Economy

Material · Goods and prices · Money · Tribute and legitimacy ·

Material

The whole of it, in one loop:

   mountain ──dig──▶ stock ──build──▶ the city ──burn / neglect──▶ ruins
                       ▲                  │                         │
                       │                  └──────demolish───────────┤
                       └──────────────salvage────────────────────────┘
                       ▲
                  trade (ships)

Early on the arrow from the mountain is thick and the one from the ruins is almost nothing: a founding-era town robs a ruin only if it is much the nearer, and gets a quarter of it back. By the industrial age the two are comparable. By the contemporary age the city is mostly feeding on itself, which is exactly when it has run the mountain down, and that is the point. The curve of the recovery rate is tuned so the two crossings happen at roughly the same time.

Goods and prices

Local production chains, real stock, and prices that move. Grain, timber, stone, brick, charcoal, iron, cloth, tools, glass, coal, steel, concrete: each era unlocks a few and makes a few obsolete. Goods exist as quantities in warehouses that are actual buildings in actual places; burn the warehouse and the grain is gone. Prices move on a stock-versus-appetite curve.

Trade with the foreign cities is a caravan or a barge that takes real time to arrive, carries a real cargo, and can fail. Price differences drive it. A foreign city that industrialises before you will undercut your weavers and put a district out of work, which shows up as empty houses, then squatters, then a slum, then a fire.

Money

One treasury. Taxes on private income, tariffs on imports, the market’s own trade come in; wages, relief, the garrison, public works and imports go out. The founders arrive with a small purse and enough grain and timber for the first year. A citizen keeps a separate purse and leaves when the tax is more than the town is worth to them.

Tribute and legitimacy

Rents flow from serfs to their lords and a share flows from village knights to the town’s lord, scaled by what the two peoples think of each other. Feudal dues end in the industrial era.

Legitimacy is the number the rest reads. It starts middling and moves with what happens: a civic building finished, a siege lifted and relief spending raise it; a street cleared through a house, a feud, a conversion to a foreign people, an earthquake and a sack lower it. Loyalty, tribute, migration and the willingness of strangers to settle all read it. The player cannot spend it, only earn or lose it.

← Progression arc Peoples →

This chapter is docs/design/04-economy.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.