It’s since updated, but it was an hour or two before it did so.
Interesting. Asceticism and self-abnegation has less emphasis in the Faith of Sénan than in Christianity, and while those theological threads are present in the cults of the Odos Astrid and Visalter (for example), odos to whom the PC is likely unexposed. But I think I can see my way to softening some of the language, especially for the pious.
Yup.
Yes, you’re allowed to collect game from the forest; it’s yours. But what I really need to do is control for/balance the swine against the forest acreage; swine feast on the nuts during the fall. Without that “mast,” you’d need to feed them a lot more food.
I suppose spending time hunting could be an annual activity; I was more imagining a hunting sequence with other members of the gentry.
If you go earlier, it’s hounds. Or is it that you just like harpists?
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Hey!
I just played through this wip and I really like the concept of it, really enjoy those games which allow you to control a fief or kingdom and this has all those elements. However, one comment would be that its a bit of an information overload at the beginning cause the player has no idea what he’s doing (maybe this is the intended effect?) and the reports get quite draggy with each additional iteration in the sense that I don’t really care too much about all the detailed stats and having to click through them every year seems a bit tedious. Perhaps one way to go around that would be to have aggregations, like grain instead of wheat and oat, meat instead of pork and beef etc.
That way, you will be able to present the information in a succinct way, and perhaps instead of making a decision on every aspect (having to choose for each animal and all that), I could take a blanket approach (kill half keep half) and then micro manage.
Regardless, I really like this concept, and I think that it has a ton of potential! A bit like swamp castle (which was super interesting) Hope the feedback helps!
Oh, Fiogan! You’ve just impoverished the whole manor!
I finally looked up how much forest acreage you need for a hog, and it’s two each! That means all those poor half-villeins are going to lose their sows, which means a lot less tax-pigs for the PC.
But, better to figure that out now. 
Seems fun so far, I can enjoy a management-focused game. I’m not sure if it’s just the demo at the moment, but I did reach a point where it seemed like I couldn’t do anything new, many options never became available.
Bit of both!
I’m going to put that on a sticky note above my desk for when I’m tempted to slack off…Sorry, half-villeins; farewell, wee piggies.
Yes, I’d pictured the latter too, but also wondered if we had poachers, and what the local law was like on these matters.
As soon as I begin management, I look at my stats, annnd…
Manor Stores
Wheat: -200 bushels
lol
Anyway, the number of sheep does not seem to be changing from year to year, however many lambs I slaughter. I get 53 sheep deaths and 75 surviving lambs but the number doesn’t change. EDIT: Checking: The sheep herd is reset to 350 automatically every year.
I’m consistently losing more children than are born. What’s up with that and how can I fix it?
…by 573, I am down to -14 villeins.
Why are we culling young animals instead of the big adult oxen and sheep who provide the most meat? (And on that note, do oxen provide labor days? They probably should if they don’t.)
Medieval note (unless you’ve intentionally changed this): Landless are free, not servile - to be a serf, you have to be tied to land. Admittedly, they’re free to starve, but that’s landlessness for you…Also, landless population should probably rise if you’re hiring a lot of labor.
(Source: Lords of Men, Ars Magica.)
I enjoy this sort of game (speaking as the one who didn’t rest until he turned XoR’s winter season massively profitable), so you definitely have my cash if you make a full game out of this! I recommend “Lord of the Manor” for a name, and would suggest balancing farming with Noble Deeds such as knighthood and warfare.
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'Tis great so far.
This kinda thing is very much down my alley, though I feel very much that the focus is kinda skewed right now. Like, we get a ton of numbers that amount to very little in the end because we lack a way to majorly influence them. For example, my pig population remains utterly stable, no matter what I do. 3 sows die each year, without fail (as do 53 sheep and 1-2 dairy cows and oxen respectively) and that’s exactly what I can replace because I can’t generate more vegetables; news acreage only offers me oats and wheat. Conversely, I always lose 53 sheep and get 158 lambs each year, no matter how many I do or don’t cull.
And I’m raking in both credit (15k after 14 years) and surplus hay. Never mind all the leather that’s going nowhere. Or the 2k cider surplus that I’m probably using for baths or drownings or something.
The game sorely needs ways to somehow gainfully employ these stores that add up. Maybe creating industries of sorts around these goods (a roadside inn to peddle cider to travelers or a bookbinder to fashion vellum from leather… speaking of!)
So this is obviously a made-up world and its rules are subject to your whims but… in medieval Europe, salt was easily worth more than grain. Salt mines were rare and salines inefficient. A bushel of wheat for 4 bushels of salt seems off. Calf hide is used to create vellum and thus an important resource in a presumably pre-paper world. Tossing it into the equation as leather feels like a missed chance to add more depth to the yearly calf culling decision. Again, matters might be different in this world, but this immediately stood out to me.
Lastly, I currently have 618 Villeins in the Farmlands but -146 Villeins in the Manor. I assume dying Villeins are deducted from the Manor and added to the Farmlands only but that’s just an educated guess.
That’s all I could take from half an hour of gameplay. I’m desperately looking forward for things to do between ledgers and I’d urge you to consider being able to do more than one thing per year. I mean, grading a road doesn’t require the landlord’s personal oversight, does it? All the building options feel like they should happen on the side, though maybe at an increased cost if you run out of Tradespeople and have to bring in Journeymen to do the work.
Either way, as I said, this is totally down my alley and I’d love to see more.
Edit: I actually like ‘Fief’ as the name. It’s short and catchy but maybe more suited to a boardgame than a Choicescript story. If I wouldn’t get yelled at for it being gendered I’d suggest “Manor Maketh the Man”.
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@jasonstevanhill Could I maybe suggest a glossary? There’s quite a few words in there that some people may not be aware of. (Although I can guess, I’m not sure what a thornet or caris is myself)
The glossary is what you get when you hit “Next” on the stats.
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Ah, did not know that (was using the “return to game” button)
I’m like, “no it doesn’t!” I worked so hard on that slaughtering mechanic! But your note about “every year” made me find the error. Thanks!
So, this is tough. I’m trying to hold cottar for someone who’s part of a household. The landless, if they don’t live about the manor house as servants, are tenants of the wealthier freepersons—the yeomen in particular.
(Also, I totally need a new term for “yeoman.”)
Are they tenants of the yeomen or laborers? Yeomen with tenants of their own implies an interesting dynamic - usually yeomen will crop their own land themselves.
“Freeholder?” “Freeman?” “Carl?”
Hi Spire,
I actually really struggled with the price of salt. I looked in a bunch of different places, trying to determine a reasonable exchange.
It’s been mused that peasants needed 100 lbs of salt / person / year in order to survive (presumably because that was how they preserved meat). Even if we cut that in half, the average family will need 5 bu salt / year. If it’s a one-to-one ratio, that damages the calorie intake of the family beyond repair; I mean, that’s almost a whole acre of wheat just for salt (at 6 bu / acre yield).
Actual price lists from one contemporary document seemed to price salt at 11.5 bu for 1 bu of wheat, which seemed (1.25 pence / lb of salt vs 1 shilling / lb wheat, multiplied by 50 lbs / salt and 60 lbs / wheat). But that seemed way to low; like, not worth tracking.
Alternately, this article breaks down the price of salt for a Roman soldier (obviously, not the right time period, but it’s not like yield would have increased that much). tl;dr: a Roman-era “minimum wage job” annual pay was worth 3 bu of salt. That would mean a rate of 1 to 10 bu wheat. That would mean 8.3 acres of wheat just to feed meet salt needs for a family for a year, before you even consider actually feeding them.
So, I’m not quite sure what to do there. I keep lowering the calorie intakes of the cottar families, and I’m wondering at what point they’re going to take up arms against me.
[FWIW this is great feedback and the particular kind I’m looking for right now. I want to figure out all these math problems before I start layering in the story.]
As for vellum, that’s a great idea. I’ve also considered adding butter (!). I’ll put it on my list.
And yes, there will be an opportunity to sell out of your stores, but also events that will make use of them.
EDIT
I’ve found other sources which I might be willing to give more credence to, that assert the annual consumption to be 20 lbs/person, not 100. If I go with that, and make it a 1-to-1 exchange, then I can preserve the cottar families’ diets, as that would only be a third of an acre of wheat for salt. But that would damage the PC’s finances, since their salt is based on actual use, not an abstracted “per person” cost.
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Laborers, but also “renting a bed.” And not tied to the place where they’re renting a bed; they may work as a servant in the manorhouse, and/or sell their labor to the tradespeople or the villeins.
Also, I’m keeping “Freeholders” as grouping Trades + Yeomen.
So I need a term for “Freeholder farmer.”
Here’s an idea: A mechanic where you need to hire a minimum number of maintenance-days to avoid your poor starving, based on the number of cottars and landless you have? If you aren’t hiring enough labor from the cottars, then they can’t feed their families - because cottars don’t have enough land to feed their families. They have to hustle for every day of work and every bite of food they can eat.
Just an idea if that eases your math any.
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As someone who both enjoyed and was torn to bits by the Winter section of XoR, I’m digging this. The only problem I have, which would have gone a good ways’ toward helping with the difficulty curve of the aforementioned Winter section as well: have an optional talk, perhaps with a steward or other advisor, going into a small amount of detail about the economic system. As others have pointed out, right now it’s a complex and none-too-straightforward system, with only the vague goals of saving up enough to buy your title and sword off in the distance.
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This is almost impossible. I have tried nocache and other javascript on my server. Now I tell people to use private windows or incognito mode which clears cache for the user.
How much caffeine did you drink to get this much done in a week?
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