Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Evil Marahadja]

The village have a population of around 100 people, and you have 200 subjects in total.

65 ablebodied but untrained and unarmed villagers. 

Marahadja, would you clarify the population a bit? Who are the 100 subjects who aren't villagers? Do we have half our subjects living in cottages in the woods? Why 100 people in the village, but only 65 ablebodied? Are those 35 children and elderly? Are they our personal family and court ladies?

Better population breakdown, please.

Well, I do not want to create a populationsystem that is to complex. The other 100 people are basicly the ones who doesnt live in the village but still dwell in your estate. Poor farmers, lumbermen, hunters and people like that. If an attack was imminent, they would probably scatter rather than come to the village and fight, unless you get a superlojalty, but thats for the future. 65 people are basicly the men in the right age for battle, most are from the village and some live close to it. The other people are either:
Population who live to far from the village to stay and fight encase of a battle.
Women.
People to young/old for battle.
Priests and other people who want fight no matter if you other them to.

Alluvial(river) plains mean fertile ground, but no stone most of the time. I don't think we have enough money to buy weapons or hire mercenaries . Certainly not mercenaries.

Correct. And it would be dumb to create lumber plantations. Since it would give a lot less income/acre than the cultivated land you have now.

Regarding the money. 200 gold coins is decent. Its defiantly more than any peasant will see in their life. Its enough to build one, maybe two buildings. Or to arm a handfull of soldiers. Or maybe to arm a knight. If you want to build something, you could either:
Force your population to build it. (Cheapest, but will lower happiness)
Make your population to build it, but compensate their losses. (No happiness penalty, but takes a while and cost you some money)
Hire outsiders. (Fastest but also most expansive.)

Militarywise, you are by far the strongest military usage you have at the moment. If you are fully equipped, you could kill at lest one or two dozen of untrained peasants before you fell.

And lastly, your foodincome will vary a bit for every year depending on the weather and other stuff you cant. 

[kingfisher1112]

Fine, build a school. Compensation method.

[LordBucket]

If you want to build something, you could either:
Force your population to build it
Make your population to build it, but compensate
Hire outsiders

...or, we can do what was suggested: have a voluntary construction force and militia. Surely not everybody wants to work on a farm. Instead, they become indentured tradesmen and servants. We feed, cloth and house them, and they serve as we command. No more farmwork, they're fed and cared for, and they learn a useful trade. It's a good deal for a peasant. I would think all 10 positions would be filled with volunteers pretty quickly.

200 gold coins is decent. Its defiantly more than any peasant will
see in their life. Its enough to build one, maybe two buildings.

We own the land. They're paying us a tithe of food for use of that land. They're not paying gold coins as taxes and we're not going to pay gold coins to peasants to build granaries and roads and things.

The game will be set in the early medieval period

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

I think we're going for a communist dictatorship here, with a semi-flexible work system. Those who want to live the farm life, no problem. They pay 10%. For those who don't want to work the farms and want to learn a trade, they can indenture themselves to our noble house, and we will take care of them in exchange for their service at our discretion.

your foodincome will vary a bit for every year

That's fine. Everyone seems to be in agreement that we want to build a granary and stockpile food rather than sell it all for cash. Our goal here is to create an environment of security and abundance to engender loyalty, convince the peasants that it's really in the best interests to be our peasants, attract immigrants, and generally avoid all the problems associated with having a hungry village of serfs armed with pitchforks. Again, communist dictatorship. If the harvest is bad, we want nobody going hungry because of it.

Note also that since we've opened up 10 positions as workers and militia, we're expecting our food income to drop by about 15% (10/65) regardless of seasonal factors because there will be fewer peasants working the fields

Your yearly yield: 100 goldcoins (from trade), 300 barrels of food.

The population is obliged to give you one tenth of their yield to you.

...that doesn't work. If our 10% is 300 barrels, that suggests the total production is 3000 barrels. 100 people in the village, they keep 2700 barrels of food...that's 27 barrels of food per person per year that they're keeping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koku

If my math is correct...after the 10% tax, apparently our village is producing enough food to provide every villager with a 20 year food supply, every year.

200 gold coins is decent. Its defiantly more than any peasant will see in their life.

300 barrels of food. (Worth 250 goldcoins if sold at optimal price)

...that really doesn't work. Even ignoring the exact units of measurement, if our 10% is worth 250 gold coins...that leaves 2250 gold coins worth of food left over for the village, every year. How can 250 be such a huge amount to them if they're producing nearly ten times that annually?

[Evil Marahadja]

Lordbucket:

1. Yes, you can of curse do that aswell.

2. Well, you do own the land. But you still need to pay for the material when building some stuff. For example granaries. Other buildings, such as ditch roads, are free. (Although you already have them.

3. Ha, seems like I overestimated the ammount of food a human needs/day slighly. Lets just say that you produce x amount of food, and get 250 coins of you sell that.

4. Well, consider that most of the food gets eaten. And they trade the rest of it away for things like cloth and equipment.

[Wayward Device]

Ok, so um two suggestions. Firstly, granary for the greater good and all, but what I really want to know is this: is our river suitable for a mill? We don't seem to have one, which means our peasants are either grinding any grains they grow by hand (time consuming and exhausting) or taking them to a mill in a nearby town or village and likely tithing to the owner for the privilege. Also, does our river have nice clay banks? Because its one of our two natural resources and we should be getting as much out of it as possible (I'm all for an improved dock etc.) and a pottery industry could be nice for all sorts of reasons.

In terms of militia training and happiness, why not combine the two? How about we make every seventh day a day of rest (I assume that 'cos this is a (low?) fantasy setting we don't have Christianity or Sunday?) with competitions in archery, wrestling, boxing and fighting with staves and quarterstaffs? Its not like we seem to be going for the "Bwahahaha! OPress" root, so our serfs knowing how to defend themselves is a good thing. Perhaps the winners could get all they can eat/drink for the night? Simple people appreciate simple rewards. Also, if trade picks up when the dock is built, gogo tavern! We need some place to hang out and drink in between lording it up and saving damsels from dragons appropriate to the setting stuff.

[Maldevious]

This could be fun. Agree on a new dock and mill.

[Doomblade187]

Build a dock and mill via the compensation method, and institute the 10-person group of volunteers from above.

[Mr. Palau]

If you want to build something, you could either:
Force your population to build it
Make your population to build it, but compensate
Hire outsiders

...or, we can do what was suggested: have a voluntary construction force and militia. Surely not everybody wants to work on a farm. Instead, they become indentured tradesmen and servants. We feed, cloth and house them, and they serve as we command. No more farmwork, they're fed and cared for, and they learn a useful trade. It's a good deal for a peasant. I would think all 10 positions would be filled with volunteers pretty quickly.

Also we could also have the peasents do mandatory service during some low-activity part of the year, like winter when they just stay home live off their stored food and drink, work on construction projects for some meager form of compnesation. Its better then them sitting on their ass.

[Doomblade187]

If you want to build something, you could either:
Force your population to build it
Make your population to build it, but compensate
Hire outsiders

...or, we can do what was suggested: have a voluntary construction force and militia. Surely not everybody wants to work on a farm. Instead, they become indentured tradesmen and servants. We feed, cloth and house them, and they serve as we command. No more farmwork, they're fed and cared for, and they learn a useful trade. It's a good deal for a peasant. I would think all 10 positions would be filled with volunteers pretty quickly.

Also we could also have the peasents do mandatory service during some low-activity part of the year, like winter when they just stay home live off their stored food and drink, work on construction projects for some meager form of compnesation. Its better then them sitting on their ass.

As long as they get paid/compensated, they should be happy.

[Evil Marahadja]

You acted immediately, this village needed some reorganising to fit your needs. You meet with the former leader of Fuerza, and announced your offers of other work than the farm. It didn't get long before you got some volunteers. You now have five servants, although they are not trained in anything, they could be specialised in whatever you decide.
Many thoughts went through your head. Should you build a mill? A granary? A small port? A wooden fence? After a while you decide to build both a granary and a mill, since it would be good to have them built before harvest. You command your servants to buy the material and hire the expertise needed.

Regarding your militia. You have a rather interesting option. A hunterteam volunteered to serve you. They are competent archers, which is hard to come by these days, although, if you hire them, it will hurt your meat production quite a lot. You could instead hire five normal peasants, which wont hurt the food production as much, although they wont be very useful in a fight at the moment.

You also decided to from this harvest and onwards. You will have a feast everyweek. You could organise it more detailed when the need arises.

It is now June! (Three months later)

Your granary is finished and you will have to decide weather to use is privately or let the villagers use it aswell. The peasants have started to gather this years hay, however, this years harvest was very poor. And you will have to slaughter animals as the peasants wont be able to feed them this winter. Your mill will be completed next month. Since it is quite a complex building.

You have heard some rumours about raiders further up the rivers. If it is any truth is them remains to be seen.

Sir Reginald Dumac

Title: Baronet (Obliged to serve Baron Amroth Elnesar, and join his call of arms)
Ownings: A large house in Fuerza, a horse and battle equipment worthy of a knight. 50 gold coins (-100 for the mill, -50 for the granary) gold coins. Five servants.
Reputation: Non-existent
Military strength: Yourself, you are actually quite a formidable foe. And 55 ablebodied but untrained and unarmed villagers. Five untrained militia.   

Fuerza

Your yearly yield: 100 goldcoins (from trade), food (250 goldcoins if sold at a optimal price) 
Notable buildings:
Church (Represent the religions interests in the area.)
Granary (Private= 1000 storage, commonly=250 storage, although the villagers will store food themself, and handle a bad harvest year without your intervention.
Water mill (Finished in one month)
Other: Pays one tenth of its total income to the church, and one tenth to Amroth Elnesar.
Priest happiness: Content
People happiness: Content

Spoiler: Authors note (click to show/hide)

 Decided to abstract the food production a bit.

[NRDL]

I'm not gonna mess with the food production, but Hire the untrained peasants, but send the hunters on a one time mission to scout and possibly eliminate any small raider bands. 

[stabbymcstabstab]

Take the hunters Most meat back then end up on the lords table anyway and besides they can hunt if they have spare time and trained archers were very vauluable back then.

[LordBucket]

Regarding your militia. You have a rather interesting option. A hunterteam volunteered to serve you. They are competent archers, which is hard to come by these days, although, if you hire them, it will hurt your meat production quite a lot.

Would you clarify? Not entirely sure what you mean by this. Why will having recruiting these archers hurt our meat production so much? I assume you mean that these are people who live as hunters and pay their 10% to us in meat? if so, that's fine...but how much of our current 250gc/yr worth of food income do these particular five hunters represent?

Ownings: A large house in Fuerza, a horse and battle equipment worthy of a knight. 50 gold coins (-100 for the mill, -50 for the granary) gold coins. Five servants.

Your yearly yield: 100 goldcoins (from trade), food (250 goldcoins if sold at a optimal price) 

...just to clarify, you're saying we have 50 gold coins, and a 250 coin value worth of food income every year, but zero food in storage? I assume we're crediting income at the end of the year just for simplicity?

Granary (Private= 1000 storage, commonly=250 storage

...again, just trying to clarify...is this capacity, or food? How much actual food do we have stockpiled?

-100 for the mill, -50 for the granary

1) Is wood so uncommon in this area that we really need to pay for it? Can't we chop down trees?

2) What are climate conditions like? Are earthen constructions realistic, or is there too much rain and moisture?

3) What are the village houses made of? Are villagers living in teepees? Adobe or cob houses? Wooden structures? What's the village made of? Our gameplan here is to make such an awesome place that we attract immigrants and villagers make lots of babies to swell our numbers. Those people are going to need places to live.

Five servants.

They become construction crew. 5 days a week, they're building things. We'll need more eventually, but 5 is what we have for now. To start, under our supervision they can be building the granary and mill we have in process. Village cleanup. Clearing space, widening roads, building repairs...we have plenty that's need to be done to keep them busy. If we run out of construction materials, set them to building an earthen wall around the entire village. If climate conditions don't allow that, they can build a moat. No shortage of things for them to do.

Five untrained militia.   

Get them training.

you will have to slaughter animals

Skin them too, make leather armor for militia.

[NRDL]

Five untrained militia.   

Get them training.

you will have to slaughter animals

Skin them too, make leather armor for militia.

+1

[Mr. Palau]

Also lets use our 50 coins to have the peasents begin constructing a Port, use the construction team too. Compensate them as much as possible with the 50 coins.

once we have a port we can export food to places in dire need of it that we normally couldn't reach on foot which should increase our income from food on a yearly basis. Meaning before we were only able to move food to X market because after that it would go rotten, but now we can move it to Y thanks to the increased speed of the ships. Since Y pays more for food than X, we will make more money off of our yearly food intake. Also using the granary and the port set up a deal with the peasents that we can buy their grain for something greater than the price they would normally get at the market, but less than that which we can get if we ship it, and then begin buying grain from the peasents to export. Store the grain in the granary, of course, and allow the peasents to store any of their own excess grain in a seperate section, or just the other side of the room.

Of course this will also improve economic conditions in the village as well as for the peasents because they are able to sell us grain at a good price. The peasents will then have more money, so they can uby more things.