Economics is something I think about all the time when playing these games or reading fantasy. We know that the ratio of farmers to non-farmers in the medieval period was something like 29:1. But so little thought is given to just the sheer amount of work and space it took to fill mouths and clothe bodies.
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like nice clothing even when the weather (and culture) allows nudism
Women may have done half the labour but they didn't spend all their time weaving cloth and making clothing. You're forgetting about all the food preparation and preservation that women did. Women cooked meals, baked bread, preserved fruits and vegetables, and brewed beer, in addition to all the farm work they did (feeding chickens, collecting eggs, milking cows, working vegetable gardens, harvesting). Of course, women didn't do all of that work alone, they taught their children how to do it and supervised their labour. Large families were preferred because children are inexpensive (cheap to feed and clothe) relative to the labour they produce under proper supervision. Expensive entertainment and education for children was still centuries away.
Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work.
of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done.
women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids.
you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives.
not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)
The spinning wheel was in use in Europe in the 14th century [1]. That's a lot earlier than "slightly before" the 1800s.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/An_amoro...
Yes, but also the other side of the ratio includes everything like guilded craftsmen, monks, merchants, etc. Not exactly people who weren't doing work themselves.
Women and children very much participate in farming back then, harvest was a “all hands on deck” situation.
Similarly by adding ‘and clothe bodies’ that captures well over half of a typical woman’s labor back then. Drop spindles sucked up an enormous amount of labor before you even had cloth.
At times it was all hands on deck for harvest - but most of the time it wasn't and that rest is an important part of village life missing. As you say, drop spindles suck.
Reminds me of the Walking Dead tv show where they had communities being fed by a few raised beds with tomato cages and half a dozen corn stalks.
People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.
In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement.
It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.
You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.
expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village.
more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.
I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.
I wish the Banished developer hadn't abandoned it
Have you tried the Colonial Charter mod? Adds an insane level of content.
Also, there are now dozens of games that took the concept and ran with it. From Space Base to Manor Lords to Timberborn.
Abandoned? What was unfinished? I was satisfied when I played it. My only complaint was something about population growth or the ageing of people being too quick IIRC.
It is fascinating that players would actually reject the game if it showed the true straight roads and planned layouts. We have a mental model of the Middle Ages that is wrong but we still demand that products match our expectations. The truth feels like a glitch because it breaks our immersion. We care more about the feeling of the past than the data.
Also, it is logical that we optimize the past to make the gameplay loop satisfying. Real history was full of system failures like floods and unfair taxes that prevented any real progress. We code these simulations to give players a sense of progression that the actual people never had.
I enjoy going into a city building game and thinking out exactly what I’d like the city to look like beforehand. But, it doesn’t always work because the city will eventually outgrow the original design.
The need to have the city constantly growing is a real killer for realism here, I think. It basically makes super careful planning impractical.
I think most of the problems are downstream of this. For example, your fields will probably have to be moved after a couple years. The city will expand and you’ll want to replace it with higher-value industry. And you’ll be scouting out a new massive area for your new fields, which will make your old ones obsolete. So, you’ll move your fields every few years. Now, crop rotation doesn’t make sense, unless the crops destroy the soil at some ridiculous rate.
Next they'll be telling us that dragons, wizards and elves are not accurately portrayed in medieval RPGs.
It's surprising really, since Mario Kart is a completely realistic driving simulator.
Of course not, everyone knows there were only five Istari in total, Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagast the Brown and the two Blue ones that were kidnapped by aliens.
Historical inaccuracies aside, when making a game it is essential to frequently stop and ask, “does this make the game more fun?”
A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.
RTS like Age of Empires were more geared towards combat, and base building existed only to supplement that. Whereas in games like Pharaoh and Caeser you could plan your city if you wanted to.
My iteration of The Settlers was The Settlers II (also its later 3D remake) which is very much designed around roads that units mostly had to use! This was found in other early instances of RTS but later discarded (including in The Settlers series).
It's true, however, that events like floods or the tax collector were missing. Those are more easily found in board games.
There is a more recent game that can be used as reference to a city-building experience called Manor Lords. You are basically building your village from scratch in the wilderness and it really looks like a medieval village.
To connect with another comment under this post, it even captures woman’s work of the era, with homes having small gardens or producing clothing that ends up being a significant portion of your economy, at least when I last played it.
Interesting insight, I personally am not a fan of medieval builders for that many kinda seem like reskinned modern builders, though to be fair modern city builders are also historically inaccurate, you can basically do anything without political ramification, no nimbys, hoas, ceqa…
Side note, but I did not realize how unoriginal Warcraft was, until looking at these.
Medieval RTS games have a special place in my heart. But I'm almost convinced it's because of nothing but pure nostalgia, being the first RTS I ever played.
But no. It's the same reason I have a soft spot for the LotR movies, and for forests and earthy colored clothing in general, and wool clothing. There's something so... wholesome about it. Or simple. Or, je ne sais pas... preter-nostalgic?
Earthly colored clothing was not normal. Sometimes it might be forced on slaves, but humans like colors and dying clothing is a tiny part of what is needed to make a garment so anyone allowed to would do it.
of course we have a lot more colors available today, but there is every reason to think they would use all the color they could. Some of the colors decay fast (lasting longer than the garment if in use but not surviving to today if the garment was stored). Mostly this is something not written about in history so we have to guess but we have plenty of reason to think color was common.
There's a whole lot of pictorial evidence from medieval times and it typically shows quite a bit of fancy colored clothing. Even traditional "folk" attire, that would've been restricted to cheaper choices, is not really all that brownish. Modern chemical dyes were only around starting in the mid-19th c. or so, hence prior to that you got a somewhat poorer color selection, but some variety was absolutely available.
Good point, I mostly look at written history but art is a valid source that I forgot about.
We need the ability to recreate an authentic anarcho-syndicalist commune.
There were no electronic computers in the middle ages - so of all the computer games course are inaccurate! ;-)
