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

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I have just finished developing a method of working out navy support limits for countries. This should allow you to conclude how many warships your country is able to support, and it is based on considerably more factors than army size, largely because there are a lot of variables to consider in ship building. I say that it works out the naval limit, because it does not actually tell you how many ships your realm has, this figure will be a number between 0 and the naval limit. The reason for this is because ships unlike men are not so easily replaceable, thus we have to consider that after a naval defeat the actual number of ships remaining may be under this max number, and it requires significant capital and resources to replace that unit. At the start of your campaign one of your countries may have just had such an event thus the number will be below the support limit.

Anyway once I write it up I think you guys will understand better how I have come up with my conclusions. It will build upon what we have already done by setting up budgets derived from GDP etc.

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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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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.

[gn0rt0n]

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

[kurisari]

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...