The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games • Hacker News Board

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#151

Post by dragontamer » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:42 PM UTC

dntrkv wrote: post #142

dragontamer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you choose the trade routes individually. Its not natural, that's the player's choice in where the roads go (except for Rome: all roads lead to Rome lol (special power where every city auto-builds a road to Rome in the early ages))

It's not completely manual. If you have cities A, B, and C and you have an existing route from city B to C, and you add one from A to C, it will automatically choose the optimal route by utilizing existing roads and connect the new city from there.

That's not what the original commenter is talking about.

The "decision" to build a road from A to C was not really a top-down decision from the medieval periods. Rome built roads in a top-down manner that sometimes benefited the Empire as a whole... but Feudal Lords built roads in a smaller and more selfish scale.

The growth of roads at that time was more akin to animal paths (animals deciding to travel the same path as other animals: because the well-trodden areas are flatter and easier to walk). Its an organic growth, rather than a top-down planned growth.

I seem to recall playing a few games where roads grew naturally like this, but I've forgotten their names by now. Feudal lords built Roads more akin to Death Stranding (where the player builds a road to try to connect to the online community. Once the road exists, you gain the benefits of the entire community's efforts)

So people are talking about that kind of "locally selfish but community building" behavior. And also in a management simulator and... not whatever Death Stranding is (First person Post-apocalyptic UPS simulator?)

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Different mechanics for different eras of history. Again: Civ6 probably is akin to some Emperor declaring a road should be built between two major cities. But Medieval / Feudal society didn't have top-down edicts from an emperor (at best: maybe from the Pope but... the Pope didn't have that much power). Having a simulator for the medieval time-period could be an interesting gameplay mechanic.

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#152

Post by pessimizer » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

larsiusprime wrote: post #31

> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction of mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord. Tithes, taxes and rents! Instead of merely abstracting the taxes into an income modifier or letting the player be the extractor himself, we could be shown the tax coll…

Government is always abstracted in games, rather than being material. If a game had a tax collector, it would have to figure out what would happen if you killed the tax collector. What if the tax collector is actually a tax farmer[1]? Would his gang go after you? If the gang was too afraid of you, would they raise taxes on your neighbors to compensate?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#153

Post by xyzzyz » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:48 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #150

learc83 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>subsequent medieval times relatively light as a percentage of one's wages? You owed the lord a percentage of what you produced as rent. You owed the church a tithe. You also potentially owed service to the lord and the church. Taxes were also paid on certain goods purchased. Taxes that in many cases nobles were exempt from. Kings and feudal lords could also enact special taxes to pay for specific projects. If you we…

Yeah, and from what I understand, it was a tax on revenue, not profit. If you harvested 10 carrots and had to give 3 or 8 carrots to your horses, you were still tithed 1 carrot.

Only the very wealthiest of land-cultivating peasants owned large animals at the time, though (and pretty much never horses). Also, you wouldn’t feed human edible vegetables to animals, that would be very wasteful.

More importantly, these income taxes were based on rather small fraction of revenues, since they were only based on agricultural production, and not on household production. Obviously, it was extremely impractical to tax household production, and it still is. Importantly though, back then, typical household consumed much more of its own production as a fraction of all consumption than today, and as a result, less of their real income was taxed.

Here is a way to think about it: if you buy a shirt from someone, you might need to pay the sales tax. However, if you make your own shirt, you aren’t going to pay tax on it. Today, you wouldn’t actually do it, because other people can make a shirt with much less effort than you ever could, so it’s still worth it for you to buy someone else’s product and pay the tax, because the productivity gains of trade will more than pay for what government skims from the transaction. However, back before industrial revolution, the differences in productivity weren’t nearly as big, so it didn’t alway make much sense to specialize in everything and trade.

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#154

Post by dragontamer » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

Arnavion wrote: post #93

larsiusprime wrote: post #31

> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction of mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord. Tithes, taxes and rents! Instead of merely abstracting the taxes into an income modifier or letting the player be the extractor himself, we could be shown the tax coll…

I believe Pharaoh (mentioned in the previous paragraph) did actually have taxmen that would go out and collect taxes, and could be ambushed and killed by the people if they were sufficiently upset by the living conditions.

But really, they were mostly just killed by Hippos. Just like everyone else in town.

I do believe you require approximately two fully-equipped and high-morale legions to kill a singular Hippo in that game, no joke. If you see 2 or 3 Hippos in a singular area, you'll need a substantial Army to clear them out.

EDIT: If you're lucky and can push the Hippos out to the river somehow, your Navy can bombard the Hippos with impunity, but it takes a long time for those ships to kill a Hippo. (I've literally built the Pyramids before the Hippos died. So a really, really long time)

The other plan is to set up a lot of Police Stations. Police don't have morale-stat and will fight to the death (in contrast: your armies will break formation and retreat). Each time a Police dies, they hire a new citizen rather quickly, eventually your infinite stream of Policemen kill the Hippo. This works because Hippos only attack citizens, never buildings. (In contrast, if you actually had an approaching army, the Police would die, and then they'd destroy the Police Station... so no new Police would come out to defend.)

Also, immigrants come extremely quickly in Pharaoh. You pretty much convert immigrants into Police (and then subsequently dying) at unrealistically high speeds. Armies actually need "training", "Morale" and all that stuff...

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#155

Post by mrandolph » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #152

larsiusprime wrote: post #31

> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction of mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord. Tithes, taxes and rents! Instead of merely abstracting the taxes into an income modifier or letting the player be the extractor himself, we could be shown the tax coll…

Government is always abstracted in games, rather than being material. If a game had a tax collector, it would have to figure out what would happen if you killed the tax collector. What if the tax collector is actually a tax farmer[1]? Would his gang go after you? If the gang was too afraid of you, would they raise taxes on your neighbors to compensate? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)

seems like an opportunity for some fun game mechanics!

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#156

Post by jaytaylor » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 8:58 PM UTC

tigertigerbb wrote: post #120

Arnavion wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Pharaoh (mentioned in the previous paragraph) did actually have taxmen that would go out and collect taxes, and could be ambushed and killed by the people if they were sufficiently upset by the living conditions.

You should check out 'tax farming'. There's probably a wikipedia page for the 20,000 ft view.

...

Direct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#157

Post by Robotbeat » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #153

Robotbeat wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and from what I understand, it was a tax on revenue, not profit. If you harvested 10 carrots and had to give 3 or 8 carrots to your horses, you were still tithed 1 carrot.

Only the very wealthiest of land-cultivating peasants owned large animals at the time, though (and pretty much never horses). Also, you wouldn’t feed human edible vegetables to animals, that would be very wasteful. More importantly, these income taxes were based on rather small fraction of revenues, since they were only based on agricultural production, and not on household production. Obviously, it was extremely imp…

We don’t tax household consumption today, either. If you grow veggies, cook, mend/sew your own clothes, wash your own clothes, change your own oil, mow your own lawn, 3D print your own stuff, or produce your own solar power, you’re not taxed on it (although that doesn’t stop some folk, whether utilities or whatever, from trying to effectively tax you on it). Of course, household production is massively less efficient for many things, although people are forced into becoming DIYers if tax rates are high, prices are artificially high (think rent-seeking behavior by monopolies like utilities), or if money is scarce (ie if there’s a recession/depression).

And my point about carrots was deliberately cartoonish. The point is that revenue, not profit, was taxed.

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#158

Post by scyzoryk_xyz » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #102

Hrm. My opinion is that complete accuracy isn't all that fun. Folks have used tax records to do analysis of, say, how many farmers it takes in a village for a blacksmith to be present, and so on and so forth. It was a lot more than you might imagine. On the other hand, looking at the D&D 3.5 Dungeon Masters Guide 2 , they have finally fleshed out Saltmarsh. Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually…

Yeah, success in this type of game is definitely about channeling a very specific set of power fantasies, delivered along with all those addictive brain reward feedback loop game mechanisms.

You're totally right about the limited potential for enjoy-ability of realistic forces in city/system simulation games. After all, the best examples of these games usually simplify. Like, the old SimCity games focus just on the zoning mixed with some taxes. Or, the Anno games depict colonization of (unsettled - haha) land mixed with maintenance of trade routes to reward the player with 'growth'.

The article however does deliver a pretty good idea of how one could go about depicting the specific area of interest studied by the author - medieval farming and village planning. I think all of us can easily imagine a very enjoyable game there.

The question of balance is interesting, and IMO highly dependent on how strong and original the selected set of core mechanics is. The better they are, the less of this 'fantastical satiation' aspect is needed to cover them up. But what is most interesting to me is the question of what should mechanics in such games themselves actually depict? Like, to actually be worth spending time playing?

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#159

Post by cwdegidio » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

Davidbrcz wrote: post #145

ajuc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was kinda disappointed in it. Crusader Kings 2 were much better.

Ck2 was released roughly 10 years ago amd had tons of extensions. I played recently ck3 and, even if the vanilla gamw is better than ck2, i got the same dull - boredom after 20 hours than i had when i played vanilla ck2 for thr first time. Give it some time :~)

Crusader Kings 2 and 3 are the only games that have ever recaptured the accidental all-night gaming session for me like Civ I and II did back in the day. Since discovering CK, I can't tell you how many times I innocently started a game on a Saturday night, have my partner come in and say good night... just to have my partner walk in the office and ask when I was going to sleep only to realize it's morning (my office has no windows). God I love it.

Re: The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

#160

Post by jaytaylor » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

paavohtl wrote: post #39

Aperocky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it's windows only..

As are most games. According to ProtonDB [1] it should run more or less perfectly on Linux with Proton. [1] https://www.protondb.com/app/690830

Proton [0] looks like a really nice exanple of Open Source collaboration.

[0] https://www.protondb.com/