[Award Winner] Cartographical Economics and Demographics - A Guide to Realism

[Al. I. Cuza]

The problem in CK and EU is, that the population in the provinces does not influence manpower. That is why in most games France becomes this invincible monster. I would like to create a system, where the actual population of a province influences the basic manpower, not only as applied modifiers.

[terminal]

The problem in CK and EU is, that the population in the provinces does not influence manpower. That is why in most games France becomes this invincible monster. I would like to create a system, where the actual population of a province influences the basic manpower, not only as applied modifiers.

I agree. One way you could do that is to have a variable (population growth), thus you can work out the manpower increase per year, based on the population pyramids of the percentage of the population that is eligible for military service. The idea I like about a CK system is that specific priovinces could provide different tyoes of troops based on the dominance of specific classes in that priovince. You could also permeate differences in recruitment rates in different provinces. This could also be incorporated into the economic picture as well, in that one could say in the provinces where the king has direct control he can perhaps recruit more troops, whereas in provinces which are less centralised and adminstered by a count or duke, recruitment and central government income is reduced because one would assume they would take a proportion of profits and has influence on reducing troops going to service for the realm. The count/duke would also likely maiintain his own small army for protection of the province, meaning the province has a smaller pool of manpower.

If one also assumes that the King province is the capital and is a heavily populated, then other provinces will have smaller manpower bases to start with.

You could even make it more complex by attributing different population growths to different provinces, i.e. provinces with smaller population will likely have smaller population increases whereas smaller provinces will have smaller population increases.

We also need to try and model domestic and international trade which I'm sure will not be easy.

[Al. I. Cuza]

Trade will indeed be hardest.

Ad population growth: Like in EU (and most grand strategy games) population growth should be calculated relatively, not in absolute numbers. There should be a base population growth modified by different aspects: religion, health, immigration, emigration, war, food supplies, etc... And there should be a base maximum for the population in provinces, again modified by production technology, land-fertility, maybe even magic, etc...

The population groups seem like nice ideas, but they don't only influence army composition and manpower, but also income, productivity and miscellaneous economical behavior. And here we should think of general traits which can then be applied randomly (frog-like fire breathing bards who eat brains wouldn't necessarily fit with the CK-specific groups )