Sulimo said:
Congrats Silveras. What an excellent job you've done.
Ever since Birthright I've wanted a set of rules for small scale domain management, and finally there's a bunch of books on the subject. Too bad I can't afford them all to stitch together for my own use
One thing I am wondering. The spreadsheets you used to create the examples. Have you put them online anywhere?
The spreadsheets I used for the MMS:WE example are posted on the Expeditious Retreat web site, on the Community Support page. There are several other very good pieces there by others, as well.
The page from Empire was taken from a template I put together, but is not posted anywhere. The ones I used for the Strongholds & Dynasties examples were "scratch sheets" that I kept making big changes to. Since the resource management system appears to "break" (actually, "crash into flaming ruins" is closer to the truth) with good-sized cities, I never finished. Mongoose put PDF versions of the sheets in the book on their site for download, though.
As for not being able to afford them ... the best investment for raidable resources has to be the Dragon magazine archive, if you can still find it in stores. The search feature is adequate, but you are better off opening the PDF in Acrobat Reader after you find the issue you want.
For example, in Dragon #94, there is the article "An army travels on its stomach: Large-scale logistics in a fantasy world" by Katherine Kerr. This article talks about how much food is available in a 30 mile hex, and how fast an army can move. Very useful information for domain management, and it answers a question asked in a different thread (How much grain can you grow in X area ?).
In Dragon #89, there is the article "Survival is a group effort: The effects of population growth and regrowth" by Stephen Inniss. This one talks about how to determine the natural population birth rate for fantasy races (a question asked on THIS thread).
While I did not do the lookup, Len Lakofka (creator and player of Leomund) wrote a very good article on playing "apprentice level" characters. It was for 1st Edition AD&D, but the ideas there are not too hard to adapt to 3rd edition. I seem to recall seeing a thread on that topic, recently. Also, he presented the Cloistered Cleric, an NPC class for a more-spells-less-fighting medieval monk-type cleric.
Yes, I am THAT old. I remember reading these when they were new.