Peoples

Citizens · Descent · Strangers · Estates · What the player sees ·

Citizens

A few hundred to a few thousand simulated individuals, each with a household, a trade, a purse, needs and a daily route. They are born, apprenticed, married, widowed and buried. They are not statistics: the tanner who cannot afford the new tax is a specific person who will specifically leave. Above a population ceiling the outer districts fall back to household-level aggregation while the core stays individual, so the city can reach metropolis scale without the frame budget collapsing; the aggregate half works and eats at the same per-head rates.

Work is a job board, not a command hierarchy: fell timber, quarry stone, fire brick, haul, build, farm, mill, weave, forge, teach, police, put out fires. Citizens take jobs by what pays and what is close. If nobody will take a job, the thing does not get built, and that is information.

Descent

Everyone carries where they come from: the name they answer to, the name they were born to (which never changes), the share of their descent from outside the region, and a look their children inherit and dilute. Moving house never changes descent.

The founding village is one named people. A daughter village that has stood a generation and grown past a few dozen names itself and takes its own feudal standing. Settlers carry that name onward. Peoples who share ground, a cold standing and a hungry year come to blows, and a fight leaves hostility that the yearly drift cannot write out.

Strangers

Arrivals from foreign cities bring their own looks. How many come is the region’s welcome plus the size of the community already here; a few arrivals in a year make a people of their own. Converts, people who take a name they were not born to, make that community larger and the pull stronger, and cost the rest of the region legitimacy, tribute and safety.

Estates

Serfs, freeholders, burghers, clergy, knights and a lord have distinct clothing, posture and standing. Local lords collect rents, village knights owe tribute to the town’s lord, and food, shelter and dues affect loyalty and the willingness to migrate. Succession chooses a living adult locally; this is a simplified estate hierarchy, not a genealogy simulation.

What the player sees

Village markers and labels are drawn in the colour of the people who hold the place, so the territory map is a map of descent: a daughter village changes colour the year it names itself, and a quarter settled from abroad reads as a different colour from across the valley. The peoples panel is the whole of it, including a year-by-year chart of the region’s make-up.

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This chapter is docs/design/05-peoples.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.