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

  1. #11

    Post Working Out Your Navy

    Okay this tutorial build upon the first tutorial that discussed demographics, GDP and government income. You should use the information which you attained in that part of the tutorial to now get your naval support limit.

    Why is it important to know naval statistics? Naval statistics are important because ships in the middle ages were extremely expensive and are one of the most costly assets that a realm can possess. They are also a key element of strategic warfare, especially for nations that have large coastlines or have plans to invade foreign powers on islands or separate continents. Your navy will take up a decent sized proportion of your government income as it did for realms in the medieval era.

    This tutorial may get complex, so it is relatively important that you follow this tutorial along with the Example Excel spreadsheet, this will give you a better idea of the progression of how we get to the meaningful data.
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  2. #12

    Post

    Something I forgot to mention. Is that because you work out exactly the number of ships you have, it is a good idea to name the boats, much like how countries still name their ships, i.e. HMS Victory, Nossa Senhora da Conceicao, l'Ocean. To name but three famous ships. I like to do this because I can then embelish the ships and build into my stories.

    Once you have named them you may want to list them in a Naval Unit List, from this you can vary the size proportionally. What do I mean by this proportionate variation? Well everything you worked out in the naval statistics, can be taken at face value or can be taken as an average of the actual ships, but I normally treat my figures used as the general mean average. An example of what I mean by this is the dimensions of the ships. The average wargalley measure 42 x 5 x 2, but some boats could be 50 x 7 x 3 and others 34 x 3 x 2. Now I generally don't vary my navies much, but I like to include some variation to account for flagships and smaller maneuvreable galleys, that would be used to get in and amongst the heavier ships.

    This variation does not need to be accounted for in the calculations, it does not change the calculation. This is what I call "Created Variation". You take the mean values and go above and below the value to create some specific variation in the fleet.

    This is specifically nice for roleplaying elements because then you can differentiate between the ships and everything you have worked out feasible and correct. Slowly these tutorials shape the parameters of your world,then you can fill in the details.

  3. #13

    Post

    Just a quick note to say thank you for your write-ups. I really enjoy having numbers based off of a standard. Besides, theory-crafting is quite addicting itself!

    -Gary

  4. #14
    Guild Adept Notsonoble's Avatar
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    Thanks much for this... I've been working mostly off this http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm and a few discussions... so hopefully your stuff will help...

    I was also working on a spreadsheet based Medieval Demographics's info... I"ll have to see if I like yours better.
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  5. #15
    Guild Adept Notsonoble's Avatar
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    Quick note, you may want to resave your navy spreadsheet as a regular xls... not everybody's gone to MS Office 2007... so people on 2003, XP, or 2000 won't be able to open it, unless they download OOo, and then it does odd things.
    My D&D/Roleplaying Blog Making a new effort to update every two weeks!
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  6. #16
    Guild Artisan LonewandererD's Avatar
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    Hey Terminal, really getting building my world now and your tuts have been great. I just have two questions.

    1) Your tut works an army size for an all male fighting force but the nation I'm working has an uni-sex fighting force (there are several factors in the local culture that take priority over gender in terms of determining an individuals stauts). Do i just double the size of the fighting force? The answer seems simple I know but i can't help but feel it isn't that simple.

    2) Working out realm size seems simple if your working on a scale of 1 pix = 1 mile or if you're scaling up. I'm having some troubles when scaling down though, for the my current map the scale is 15 pixs = 1 mile. I worked out the size it would be if the nation emcompassed the whole map (excluding things like coastline) but when i used the histogram to determine the nation size (histogram divided by scale) I'm coming up with a number that is far larger than the estimated value. Am I doing something wrong?

    Sorry to bother you but if you (or anyone) can help point me in the right direction that would be great.

    -D-
    People come and people go. I walk amongst them, I see their faces; but none see mine. I pass them in the streets but nary a glance is spared my way, for what interest would they have in a Wanderer? Not of this world... Forever Alone... Forever Wandering... LoneWandererD...

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  7. #17
    Guild Artisan LonewandererD's Avatar
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    Please ignore the second question. I got what i wanted eventually. Maths, my achilles heel.

    -D-
    People come and people go. I walk amongst them, I see their faces; but none see mine. I pass them in the streets but nary a glance is spared my way, for what interest would they have in a Wanderer? Not of this world... Forever Alone... Forever Wandering... LoneWandererD...

    My DeviantART

    Finished Maps

    RIP Angel "Ingy" Yates - The first inspiration that guided me towards art. You will be missed...

  8. #18

    Post

    Sorry guys had connection problems during the Xmas period.

    Yeah you can double the fighting force, assuming that women fight at the same age range as the men. Thats basically what you are working out. In my tutorial I mention that in a male only fighting force you get rid of half of the population because half of the people should be female (probability of couple having female child is 50%). Obviously most countries have a slightly different distribution but this only serves to complicate matters. So half means you only have the males of the realm. Then we assume that in this realm that half the male population is below and above the age of military service. Therefore you get the number of people that are able to serve because they are of military service age. Then use the consciption rate to work the standing army.

    For a unisex fighting force, the national pool of fighters is doubled because you now include women of fighting age as well, which through our methods we assumed at the outset was identical to the male one. So if you have a male fighting national pool of 2,000,000 men, the same country with unisex fighting for would have 4,000,000 people which can then be multiplied by the consciption rate.

    So to answer your question very simply yes simply double the male figure. But I hope the above serves to explain why you can simply double it.

    If you were working out a different distribution of people within you country, i.e. there are 1.5 men to every woman then you would have to account for these differences, but my tutorial was designed to maintain the simplicity and work out the figures in a simple manner.

    Hope this helps.

  9. #19

    Praise

    Excellent! Splendid! This really made my day! I've been slowly building onto this specific fantasy world in terms of cultures, races, and characters - specialties of mine - for many years... but finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of putting together these details really makes it spring to life. And you explain it so well!

    Next step: finally putting together a sensible climate, haha...

  10. #20

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    Cheers bud, I will be coming out with more guides when I have done more work on my mapping. There is still a lot of economic and cartographic guides to come.

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