The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

setr wrote: post #177

thaumasiotes wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 11:14 PM UTC

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…

Post by the_af » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

Brendinooo wrote: post #163

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 always figured that game makers didn't do this because it wouldn't actually be fun to play with. Reminds me of when I played Medieval: Total War and spent most of my time dealing with uprisings. Like, do we want to deal with regulation bloat that causes greater infrastructure costs, so you have to pay billions to build a big road or whatever? Can you account for a Whiskey Rebellion sort of scenario in a SimCity sor…

Post by alisonkisk » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 11:48 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #147

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…

This assumes the differences are purposefully designed rather than out of ignorance of the past. I think you can create a unique game by looking at the historical time periods these games were made about and going from there. This is because most of these games actually start with something like DnD and go from there. As a simple example of where this can lead you into historical inaccuricies... the long sword. Long…

Post by alisonkisk » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

sprafa wrote: post #167

mncharity wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the products of a culture with less tolerance for untruth than our own. It might see more films with postscript reality checks, like Jackie Chan's making-of "if you do this, you will get hurt". More children's picture books with errata pages, like Penny Chisholm's. I wonder if some such might be encouraged somehow?

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.