dark arts of carrot farming, but also were predicated on periodic periods of going viking and pillaging other communities. In the Roman era, a lot of Brittania, Gaul, and Germania was fairly un-cultivated - communities subsisted in larger part off of hunting game and gathering material from the forest than sowing crops or keeping herds.

Hunter gatherers have very low populations per hex Like 50-100 households per hex (though usually organized into small tribes that occupy a Barony). Nomads with herds and defined stopping places for fruit and shit do better, but the area they need to command is massive. It works out to about 150 households per hex and it doesn't work at all if there aren't multiple hexes to have winter and summer pasturing at the minimum. The Mongolian Plateau didn't spawn a titanic army because it had improbable population density, it spawned a titanic army because it's thirty eight thousand hexes. It could just have a low population density. It wasn't even remotely at capacity - at the start of Ghengis Khan's conquests the Mongols had only about 5.3 households per hex. And they weren't at maximum militarization, having about one warrior per two households. But of course 100,000 soldiers coming from a 3 million square kilometer area no one had heard of was completely capable of crushing the other armies of the day due to military technology and leadership superiority, not because of weight of numbers.

Now it's a fantasy setting. So obviously you have various tribes that have extremely generous populations for the size of the areas they are in. But if you read the old AD&D stuff, you get various Orc tribes that have about 200 households and a near full military mobilization with 2 warriors for every 5 person household. Such a military encampment could plausibly be supporting itself on forage controlling just a few hexes. That's not an unrealistic setup actually.

-Username17

[Dean]

Regarding hunter gathering in wilderness "upgrading" to farms: Hunter gathering is actually a more efficient food generation method per man-hour than farming. The advantage of farming is that its upper potential of food generation is much higher than hunter-gathering. So while hunter-gathering is a much more efficient way for a small population to gather food it's limited to the natural production of the land around you, where an agrarian society can keep tasking more and more people to be farmers with a much higher ceiling on maximum calorie production.

It's not necessary but you could represent that by making "The Wilderness" have a certain food production it makes with basically no effort. So transforming wilderness to villages or farmland is possible but only something you'd do if you have the population and resources to take advantage of the upper potential. This would jive nicely with small populations of elves just living in harmony with their forest while humans go all Fern Gully and chop down everything to make room for all the babies they won't stop having.

[Username17]

Hunter-Gatherer life is factually a lot less hours of work. You don't plough or sow or weed or hoe. You just harvest. But in order to make that work you need a very large amount of land.

The assumptions for a family farm here are that each household is working a 10 hectare farm, and that they are producing 25 Koku from it. That's actually ridiculously terrible by modern standards (10 Hectare in the United States produces about 160 Koku), but global cereal yields have risen tremendously quite recently. The World Bank currently averages world cereal yields at 4 tonnes per cultivated hectare per year, but sixty years ago it was less than a tonne and a half. So these projected base value are shitty, but they are reasonably realistic for medieval farming practices.

But even in that context, there's just no comparison. Estimates vary wildly for hunter gatherer types, but they tend to run 40-200 hectares per household. And that's not 40-200 hectares to produce a 20 Koku surplus that can be taxed and traded to towns for goods and services. That's subsistence. Hunter gatherers don't have towns.

But this all goes down to what we actually want: small settlements of barbarians. The Lizardfolk of the Swamp of the Wheel do not need land under cultivation, because 5 hexes of swampland can still support two to five hundred households with foraging, which in turn could support up to one thousand soldiers. That's actually plenty to patrol their swamp and send out regular raids at the Orc tribe from the marsh flats next door.

The real fantasy element is that some groups like Elves are going to jolly well have specialists and guilds and stuff without having farms as such. You still have villages with only a few hundred households like they were a Goblin tribe, but they just also have master smiths and shit because Elves.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

I assume weird Tippyverse shit is only allowed to be a reskin, I say as I imagine great cathedrals dedicated to worshipping the Create Food trap which has a required number of man hours per koku that compares unfavourably to actual farmland.

(Even if that's off the table as a normal output you can't stop me shoehorning it in as an artefact relic from three apocalypses ago which can't be replicated at the level of development the setting's actually at during the campaign )

EDIT: I keep forgetting that this place makes a sick face whenever I type my most used emote...

[Username17]

So the medieval period is almost defined by a two steps forward/two steps back development curve. While things continued to be invented and investment certainly occurred, there were a lot of times and places where the development curve pointed downwards. Processes of engineering, systems of farming, and societal organization methods simply got lost. Some under the torch of zealous religious vandals, but also just because the lack of social cohesion meant that lots of social, industrial, and agricultural technology simply did not pass successfully from one generation to the next.

That being said, players aren't going to want to do that. They are playing as the swords of civilization and they are bringing advancement. The player characters are starting with a land that has been broken up and allowed to lie fallow and be divided among squabbling tribes, but they intend to forge out of it a kingdom with rising standards of living and an increasingly well trained and equipped military.

Which is a perhaps longwinded way of saying that honestly the players are going to be investing in methods of increasing crop yield and supporting cities with populations well in excess of what could be achieved with the simply hunter-gatherer lifestyles of the peoples of the valley when they first arrived. And some of that is going to be using their own personal magics and some of that is going to be organizing the peasantry to do some fucking irrigation, and some of that is going to be digging up ancient relics of long forgotten empires and putting them to use.

The basic Koku yield of a basic farm is 25 Koku per 10 hectare farm. But by late in Lord level there's no particular reason that the player characters shouldn't be throwing around crop yields that are six times that. It's not impossible, modern society with its combine harvesters and chemical fertilizers does better still.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Well, elves could go full Fallen Empires and have fungus farms that generate more high-density protein per kilogram than wheat - and which would maybe help explain the Drow, because these farms could be predominantly underground and not dependent on sunlight - which would help explain how why Elves have relatively low population density but a relatively high degree of specialists for their work: their have a very efficient form of farming, but it doesn't scale up - it requires certain specific conditions to farm fungus (special soils, whatever) - and this is why you have High Elves that can build tree cities and Wild Elves who eat grubs and wrestle deer and the Sea Elves rely on fish and seals and shit.

(Totally random brainfart on that one, feel free to ignore.)

[nockermensch]

The easiest way to explain elves master artisans is Frank's write-up where they digest cellulose. Elven civilizations bypass the neolithic revolution and instead organize in Smurf villages where about every elf is a different flavor of artisan, artist or soldier, since food for them is just ubiquitous and whole villages can be sustained by a few dedicated hunter-gatherers.

Which actually leads to a criticism of the domain write-up so far: It doesn't seem fantastic enough to support a kitchen-sink like D&D. For starters, as shown, what happens if your population just picks their food of the ground and therefore doesn't need a large peasant base to support everybody else? What if koku is just irrelevant to the race's [lack of] biology?

[maglag]

For starters, as shown, what happens if your population just picks their food of the ground and therefore doesn't need a large peasant base to support everybody else? What if koku is just irrelevant to the race's [lack of] biology?

Since Frank confirmed even the Lich King needs kokus to stay in the game, seems like the answer is "fuck you, almost everybody has to eat, no undead/celulose eater country" regardless of previous material.

Which granted is probably the sanest and easiest way of explaining why the long-lived elves that don't need to eat haven't conquered everybody else. There's just too few of them for you to base your nation on them.

[Jason]

In a world where characters have daily magic reserves, you need to know where troops have marched or could march on a daily basis. A hex base that is substantially larger than the distance infantry can travel even on a forced march is simply without value.

Would it be entirely unreasonable to shift timeframes along with zoom level? Changing to weeks rather than days, for example? Would it be too much hassle to transform daily magic resources into weekly ones for such a purpose?

I can see the Appeal of larger scale and löarger timeframes, especially for Military campaigns, but I can also relte to your argument about daily resources (especially given that scrying is a major impactor on military strategy).
Maybe I am just stubborn, but I am not completely sold on the idea, yet, that this is an unsolvable Problem.- It might turn out to be too much effort, though.

On a more narrative Level, weeks rather than days would make for more interesting military movements on a map, in my opinion.

[Username17]

Which actually leads to a criticism of the domain write-up so far: It doesn't seem fantastic enough to support a kitchen-sink like D&D. For starters, as shown, what happens if your population just picks their food of the ground and therefore doesn't need a large peasant base to support everybody else?

If farmers are producing indigo or coffee because some portion of the population eats rocks or saw dust, that doesn't change the economy very much. Or rather, it doesn't change it very much at the level that players interact with.

The assumption is that the grain market clears. Each peasant laborer physically eats 1 Koku, but they get paid 3 Koku. And they trade the other 2 for clothing and rent and blowjobs from whores and whatever the fuck else it is that they need and want out of life that they can afford on the 2 gold per month they have left over after eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. This means that a lot of the produced agricultural products get shipped to some town or city where they are exchanged for metal coins, and then those metal coins flow back to the towns and cities to be exchanged for goods and services available there. From the standpoint of the player characters, it isn't actually important whether you are collecting taxes as carrots and then selling them to the city for coins or waiting for the peasants to sell their carrots in town and then collecting taxes as coin.

And it also isn't really that important if some amount of the agricultural land is producing cotton, spices, dyes, or whatever that is traded for coins because people want it for reasons other than giving them sufficient calories in their next meal to continue existing. As long as someone somewhere is making actual rice and butter sufficient to keep the towns from literally starving, the only thing you particularly care about your farms is the gold piece value of the goods they are producing.

So sure, a Bone Devil doesn't actually eat food, and thus his upkeep doesn't include actual corn or tomatoes and he can't be paid in those. But on the macro-economic scale you're dealing in GP values anyway, and the Bone Devil presumably still wants to be paid in something, so the underlying economic assumptions don't change very much.

Basically, the civilization in each hex has a number of key pieces of information:

• How many households there are.
• How much production there is per household.
• How much you can tax.
• How much you can levy.

So hunter gatherer groups have very little excess because they are subsistence hunting for the most part. The number of households is low and the taxable excess is small. But they also can be relatively highly militarized, with many "barbarian" groups putting up 2 warriors per household to the Levy.
Farmers have significantly more excess because they are farming. A typical farm has a single household and 25+ Koku of product. Typically they give up 5-10 Koku in taxes and have a maximum of 1 warrior per household.

So there's room for things to get different. Populations of Ogres, for example, aren't really something you give a shit about their tax levels for, and you're happy for them to live in the swamps and send you a couple of giant warriors for each Ogre household. Skeletons aren't organized into households at all and can just go directly into your army. But if you wanted them to go work the land you could do that, and they'd only need the very minimum of supplies to keep going. So you could set them to working the dirt and tax them 20 Koku from their basic farm. But these racial superpowers don't flip the board over, they just augment things slightly. You're still talking Households, Tax, and Levy regardless of what races you have and what they do. And racial modifiers are just going to change the taxes or the troops you get in your levies.

Would it be entirely unreasonable to shift timeframes along with zoom level?

Wages and construction take place over a month. Farming production happens on a yearly basis and training takes time, so taxes and levies might as well be tracked yearly. Major battles and conquests of baronies play out over a few days. Changing the time frame is absolutely necessary.

The real issue of course is to convince players to actually allow a month or a season or a year to pass. And I would suggest the easiest way to do that is to have a maximum amount of territory your domain can digest in a time period, thus causing players to be required to hunker down and let an administrative turn pass even if they do want to go play Alexander.

-Username17

[Blicero]

The real issue of course is to convince players to actually allow a month or a season or a year to pass. And I would suggest the easiest way to do that is to have a maximum amount of territory your domain can digest in a time period, thus causing players to be required to hunker down and let an administrative turn pass even if they do want to go play Alexander.

EU IV's conquest systems work pretty well for this purpose. In short:

1. When you finish a war, everyone involved automatically has a truce that is costly to violate
2. The amount of territory you can take from a nation depends on the scale of your victory. If you've only won a few battles, you won't be able to get more than a county.
3. Once you own a province, you have to spend research points on incorporating it into your domain. Spending too many research points on provinces will hurt your ability to develop new technologies.
4. If you expand too quickly, your neighbors will form a super alliance called a defensive coalition against you.

These systems are optimized for European warfare in the 15th-18th centuries, where diplomatic relations were always feasible, nations generally didn't appear out of nowhere, and "balance of power" was a meaningful foreign policy goal. Those may or may not be applicable to a medieval / iron age kitchensink fantasy game. Defensive coalitions also exist in CK 2 for example, but they make less sense in the setting.

[Username17]

Crusader Kings 2's defensive coalition system is an embarrassing game construct to make a-historical expansion slightly harder. The thing where if you grow fast enough with the more effective casus bellis that your own pope is going to join in war to stop you from annexing any more Muslim territory is stupid. And the things people do to get around coalitions (wait for successions and then invade before the new prince joins the coalition, blitz out of boats in order to annex counties before coalition partners can arrive, etc.) are also pretty stupid.

But the idea of having there be big penalties for breaking truces is a good one. Indeed, in a fantasy game it makes even more sense. Breaking truces early could literally undermine your rightness to rule on a cosmic level. Like, if the Yuan-Ti cede you territory in exchange for peace and you take the territory and immediately start attacking again, you could simply stop being the rightful king. And then the pride lands get all desolate and weird.

Don't break truces.

Especially when characters get a certain amount of their army through explicitly supernatural means, being the "rightful ruler" could be very important. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to be a good person or even a good king, but if you don't play by the rules you don't get your complementary contingent of Treefolk. They simply won't follow you if you don't do the appropriately kingly stuff. And that includes recognizing your own borders and engaging in conquest only through allowed channels.

In Crusader Kings 2, declaring war on someone during a truce is something that costs you piety and prestige and makes lots of people dislike you. But in a fantasy game, piety and prestige can have real effects like whether the Paladin Queen gets to summon an angelic host to fight for her side or not.

-Username17

[Shatner]

See, this to me indicates a legitimacy rating. We don't want to go full Paradox and have it be a 0 - 100 rating, because this isn't a computer game where hardware will track and tabulate modifiers, modifiers modifying modifiers, and bonus/penalty decay rates for you. But a -5 to +5 scale which is like an amalgamation of EUIV's stability, legitimacy, and maybe piety or prestige as well would help simulate what we want.

Though we're going to have to engineer something in so that the Conjurer King is still able to summon demons and slaan and stuff even after backstabbing a vassal or something. Because sure, Angels and Devils, and wizards, and drow might not show up for work if you're legitimacy rating gets too low, but brute squads and balors should be a-okay with that turn of events provided the money/planar currency arrives in-full and on-schedule.

[DrPraetor]

I dunno; I'd like for their to be advantages to living at each point of the legitimacy scale, rather than having everyone gravitate to either -2 or +2 (11 legitimacy ratings is obviously too many).

So Nirriti the Black lives at -2, betrays whoever he wants and basically spends 0 fucks on the mandate of heaven or on governing his domain. He'd like to be at -1, because that would let him reduce his zombie patrols, but it may not be worth the trouble.
Duke Sigmund Igthorn is at -1, and he usually betrays people, but he does have some ogre huntsmen and junk so he'd like to be at 0 for a fertility bonus (but may not be worth the trouble), and doesn't want to be at -2 because then even the cursed places turn against him and he has limited patrol points. So he'll send people declarations of war rather than sneak attacking (unless the advantage of the sneak attack is big.)
Julius Novachrono is at 0, and likes it. He's a wizard and doesn't care enough about mandate bonuses to chase them, but he has a lot of peons assigned to harvesting magic resources in his domains and he doesn't want unrest or fertility penalties, either.
Julius Caesar is at +1, and he enjoys significant bonuses from his Numen. His domain is big and agricultural, and he can usually goad people into attacking him or convince their subjects to ask for his help or some other suitable excuse. He'd like to be at +2 but it would impair his expansion so it's probably not worth it.
Arthur Pendragon is at +2, and he has a bunch of mandate-dependent class features so he doesn't want to lose it. This should be a significant hindrance if Arthur wants to expand, though - and it might explain stuff like letting Mordred run around and try to overthrow him.