Assenpfeffer
First Post
Silveras said:The book has a sidebar talking about how to adjust the maintenance costs, which are tied to the number of hexes in the realm. 7 hexes is where the maintenance costs begin to mount up higher, marking the point of "large". You can change the table to make maintenance of realms with more hexes less expensive, and thus make larger realms "normal" for your world. The sidebar covers it pretty well.
In that case, how much attention is going to be required for each 12-mile hex/province? If a small kingdom (in my setting) takes up 20-30 hexes, does the amount of work involved in upkeep (especially given that FoB seems to use both weekly turns and quarterly "superturns") going to be incredibly cumbersome?
Silveras said:I am in the same boat; most of the 250 areas I consider single provinces would have between 8 and 15 hexes in them at 12 miles across the hex. Sub-infeudation lets me fix this for small realms, but I am not interested in re-writing all 250 just to make sure the numbers stay in balance.
The main area I'm looking at using FoB for is an elongated peninsula about 2900 miles long and averaging around 800 miles wide. This is roughly the same area as continental Europe as far east as the Russian border, near as I can tell. Just doing the simple math, that's going to give me a rather staggering 18,000+ hexes.
After fooling around with my map-in-progress, it looks like 84-mile hexes would work okay. 36-mile hexes still seem too small, but might be made to work.
Silveras said:Well, the production numbers may not need to be changed at all. Since they are already abstract numbers that do not tie back to "X gp" or "X tons of iron", you could just keep them the same ... except...
The troop movements are tied to the production numbers and to the 12-mile size. Adjusting the 12-mile size up to 72, as you mention, makes your troops move 6x as fast. You pay resource points to move troops, so making the hexes bigger means you can move the troops 6x as far for the same cost.
Remember that bringing the cross-hex distance up to 72 miles across makes the area about 34.75 x the area of the 12-mile hexes. That needs to be the factor for any attempt to scale the resources.
You can cut the speed of the troops by dividing their movement points by the same amount you multiplied the distance. That has a funny effect, as their movement points are 7x their base movement (7x daily movement to represent 1 week), so in the sample case you presented, movement points would be 7/6 (1.1666667) x D&D movement in 5' squares. You might as well just say they can move as many hexes as squares at that point, and round off.
The resource points may take care of itself, at that point. If you don't try to scale them, then the 6x as far for the same cost makes sense.
84-mile hexes would put that movement ratio right on the money. And thinking about it, 12-mile hexes nestle nicely in an 84-mile hex. Hmmm...
If we do this, though, wouldn't it mean that the proportion of a nation's total resourses needed to move a unit across it would be 6x as much, making troop movement costs inflate to an uncomfortably large proportion of the total budget?
Aaargh - this is shrivelling my brain.
Silveras said:The rules for units finding each other when they wind up in the same hex will likely need some attention, then. Armies are much more likely to be able to avoid each other in 3600 square miles of area than they are in 125 square miles of area.
That, at least, seems fixable, given my (admmittedly tenuous) understanding of how the rules work.
Also, does FoB (or AEG's Empire, for that matter,) address the issue of naval movement and/or combat?