Thanks for all the words of approval for my work.
su_liam - You should save time through using the same process I use. This is why I spent several hours trying to work out a way to use all the different elements to standardize the various economic and demographic elements of the world. I used to just work things out in my head and then once the map was finished I realised that, I had placed to many cities for some countries which was unrealistic for that portion of the world, worked out completely nonsensical statistics, which automatically disheartened me from continuing with that map.
Now I basically decide the size of that country based on my ideas and then everything else derives from that size and location on the planet and extrapolates to statistics which are consistent across the whole planet.
Also once you get the hang of using the excel spreadsheet and once you've done one Kingdom correctly you can quickly duplicate the results. I now can work out a whole kingdoms statistics in about 10 mins, something which used to take me several hours normally, and I still came up with inconsistent results.
FAHall - Its a good thing that you have a lot of the elements decided, I normally also like to have a mental picture of what I'm doing, but I use this system to test the feasibility of I'm doing. Especially since I tend to spurn magic in my world and thus have no other explanation for things.
The Kingdom Generator also ties up some of the loose ends that would take me a lot of effort to work out. Such as city populations etc that realistically would be very hard to work out by yourself and keep some consistency.
Anyway I really only documented the key information that is required for you to understand some of the more complex statistics of your nations and realms, and I took this on to understand military dynamics of countries. You could use this information to further understand other sectors of the economy. For example I have been working out how one would calculate the navy of a country, and costing patroling coastlines.
One could also use the government income and divide it up to understand different sectorial budgets which again you could use to work out whether certain infrastructural improvements and services are sustainable or affordable.
The importance of doing this kind of background understanding is that subconciously it will shape the story behind your world. For example I shaped three countries in one of my old maps which I used for this tutorial. These countries were the Kingdom of Harran an old Elven Kingdom, The Vasvar Empire, a very powerful human country with vast territories and the Republic of Cavains which I had split from Vasvar ages ago. Through my workings I realised that Cavains could not of survived Vasvar for the several years since independance unless they had military help from Harran. Thus it shaped my story, that Harran and Cavains had struck up an alliance together because of the menace of Vasvar. The astoundingly nice thing about it is that a war between Vasvar and Harran and Cavains would favour Vasvar in terms of numbers and military expenditure, but not by much. Thus the politics of the region have been shaped by understanding that the mere fact that Harran and Cavains exist, must of required them to ally togeher against a mutual enemy. This is a military example, but this is just one area that can be looked at.
You can literally work out the feasibility of everything. You could work out whether the cost of building 10 castles a year, a 500 meter bridge in the capital, and a golden statue to the gods is feasible. Its all about working out the budgets from income recieved, then looking at the cost elements required in building these things, in similar manner that I did in the military example at the end of my tutorial. I will no doubt cover this in a later tutorial, with an actual example.
Anyway once you start thinking like this, at least in my experience you wonder how you went without it as everything makes logical sense.
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