4 ms·

Economics is something I think about all the time when playing these games or reading fantasy. We know that the ratio of farmers to non-farmers in the medieval

Economics is something I think about all the time when playing these games or reading fantasy. We know that the ratio of farmers to non-farmers in the medieval period was something like 29:1. But so little thought is given to just the sheer amount of work and space it took to fill mouths and clothe bodies. I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.

relaxing 9mo ago
Reminds me of the Walking Dead tv show where they had communities being fed by a few raised beds with tomato cages and half a dozen corn stalks.
- nitwit005 9mo ago
  People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.
  - bee_rider 9mo ago
    In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement. It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.
    - bluGill 9mo ago
      You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village. expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village. more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.
      - bee_rider 9mo ago
        I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.
        bluGill 9mo ago
        Walls themselves are a symptom. People generally build walls when they are afraid their village will be attacked. They are a lot of work so a safe village won't have them. (safe sometimes means you have a watchers and run to a nearby city with walls on need)
      - nine_k 9mo ago
        Cutting off some forest might help.
        bluGill 9mo ago
        What forest? Either it was owned by a noble with enough of an army to stop you, your great...grandparents already cut it, or the land wouldn't be useful for farming for some other reason. North America had vast empty forests - but remember just before Europeans arrived disease (small pox) killed large portions of the population. We have very little recorded about what life was like before Columbus, but archeological evidence suggests that the land was already used to the max capacity of their technology. (Europe did bring technology to better use the land - for some definition of better. I'm not qualified to comment on why they didn't develop the technology, but there seems to be some interesting culture factors - perhaps you can find an expert)
    - Gravityloss 9mo ago
      Just like in I guess a large portion of human history after farming started. You abandoned the fields and retreated to the walled hilltop when the enemy came. Maybe that's what we have been genetically conditioned to expect and that's why we have these zombie films and series.
  - eapressoandcats 9mo ago
    The funny thing about this is that pre modern cities featured in modern media are always surrounded by unformed grassland because it makes the shot more dramatic and it’s easier to do than showing lots of little farms growing in density up to the city walls.
  - rendaw 9mo ago
    People always talk about how reality is too boring, and that's why shows need to have spaceships bouncing around and explosion sounds and superhumans etc. And then something like The Expanse comes out and it turns out that realism is actually really interesting. Sure, the space is unfamiliar realism, but so is serf life to most viewers. And direction is also very important.
    - enaaem 9mo ago
      One example I can think of is armour. In movies armour don’t seem to do anything at all. You see fully cladded soldiers getting killed by single sword blows, but people in armour are actually really hard to kill. There is a lot of story potential by treating armour like super suits, where characters get stronger with armour upgrades and elite soldiers are like Space Marines.
      - Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
        I've seen clips of medieval reenactments, iirc in Poland they don't really hold back. But they try to use swords on people in full plate armor, which... does nothing, really. Anyway, you mention Space Marines, there's animations and lots of media about them. Some depicting them as basically invulnerable (like the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level), but plenty of them where they die en masse - because while they're super suits, they're up against the worst the universe can throw at them (like the British).
        Ekaros 9mo ago
        40k is weird. The scales are often entirely off. Considering the stated populations and areas involved. Or the amount of equipment fielded. This comes from it fundamentally being small scale skirmish game. So realistic army sizes are not possible. And on other hand you need some level of game balance. You can't expect one side to have dozen models and other to field thousands or tens of thousands. And even there. Considering stated population of any reasonably build world to be in billions and more populated to go to hundreds of billions. Number of normal humans you could stick a weapon in hands and told to shoot at that direction would still be in at least millions if not billions. A few thousand whatever can do very little against that.
  - CalRobert 9mo ago
    Well, a little diversity in crops wouldn’t hurt. And most of the corn isn’t for humans
lloydatkinson 9mo ago
I wish the Banished developer hadn't abandoned it
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 9mo ago
  Abandoned? What was unfinished? I was satisfied when I played it. My only complaint was something about population growth or the ageing of people being too quick IIRC.
- legitster 9mo ago
  Have you tried the Colonial Charter mod? Adds an insane level of content. Also, there are now dozens of games that took the concept and ran with it. From Space Base to Manor Lords to Timberborn.
  - lloydatkinson 9mo ago
    No I haven't, sadly I can't find the real one on Steam as it suffers the same problem every other Steam game does; hundreds of suspicious copy pastes of original mods.
bluGill 9mo ago
that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like nice clothing even when the weather (and culture) allows nudism
- Retric 9mo ago
  Women and children very much participate in farming back then, harvest was a “all hands on deck” situation. Similarly by adding ‘and clothe bodies’ that captures well over half of a typical woman’s labor back then. Drop spindles sucked up an enormous amount of labor before you even had cloth.
  - bluGill 9mo ago
    At times it was all hands on deck for harvest - but most of the time it wasn't and that rest is an important part of village life missing. As you say, drop spindles suck.
    - ab5tract 9mo ago
      If you aren’t reaping of sowing, your labor isn’t in the fields anyway. People don’t understand that there are ebbs and flows to a farming life. There is always work to do but no one is out in the fields much unless it’s harvest or seeding times.
      - bluGill 9mo ago
        Many crops are not hands off. wheat chokes out weeds, but you need to weed the garden. You need to water crops in a drough - if you could get water (from a well or river). rice needs a lot of labor to manage water levels
  - eapressoandcats 9mo ago
    Bret Deveraux linked to estimates that 70% of producing clothes is spinning, 20% is weaving, and 10% is sewing. We tend to think of weaving as the time consuming thing but that’s because the spinning wheel had been around for a while by the time the Industrial Revolution happened.
qcnguy 9mo ago
A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.

relaxing 9mo ago

Reminds me of the Walking Dead tv show where they had communities being fed by a few raised beds with tomato cages and half a dozen corn stalks.

nitwit005 9mo ago
People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement. It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.
  - bluGill 9mo ago
    You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village. expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village. more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.
    - bee_rider 9mo ago
      I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.
      - bluGill 9mo ago
        Walls themselves are a symptom. People generally build walls when they are afraid their village will be attacked. They are a lot of work so a safe village won't have them. (safe sometimes means you have a watchers and run to a nearby city with walls on need)
    - nine_k 9mo ago
      Cutting off some forest might help.
      - bluGill 9mo ago
        What forest? Either it was owned by a noble with enough of an army to stop you, your great...grandparents already cut it, or the land wouldn't be useful for farming for some other reason. North America had vast empty forests - but remember just before Europeans arrived disease (small pox) killed large portions of the population. We have very little recorded about what life was like before Columbus, but archeological evidence suggests that the land was already used to the max capacity of their technology. (Europe did bring technology to better use the land - for some definition of better. I'm not qualified to comment on why they didn't develop the technology, but there seems to be some interesting culture factors - perhaps you can find an expert)
  - Gravityloss 9mo ago
    Just like in I guess a large portion of human history after farming started. You abandoned the fields and retreated to the walled hilltop when the enemy came. Maybe that's what we have been genetically conditioned to expect and that's why we have these zombie films and series.
- eapressoandcats 9mo ago
  The funny thing about this is that pre modern cities featured in modern media are always surrounded by unformed grassland because it makes the shot more dramatic and it’s easier to do than showing lots of little farms growing in density up to the city walls.
- rendaw 9mo ago
  People always talk about how reality is too boring, and that's why shows need to have spaceships bouncing around and explosion sounds and superhumans etc. And then something like The Expanse comes out and it turns out that realism is actually really interesting. Sure, the space is unfamiliar realism, but so is serf life to most viewers. And direction is also very important.
  - enaaem 9mo ago
    One example I can think of is armour. In movies armour don’t seem to do anything at all. You see fully cladded soldiers getting killed by single sword blows, but people in armour are actually really hard to kill. There is a lot of story potential by treating armour like super suits, where characters get stronger with armour upgrades and elite soldiers are like Space Marines.
    - Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
      I've seen clips of medieval reenactments, iirc in Poland they don't really hold back. But they try to use swords on people in full plate armor, which... does nothing, really. Anyway, you mention Space Marines, there's animations and lots of media about them. Some depicting them as basically invulnerable (like the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level), but plenty of them where they die en masse - because while they're super suits, they're up against the worst the universe can throw at them (like the British).
      - Ekaros 9mo ago
        40k is weird. The scales are often entirely off. Considering the stated populations and areas involved. Or the amount of equipment fielded. This comes from it fundamentally being small scale skirmish game. So realistic army sizes are not possible. And on other hand you need some level of game balance. You can't expect one side to have dozen models and other to field thousands or tens of thousands. And even there. Considering stated population of any reasonably build world to be in billions and more populated to go to hundreds of billions. Number of normal humans you could stick a weapon in hands and told to shoot at that direction would still be in at least millions if not billions. A few thousand whatever can do very little against that.
- CalRobert 9mo ago
  Well, a little diversity in crops wouldn’t hurt. And most of the corn isn’t for humans

lloydatkinson 9mo ago

I wish the Banished developer hadn't abandoned it

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 9mo ago
Abandoned? What was unfinished? I was satisfied when I played it. My only complaint was something about population growth or the ageing of people being too quick IIRC.
legitster 9mo ago
Have you tried the Colonial Charter mod? Adds an insane level of content. Also, there are now dozens of games that took the concept and ran with it. From Space Base to Manor Lords to Timberborn.
- lloydatkinson 9mo ago
  No I haven't, sadly I can't find the real one on Steam as it suffers the same problem every other Steam game does; hundreds of suspicious copy pastes of original mods.

bluGill 9mo ago

that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like nice clothing even when the weather (and culture) allows nudism

Retric 9mo ago
Women and children very much participate in farming back then, harvest was a “all hands on deck” situation. Similarly by adding ‘and clothe bodies’ that captures well over half of a typical woman’s labor back then. Drop spindles sucked up an enormous amount of labor before you even had cloth.
- bluGill 9mo ago
  At times it was all hands on deck for harvest - but most of the time it wasn't and that rest is an important part of village life missing. As you say, drop spindles suck.
  - ab5tract 9mo ago
    If you aren’t reaping of sowing, your labor isn’t in the fields anyway. People don’t understand that there are ebbs and flows to a farming life. There is always work to do but no one is out in the fields much unless it’s harvest or seeding times.
    - bluGill 9mo ago
      Many crops are not hands off. wheat chokes out weeds, but you need to weed the garden. You need to water crops in a drough - if you could get water (from a well or river). rice needs a lot of labor to manage water levels
- eapressoandcats 9mo ago
  Bret Deveraux linked to estimates that 70% of producing clothes is spinning, 20% is weaving, and 10% is sewing. We tend to think of weaving as the time consuming thing but that’s because the spinning wheel had been around for a while by the time the Industrial Revolution happened.

qcnguy 9mo ago

A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.