Comparison: Strongholds & Dynasties - Empire - Magical Medieval Society - Birthright

[Assenpfeffer]

Okay, here's what I've looked at so far, and my own initial impressions, without going into any nitty-gritty analysis of mechanics (which I'm disinclined to do until I manage to track down a copy of FoB.)

Empire - Fair to Good scalability, but scales smaller than it seems to think it does - for the needs of some (read: me,) a kingdom-level game will need to be played at this book's "Empire" level, and some of the numbers might not make sense at that level, I think. Fairly vague in a number of places, but generally clearer than S&D. Nice, clear-cut action types and what looks to be a workable system for mass combat. If there's a quick-resolution mass combat system in this book (and it's implied that there is,) I have not found it yet.

Strongholds & Dynasties - The "Strongholds" part of the book is pretty good, an excellent and comprehensive building designer. The "Dynasties" part is not so good, and couldn't be used for a Birthright-style (in which domain management is the main focus of the game,) campaign without a good deal of additional rules work and a number of assumptions on the GM's part. Scale is supposed to be determined by the GM, but the assumtions made by the designers seemed to be the scale would be small - keep and nascent barony hacked out of the wilderness small. The economics system is flat-out broken, but not, I think, unfixable. In addition, many of the modifiers (for loyalty, control and so forth,) for the various actions seem out of whack, but I'm not sure that'd be the case during play. The core of an excellent Domain Management system is present here, but the fleshing-out doesn't seem to have happened properly.

A Magical Medieval Society - Found it unexpectedly today while hunting (unsucessfully) for FoB, so I can't say too much about it yet. It appears that it's not at all what I'm looking for to run Birthright-style Struggle of Kingdoms campaigns, but it also appears that it will be very valuable to the Ars Magica game I'm currently running, or to any Harn campaign I might run in the future. It's far better and more comprehensive than HarnManor even at first glance. It also looks superior (clearer, certainly) to the Chivalry & Sorcery rules for running manors and feudal states, pending looking closely at the numbers it provides for arable land, population fed by farmed acres, and so forth.

FoB - Sounds great - No One within 50 miles of me has it. I may end up ordering it online.

Feel free to add, raise additional points, or disagree completely.

 

[poilbrun]

Hi all!

First of all, thanks to Silveras for the work you're doing.

I'd like to know how hard it would be to mix the various systems to come up with a good system for realm management. At the moment, I have access to Empire, MMS:WE, Birthright & Cry Havoc, and my copies of S&D and FoB should arrive this week. It seems every book has some good parts, and no clear winner seems to come out for every point of the comparison (even though FoB seems to be my best bet if I have to go with only one system). According to what I've read in this thread, I feel like taking the Stronghold part of S&D and the Ministers part of Empire and add them to FoB, maybe adding some parts of the holdings from Birthright if I feel like playing something else than a monarch (I would need to see how to give revenue to the various holdings, but with Guilds, Temples and Magic Academies in FoB, it wouldn't be too difficult to insert the various holdings from BR in FoB). I will probably only use MMS:WE for roleplay purpose and if I start the characters in a small fief, but I believe the system therein wouldn't scale very well for a very large territory. As far as war is concerned, I hesitate between the Cry Havoc system and FoB (which has the advantage of being directly linked with the basic system I'll use), though I must admit I do not know the system used in S&D at all.

So, to those who already know all these books, would such a mix be very difficult to create?

Thanks for any help!

 

[d4]

I think I'd rather just create a new category of city size and work with that. Clustering to get around a mechanical limitation strikes me as a bit of rules-lawyering. If I *need* to have a city much bigger than a DMG metropolis, then I will define a new category and place it accordingly. Such should be sufficiently rare that this just about has to be an easier approach.

i think there really does need to be a few categories above "metropolis" on the city scale from the DMG. Metropolis starts at 25,000, which is still pretty darn small, even for a medieval city. (well, it might be OK for most medieval European cities, but it doesn't do justice to cities of the age in other parts of the world.)

here's some lists i got off of ask.com's geography section:

Largest Cities of 1000 AD
1: Cordova, Spain (450,000)
2: Kaifeng, China (400,000)
3: Constantinople, Turkey (300,000) (at this stage, still a Christian city; the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire)
4: Angkor, Cambodia (200,000)
5: Kyoto, Japan (175,000)
6: Cairo, Egypt (135,000)
7: Baghdad, Iraq (125,000)
8: Nishapur (Neyshabur), Iran (125,000)
9: Al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia (110,000)
10: Patan (Anhilwara), India (100,000)

only two of these can even charitably be considered European cities: Constantinople was really a holdover from an earlier time and not really in the sphere of Western Christendom, and Cordova at the time was a Muslim city.

Largest Cities of 1500 AD
1: Beijing, China (672,000)
2: Vijayanagar, India (500,000)
3: Cairo, Egypt (400,000)
4: Hangzhou, China (250,000)
5: Tabriz, Iran (250,000)
6: Istanbul, Turkey (200,000)
7: Gaur, India (200,000)
8: Paris, France (185,000)
9: Guangzhou, China (150,000)
10: Nanjing, China (147,000)

Paris is the only European city to make the top 10, but i wouldn't be surprised if London, as well as some Italian and Dutch cities aren't in the 11-20 range.

as far as the idea of using cities in multiple hexes to simulate "megalopoli," i don't think that's really needed. S. John Ross' excellent "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" article (which i don't have the link to at the moment... ) gives an estimate of approximately 38,500 people per square mile for urban population densities. so the Paris of 1500 at 185,000 people (almost 7.5 times larger than the minimum metropolis size listed in the DMG!) would cover around 4.8 square miles, or a square a little over 2 miles on a side. it would easily fit into a single FoB 12-mile hex. in fact, even the Beijing of 1500 (at 672,000) would only be about 17.4 square miles (assuming the default urban population density given above), or about 4.2 miles on a side if it was a perfect square (which i seem to recall it might have been...), still fitting easily inside a single hex. in fact, since a 12-mile hex has an area very nearly 125 square miles, a city would need to have a population of over 4.8 million (at the default medieval urban population density) to cover an entire hex!

[edit]found the link to S. John's article: it's here.

 

[jgbrowning]

as far as the idea of using cities in multiple hexes to simulate "megalopoli," i don't think that's really needed. S. John Ross' excellent "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" article (which i don't have the link to at the moment... ) gives an estimate of approximately 38,500 people per square mile for urban population densities. so the Paris of 1500 at 185,000 people (almost 7.5 times larger than the minimum metropolis size listed in the DMG!) would cover around 4.8 square miles, or a square a little over 2 miles on a side. it would easily fit into a single FoB 12-mile hex. in fact, even the Beijing of 1500 (at 672,000) would only be about 17.4 square miles (assuming the default urban population density given above), or about 4.2 miles on a side if it was a perfect square (which i seem to recall it might have been...), still fitting easily inside a single hex. in fact, since a 12-mile hex has an area very nearly 125 square miles, a city would need to have a population of over 4.8 million (at the default medieval urban population density) to cover an entire hex!

[edit]found the link to S. John's article: it's here.

I don't think Paris was much bigger than a square mile. Build up, not out when most of the population walks (at least in the west, I'm not very informed with eastern demographics). Even Rome (the biggest city of them all til modern times) was only around 9 sq. miles when it had a million or so people.

There's a lot of flexibility in urban density. A city with a pop of only 35k may cover 1 squre mile, while a city of 65k covers the same space. It also often depends on politcal stability (ie. are walls really necessary?).

I'd just shove any city under 100k people into roughly 1 square mile for simplicity's sake. I'd put 100k-500k cities into 1-5 square miles. Not very precise, but should do the trick.

joe b.

 

[Warbringer]

By the side...

It seems that a critical flaw in the use of population densities is that they only work because of the amount of natural resources that are taken from surrounding provinces.

Sure the skills that exist in a city increase the base population that can be sustained in the city, but the raw goods that feed the city have to come from areas far less able to sustain a high PD.

Unless I'm missing something, which isn't a big stretch , this economic relationship is missing in the above applications of PD.

 

[Silveras]

Empire - Fair to Good scalability, but scales smaller than it seems to think it does - for the needs of some (read: me,) a kingdom-level game will need to be played at this book's "Empire" level, and some of the numbers might not make sense at that level, I think. Fairly vague in a number of places, but generally clearer than S&D. Nice, clear-cut action types and what looks to be a workable system for mass combat. If there's a quick-resolution mass combat system in this book (and it's implied that there is,) I have not found it yet.

That's pretty much as I see it. There is much room for addition to Empire, but its biggest problems are: 1) the base scale sizes are much too small, and 2) the scaling factor for land (20) is different than the other units (10). The result of #2 is that a domain that has 75% of its housing occupied on the Kingdom scale is overcrowded on the Empire scale, and almost empty on the Barony scale. If you assume the Kingdom scale is "most correct" and scale the land area at the same proportion up and down as the other units (by 10) the system should work better.

Strongholds & Dynasties - The "Strongholds" part of the book is pretty good, an excellent and comprehensive building designer. The "Dynasties" part is not so good, and couldn't be used for a Birthright-style (in which domain management is the main focus of the game,) campaign without a good deal of additional rules work and a number of assumptions on the GM's part. Scale is supposed to be determined by the GM, but the assumtions made by the designers seemed to be the scale would be small - keep and nascent barony hacked out of the wilderness small. The economics system is flat-out broken, but not, I think, unfixable. In addition, many of the modifiers (for loyalty, control and so forth,) for the various actions seem out of whack, but I'm not sure that'd be the case during play. The core of an excellent Domain Management system is present here, but the fleshing-out doesn't seem to have happened properly.

Again, that sounds like the conclusions I reached. I am still waiting (on the Strongholds & Dynasties thread) for someone to show me a resource setup that works for a Large City. *I* think it is unfixable, at this point, without a near-total re-write.

A Magical Medieval Society - Found it unexpectedly today while hunting (unsucessfully) for FoB, so I can't say too much about it yet. It appears that it's not at all what I'm looking for to run Birthright-style Struggle of Kingdoms campaigns, but it also appears that it will be very valuable to the Ars Magica game I'm currently running, or to any Harn campaign I might run in the future. It's far better and more comprehensive than HarnManor even at first glance. It also looks superior (clearer, certainly) to the Chivalry & Sorcery rules for running manors and feudal states, pending looking closely at the numbers it provides for arable land, population fed by farmed acres, and so forth.

Check the Expeditious Retreat web site, in the Community Support section. I provided a PDF on using Population Density to define regions in a larger-scale game. Substitute 'Provinces' for 'Regions', and it works with Birthright (which is what I had in mind when I wrote it).

I think MMS:WE provides an excellent companion to any of the Domain Management systems, for detailing the "lower scale" operations.

 

[Silveras]

Hi all!

First of all, thanks to Silveras for the work you're doing.

I'd like to know how hard it would be to mix the various systems to come up with a good system for realm management. At the moment, I have access to Empire, MMS:WE, Birthright & Cry Havoc, and my copies of S&D and FoB should arrive this week. It seems every book has some good parts, and no clear winner seems to come out for every point of the comparison (even though FoB seems to be my best bet if I have to go with only one system). According to what I've read in this thread, I feel like taking the Stronghold part of S&D and the Ministers part of Empire and add them to FoB, maybe adding some parts of the holdings from Birthright if I feel like playing something else than a monarch (I would need to see how to give revenue to the various holdings, but with Guilds, Temples and Magic Academies in FoB, it wouldn't be too difficult to insert the various holdings from BR in FoB). I will probably only use MMS:WE for roleplay purpose and if I start the characters in a small fief, but I believe the system therein wouldn't scale very well for a very large territory. As far as war is concerned, I hesitate between the Cry Havoc system and FoB (which has the advantage of being directly linked with the basic system I'll use), though I must admit I do not know the system used in S&D at all.

So, to those who already know all these books, would such a mix be very difficult to create?

Thanks for any help!

Some will be easier to mix than others. For example, taking the Ministers from Empire and adding them to FoB will have no effect, really, because FoB does not use skill checks to resolve actions; the Ministers are in Empire so that "skilled deputies" can use their superior skill checks to resolve some things for the ruler.

Likewise, the superficial presence of Guilds, Temples, and Magic Academies in FoB looks like making them Birthright-like will be easy. Until you try. Then you realize that there are no actions for them to perform unless you add them; and they have no resources to work with unless you re-define the tax-and-surplus system. You will then have to re-define the prices of various improvements, etc., to compensate for the fact that the ruler and populace will have less resources to spend on building and upkeep.

All of which returns me to my earlier feeling that Birthright is the "best" of the systems overall, and MMS:WE helps to handle the lower-level that Birthright mostly ignores. Which, in turn, is what led me to start posting my house rules for a non-Cerilian 3rd Edition Birthright (in the House Rules forum).

 

[d4]

I don't think Paris was much bigger than a square mile. Build up, not out when most of the population walks (at least in the west, I'm not very informed with eastern demographics). Even Rome (the biggest city of them all til modern times) was only around 9 sq. miles when it had a million or so people.

i'll have to respectfully disagree.

you're giving medieval Paris a population density of about 185,000 people per square mile, but even modern-day New York City only has a population density of less than half that... (see this site.)

i doubt Paris was more built up than Manhattan. (though a fantasy city could definitely be... from what i've seen in Eberron, that'd be a likely candidate for a fantasy world with huge, hyperdense cities.)

 

[Silveras]

i think there really does need to be a few categories above "metropolis" on the city scale from the DMG. Metropolis starts at 25,000, which is still pretty darn small, even for a medieval city. (well, it might be OK for most medieval European cities, but it doesn't do justice to cities of the age in other parts of the world.)

here's some lists i got off of ask.com's geography section:
--snip --

only two of these can even charitably be considered European cities: Constantinople was really a holdover from an earlier time and not really in the sphere of Western Christendom, and Cordova at the time was a Muslim city.

-- snip --

Paris is the only European city to make the top 10, but i wouldn't be surprised if London, as well as some Italian and Dutch cities aren't in the 11-20 range.

as far as the idea of using cities in multiple hexes to simulate "megalopoli," i don't think that's really needed. S. John Ross' excellent "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" article (which i don't have the link to at the moment... ) gives an estimate of approximately 38,500 people per square mile for urban population densities. so the Paris of 1500 at 185,000 people (almost 7.5 times larger than the minimum metropolis size listed in the DMG!) would cover around 4.8 square miles, or a square a little over 2 miles on a side. it would easily fit into a single FoB 12-mile hex. in fact, even the Beijing of 1500 (at 672,000) would only be about 17.4 square miles (assuming the default urban population density given above), or about 4.2 miles on a side if it was a perfect square (which i seem to recall it might have been...), still fitting easily inside a single hex. in fact, since a 12-mile hex has an area very nearly 125 square miles, a city would need to have a population of over 4.8 million (at the default medieval urban population density) to cover an entire hex!

Thanks, that helps confirm my "feeling" that the cities were a bit small. I think a "Major Metropolis" at 50,000, a "Greater Metropolis" at 100,000, and a "Monumental City" at 200,000 would probably fill out the city roster nicely.

As Warbringer mentions, the PD of a city is Ok for defining its "footprint" on the map, but the greater question is: "How many non-city-dwellers are required to support it ?" For that, it is important to remember that MMS:WE uses 8% as a base urban population rate, meaning there will be 11 or so people OUTSIDE the city for every one in it. A Greater Metropolis at 100,000 people would require 1.1 Million farmers to feed it, at that rate. At the "standard" regional Population Densities of MMS:WE (30-160 for most, up to 200 max), that would mean anywhere from 5,500 square miles to 36,666.66667 square miles required to support it. That would be about 7 to 47 30-mile hexes (or 44 to 293 12-mile hexes).

 

[d4]

A Greater Metropolis at 100,000 people would require 1.1 Million farmers to feed it, at that rate. At the "standard" regional Population Densities of MMS:WE (30-160 for most, up to 200 max), that would mean anywhere from 5,500 square miles to 36,666.66667 square miles required to support it. That would be about 7 to 47 30-mile hexes (or 44 to 293 12-mile hexes).

yow, that's a lot of "empty" space!

i think it's worth noting (and this analysis bears it out) that especially in the medieval period, most nation-states would have only one really big city. Paris for France, London for England, Madrid and perhaps Barcelona for Spain, Istanbul for the Ottomans, etc. there simply were no other cities even close to their size in their respective countries, and this might have something to do with it: it took large swaths of the countryside to feed the city slickers!