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The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

leidenmedievalistsblog.nl

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

#171

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> Also, you wouldn’t feed human edible vegetables to animals, that would be very wasteful.

...yes, you would. What else could you feed them?

Animals get lower-quality stuff. Wheat for people and oats for horses. But it's not like people can't eat oats.

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

#172

Post by SahAssar »

> However, also in Banished it is your goal to overcome the stagnation and lead your settlement to expansion.

Is it? My view of banished was always that the goal was survival and living with the finite resources. Of course at some point you realize that with your foresters, miners, stonecutters, tailors, brewers, priests, teachers, blacksmiths and all the other people you need you have to build more food production, which requires more people and so on.

But I have never felt in banished that my goal is expansion, my goal was always a stable equilibrium that I could hold without touching it. It's sort of like software development for a specific problem, the best solution is one you never have to think about again.

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

#173

Post by thaumasiotes »

dunnevens wrote: post #28
littlecranky67 wrote: post #6

I would love a building game where you can't build roads. All of those building games so far allowed that, but I think it would be more fun to just allow for constructing building, and roads/pathway would form depending on their connectivity inside the production chain. I.e. you wouldn't connect your farm to a butcher, but pathways would form and eventually turn into street based on the amount people from dependent s…

Foundation does this. No road building at all. Paths are created organically by activity. In addition, the player never builds houses either. The townspeople pick where they want their house to go. There is road building in Banished, but the townspeople will only use them if it’s an optimal path. They’re not the least bit shy about ignoring the roads if they can get to their destination via a shortcut. Since the road…

> Foundation does this. No road building at all. Paths are created organically by activity.

You can put the roads where you want them by placing taboo zoning where you don't want them. Foundation's villagers have an unnaturally strong preference for staying on existing roads, so this is necessary if you want to straighten a road that was kinked due to an obstacle that no longer exists.

> In addition, the player never builds houses either. The townspeople pick where they want their house to go.

This is even less accurate; the townspeople can only build houses in areas that have been actively zoned for housing.

And their "desirability" requirements also mean that they won't build houses unless you've specifically built a lot of decorations nearby, so even if you zone everywhere houses will only appear in places where you make an effort to get them to appear.

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

#174

Post by minsc__and__boo »

cperciva wrote: post #116
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…

Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually has an assassins' guild, with roughly ten members. Do they take turns, each assassinating one person a year? The charitable interpretation might be that, in addition to being responsible for assassinations in the town, the guild is also responsible for assassinations in the surrounding countryside; in medieval times the rural population significantly outnum…

Also an assassin guild may be paid to do it discretely - i.e. disappear someone rather than just kill. That would allow for more assassinations per year to go unnoticed.

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

#175

Post by setr »

Robotbeat wrote: post #26
littlecranky67 wrote: post #6

I would love a building game where you can't build roads. All of those building games so far allowed that, but I think it would be more fun to just allow for constructing building, and roads/pathway would form depending on their connectivity inside the production chain. I.e. you wouldn't connect your farm to a butcher, but pathways would form and eventually turn into street based on the amount people from dependent s…

You would need to model the “roads” becoming an impassable hazard (thick muddy mess) to wheeled vehicles and horses during heavy rain. Even ancient people threw gravel down (or logs) to help address this problem. But that’s a heck of a lot of work.

The logical implementation seems fairly easy to imagine to me.

You do ant-like pheromone tracking for movement by all peasants of the world. (Each cell keeps a tracker, which gets incremented by passing peasants and decays over time).

Upon sufficient pheromone build up, your walking tile upgrades. Perhaps in the form of grass -> well-trodden -> dirt road -> gravel road -> stone road. Simple model of decay would be to simply downgrade back down the list. More complex might be that stone/gravel degrade into some special state to maintain permanence (dirt roads goes back to grass, but stone roads turn to grassy stone or whatever).

Your peasant/wagon/etc pathfind accordingly, getting speedboosts (or losses) by road type — and in your example, by road type + local weather (modeled separately)

You could also have different pheremone types producing different artifacts. Human pheremone only produces dirt roads at max, but wagon and tamed horse pheremone jump from grass->road with sufficient buildup. Wild animals only build up to well-trodden paths.

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

#176

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> Your large-sized dragon would need something like a log flume ride of virgins delivered straight to its gullet to sustain its bulk, not to mention the caloric expenditure.

Just to point out, virgin-demanding dragons are an entirely separate mythic tradition from hoarding dragons, which spend their time hibernating.

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

#177

Post by setr »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #171
xyzzyz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also, you wouldn’t feed human edible vegetables to animals, that would be very wasteful. ...yes, you would. What else could you feed them? Animals get lower-quality stuff. Wheat for people and oats for horses. But it's not like people can't eat oats.

Grass. I believe oats and seed is fairly recent development. Historically, you had animals grazing by rotating pastures, or consuming dried grass (hay) when you couldn’t graze (eg winter).

Also interesting tidbit — apparently horses of modern sizes cannot eat grass fast enough to sustain their size. They require the higher calorie density of oats and such. Horses that get back into the wild apparently quickly revert to much smaller sizes with a couple generations (according to acoup.net, which I never verified further)

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

#179

Post by baud147258 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #168
pessimizer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Majesty had tax collectors, a market economy, and a hands-off governing policy: You funded creation of main buildings, but they were or were not occupied based on demand for those buildings. You put up rewards for actions, but those were or were not acted on based on whatever your citizens were doing. You funded (from treasury) upgrades to goods producers, but nobody got those upgrades until they went and purchased t…

Steam also a version that runs on modern systems

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

#180

Post by thaumasiotes »

sprafa wrote: post #78
Aerroon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sword fights certainly could seem more realistic without losing the excitement. Check this out ('fighting' starts at around 2 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GoQlvc_H3s

This is great but virtually all of this is similar to what I know about the samurai - most fighting with a sword ends VERY quickly with someone getting stabbed. We are talking about an encounter between two men being decided in a few swordstrokes. Seconds, not minutes. There is not much room for 3-5-10 minute fights and acrobatics. Yes it’s interesting as a YouTube video, but for filmmaking suspense comes from “dilat…

> most fighting with a sword ends VERY quickly with someone getting stabbed.

Tanner Greer recently posted about teaching the Iliad to high schoolers, and made this point explicitly. The Iliad is composed for an audience that is familiar with hand-to-hand combat, and depicts it exactly this way: two people close, and one of them kills the other one and moves on. Fighting is mostly done with spears, not swords, but it happens the same way.

Homeric depictions of combat impressed my mother in a different way (she is a doctor): "Wow! Homer really knew his human anatomy!"

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