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Moderator
of Candle'Bre
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Apr 1999
time: 17:55
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Exploring the idea of “Pop Points” (further discussion of one of Leland’s ideas)
In another thread, Leland made mention of the possibility of breaking down the populations of our various provinces into “points” so we’d not have to track individual members of a population.
Doing so would serve to simplify a number of elements for us, and we could do so in a way that would not really cause us to “lose” anything.
Having thought about the matter a bit further, here’s where my brain is currently.
Let’s track population in 100 unit increments. I say this because, conveniently enough, a company of soldiers happens to contain 100 men, and this would be quite a convenient number to use.
What follows is nowhere close to being included in the prototype engine, and definitely doesn’t exist in the core rules as they stand at present, so this could be rightly termed as being entirely conjectural.
It nonetheless makes for some excellent discussion, and it’s all about further breaking down the population of Candle’Bre into little chunks and slices.
We’ve already started down this path to a degree when we talked earlier about the social dynamic model, and breaking the population down into chunks there. Well and good, so let’s build on that basic design.
We know (as mentioned above) that any time you raise a company of troops, said company contains 100 men, and 100 men are removed from your population.
We mentioned elsewhere that the eventual goal would be to have population either “assigned” (doing stuff for you, and specifically NOT contributing to the tax rolls), or unassigned, and contributing to your tax rolls.
So what kinds of stuff would “assigned” populations do?
The first ground rule we ought to make is this: Since we’re already using 100 men = 1 “pop point,” then I think for the sake of keeping with that convention, we ought to use 1 pop point as our standard “unit of measure” for other stuff as well.
For example:
100 workers (1 pop point) could be assigned to….
* work a plot of land to generate food (with the amount of food produced to be determined by the land quality and your infrastructural tech level) (note that this will eventually encompass both the growing of grains and the husbanding of various types of herds, but that is quite some distance into the future, and several iterations down the path, where the economic model is concerned!)
· form a chapter house of the crafter’s guild, which is (or will be…for the moment, these points are just given arbitrarily) the means by which a province generates “Build Points” (how stuff gets built)
* We could also assign a point of pop as a survey unit (working to make wilderness areas useable for some other purpose)
· And we can assign 1 (or more) pop points to buildings that get built in order to enhance their effectiveness (ie., a Shrine has X effects all by itself…assign a pop point to it, and you get Y as well)—in fact, this might be a good way to move right on into the notion of great people (aside from great War Leaders, who are covered in the combat model)…assigning pop points to these buildings could well be the triggering mechanism for the accumulation of great people points
Unassigned pop points would:
· serve as the foundation for your tax base
· serve as your “levy pool” (train troops from the levy pool)
Some interesting things to think about here:
Let’s say you build a library (academic building) in the Duchy of Leland. Let’s say you staff it.
But hold on…what if Leland currently HAS no Academics? You can’t very well staff a library with a bunch of peasants for any effect, so…what to do?
Well, one thing we could do is say that magically, when you decide to staff the library, everybody who gets a job there is suddenly considered an academic.
Now…if your province already HAS 100 academics, then it’s a non issue, since those 100 souls (1 pop point) will just gravitate to your new building, but if you don’t…voila! You have just helped to foster the creation (or strengthening) of that particular social class in the province in question.
The groovy thing about making 1 pop point = 100 people is that we don’t actually lose anybody.
By definition and design, each pop group will have its own growth rate, so to determine the growth rate of the province as a whole, we’ll have to take the weighted averages of the growth rates of each group. No biggie there, and fractional “pop points” are simply stored but not able to be used (so fractional points are just held onto until they mature into “full” points.
This will lead to some slightly more math-intensive setup, cos we might have 2 points of Aristocrats (with .45 stored and building), 6 points of Clergy (with .2 stored and building), and so on, but that’s okay too….certainly not insurmountable.
Anyway…just putting more stuff out there for consideration and discussion…. 
-=Vel=-
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