The governor, policy and legitimacy

You do not place buildings and you do not command citizens. You set policy, spend a treasury, and absorb the consequences; the city has its own momentum and will frequently do the opposite of what you wanted.

The player is a pressure on the city, not a hand in it. The levers are fiscal (tax rate, tariffs, public works, the grain reserve), legal (a fire code that bans thatch, schooling, conservation orders, whether tenements and towers are allowed), martial (garrison, the wall, tribute) and relief. Each has a cost and a lag, and the citizens resent some of them: tax above the free rate, tariffs, the fire code, conservation; relief buys goodwill back, up to a point. That resentment is friction, and it feeds migration, discontent and legitimacy every year.

Legitimacy is the number the whole thing turns on. It starts at 0.6 and moves with what happens: a civic building finished raises it; a street cleared through somebody’s house, a feud, a conversion to a foreign people, an earthquake, a sack lower it; a siege lifted raises it; relief spending raises it in proportion to the town. Loyalty, tribute from the daughter villages and the willingness of strangers to settle all read it.

The only direct edit is compulsory purchase: the city may order a building on the street line demolished, one a year at most. It costs money and standing, the people in it are displaced, and the footings stay in the ground. It is meant to feel like one.

The defaults, caps and friction terms are in the rules reference; the tax friction is a tunable.

In the code: crates/sim/src/policy.rs crates/sim/src/city.rs

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