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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

#211

Post by iamnotwhoiam »

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…

First I've heard of this game since I got it in a discount multipack with AoE, and something else I can't remember. I had absolutely no idea what was happening when I tried to play (age 9 or so).

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

#212

Post by xyzzyz »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #182
setr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That assumes you have a lot of free pasture lying around. Odds are, the pasture is already in use, likely for sheep or cows. All that's really necessary for the draft horse to wind up eating oats is that its economic contribution exceeds the value of the oats.

Yes, that’s why, as I said, no peasants owned draft horses before modern times, and very few land-cultivating ones owned any large animals at all.

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

#214

Post by shezi »

Retric wrote: post #60
Rd6n6 wrote: post #21

I’m actually beginning some informal research on 17th century Europe for a small game right now. There are some village life and village builder aspects. It’s the beginning of the “modern” period and just after the renaissance. What is life like for the local business owner? Who would they be? What extent is it still feudal serfdom in during ? It’s an interesting time with massive social, scientific, and religious ch…

17th century Europe was quite modern with for example long distance power transmission. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/01/mechanical-transmi... The spinning wheel similarly had already transformed transformed the making of cloth and rope. By the 1700’s cottage industries where setup to leverage the free time of village workers on an industrial scale. Communities would specialize based on local resources inclu…

According to AcoUP, transport cost over land is five times that over rivers, and twenty times that over sea.

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...

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

#215

Post by thaumasiotes »

xyzzyz wrote: post #212
thaumasiotes wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes you have a lot of free pasture lying around. Odds are, the pasture is already in use, likely for sheep or cows. All that's really necessary for the draft horse to wind up eating oats is that its economic contribution exceeds the value of the oats.

Yes, that’s why, as I said, no peasants owned draft horses before modern times, and very few land-cultivating ones owned any large animals at all.

I have the vague idea that in medieval Europe there would usually be one draft team which farmers would rent from whoever owned it. That supports the idea that owning draft animals was rare. But it doesn't so much support the idea that you wouldn't feed human-edible food to them.

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

#216

Post by archi42 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #157
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…

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…

Fun fact: At least in Germany you often end up paying taxes on self-consumed solar. They calculate the tax based on what you would have payed your regular supplier (or 20c/kWh). But otoh you get to declare your "solar plant" a business, with some nice perks: If you buy the solar equipment for net 20k€ you'll pay 19% or 3.8k€ taxes. You get that money back. In addition, the 20k€ are a business expense and reduce your taxable income (there are two modes for this, either 5%/year for 20 years or a huge block [50%?] the first year and some smaller blocks the next two or three years - I believe). So if you pay 30% income tax, you'll save about 6k€. All other expenses related to the solar plant (service, repairs, insurance,...) also count as business expenses, with the same effect.

If you're not earning more than 17.5k€/a in addition to your regular income, you can opt to forfeit the whole stuff in favor of the "Kleinunternehmerregelung" (small business provisions), but then you don't get the above business perks. Though after a few years you can change from a full business to a small business, so you'll have to do the math.

Sounds complicated? Welcome to Germany! :D

(Disclaimer: This might be not 100% accurate, so talk to your tax consultant if you're doing solar in Germany)

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

#217

Post by sprafa »

alisonkisk wrote: post #190
sprafa wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want such a culture? People love movies and probably can learn how untrue or true they are by just googling stuff. I certainly do.

Because knowledge is power over the environment and filling your head with lies is hard to unlearn. googling doesn't disabuse you of ingrained lies.

You can not watch the movies you know. Nobody forced you to.

Movies are just fairy tales and people enjoy fairy tales for good reason. Stories are actually a very efficient way to sharing information. I could why in detail but I’d just say it’s the way we process information is more emotional than logical. A fairy tale is essentially a hyper compressed emotional truth (when it is a GOOD fairy tale).

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

#218

Post by imtringued »

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…

>If you look at our actual cave ecosystems, troglobionts, which are adapted for living strictly in caves, are typically quite tiny. There's simply no food down there! Resources are scarce. Hence you would get no gelatinous cubes or hook horrors or carrion crawlers stumbling around the caves, lurking about, waiting for adventurers or the average bear. Instead you get some very small, pale shrimp. This is not exciting for the adventurer. Some handwaving of a source of energy called "Faerzress" eventually takes place and is only vaguely acceptable if one does not look hard, serving as kind of a bottom trophic level for the game.

Actually it would be worse. The most populated caves would be made by ant or termite colonies so if there were ant like monsters as big as humans then a small dungeon would have hundreds of monsters. Way too much for a single adventurer.

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

#219

Post by jaza »

SimianLogic2 wrote: post #140

I learned most of what I know about the Three Kingdoms era from playing hundreds (thousands?) of hours of Dynasty Warriors. I later read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the game was pretty close! (Holy shit I had a lot of free time before I had kids.)

Amen! (To having free time pre kids).

Waiting for mine (currently 4 years old) to be old enough to play any and all video games, at which point I hope to have a good excuse to start gaming again myself.

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

#220

Post by imtringued »

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…

You're supposed to make it up in numbers. The idea that there is a single hero fighting for minutes is the problem.
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