Note the hex improvements that have an asterisk (*). You can build 1 of each of those in a single hex. There are only a few (quarry, mine and another one that I can't be bothered to look up) that you can only have 1 of in a hex (which is to say one quarry, mine or "other"), but you can rack farms, roads, aqueducts, whatever else you want as well.
Also, adding the "farm" hex improvement means that the hex has a significant proportion given over to agriculture - it is not a single farm, but more likely 10 or more. Their total effect is the consumption reduction. Likewise, adding a "road" doesn't put a single road through the hex - it means that the paths throughout the entire hex have been improved, and connect to any and all adjacent hexes that also have roads.
|
For the city, remember that 1 district increase consumption by 1 but it can house up to 9.000 people. so I think that the whole area around the city is farmed by the city residents, but that production is consumed by the city.
What isn't consumed is subsumed in the city Economy. In Kingmaker cities are the main source of Economy and even if I haven't analyzed all the changes in Ultimate Campaign my impression is that that is true even with the new rules.
For the city, remember that 1 district increase consumption by 1...
Can you find the quote for that in UCam? It certainly worked that way in Kingmaker, but I'm struggling to find the same rule in the updated rules, which just seem to say "modified by settlements", but I can't find anywhere that says how consumption is modified by settlements.
I also haven't found any text stating that you cannot 'build' a farm or other improvements on a city hex, which is kindda ok (most cities should have farms around them) but it gets weird when you consider the Fort and Watchtower. Say your kingdom is small but you have a lot of BP (such as almost all starting kingdoms). You could build your regular buildings (such as a Shrine and a House) using your "New Buildings" Improvement Edict and build a Fort as a "Terrain Improvement", which can occupy the same slot as the city. And since its hex is a settlement, the Fort is treated as one Barracks and one Stable.
Sure it's cheesy and any GM could simply forbid it, but it could actually be a nice little bump for a fledgling new kingdom. The simple fact that you could have an independent little town that occupies 1 square and is self-sufficient seems to benefit the system.
|
|
I also haven't found any text stating that you cannot 'build' a farm or other improvements on a city hex, which is kindda ok (most cities should have farms around them) but it gets weird when you consider the Fort and Watchtower. Say your kingdom is small but you have a lot of BP (such as almost all starting kingdoms). You could build your regular buildings (such as a Shrine and a House) using your "New Buildings" Improvement Edict and build a Fort as a "Terrain Improvement", which can occupy the same slot as the city. And since its hex is a settlement, the Fort is treated as one Barracks and one Stable.
Sure it's cheesy and any GM could simply forbid it, but it could actually be a nice little bump for a fledgling new kingdom. The simple fact that you could have an independent little town that occupies 1 square and is self-sufficient seems to benefit the system.
If this hex becomes a settlement, this improvement counts as one Barracks and one Stables building.
I think it mean "instead of a counting as a fort", not "in addition to".
If this hex becomes a settlement, this improvement counts as a Watchtower building.
Same as above.
I have just noticed a thing about adding farms, watchtowers and c. to a city, the rules say:
An improvement marked with an asterisk (*) can share the same hex as other improvements.
but a settlement isn't an improvement. They are two different things.
In the same section of the rules it say:
Some terrain improvements affect a settlement’s Defense,
which is used in the mass combat rules (see page 237).
and that seem to assume that terrain improvements can share hexes with terrain improvements.
- * -
Consumption and cities:
Consumption: Consumption indicates how many BP are required to keep the kingdom functioning each month. Your kingdom’s Consumption is equal to its Size, modified by settlements and terrain improvements (such as Farms and Fisheries). Consumption can never go below 0.
The sheet at page 227, under consumption, say size+cities+edicts-farms+other
It is a stretch, but from that we can assume you should add the number of cities (not districts) to the consumption.
Those pieces of the text, AFIK, are the only parts of UCamp where settlements and consumptions are cited.
@Chemlak - I glossed through the PFSRD and PRD sections on kingdoms, and took a quick look through Ucamp as well. I can't find the exact rule (there is a note that consumption equals your size modified by settlements, but that's hardly conclusive - many settlement buildings affect consumption one way or another), but I'm pretty sure I've seen it - I might have read it in Kingmaker instead of Ucamp though.
For what it's worth, when I use the kingdom rules I add 1 consumption for each settlement.
Unfortunately, it is not explicitly stated. Only the section on Consumption has a reference to settlements but it is not specific.
Consumption: Consumption indicates how many BP are required to keep the kingdom functioning each month. Your kingdom’s Consumption is equal to its Size, modified by settlements and terrain improvements (such as Farms and Fisheries). Consumption can never go below 0.
For completeness here is the quote for size:
Size: This is how many hexes the kingdom claims. A new kingdom’s Size is 1.
The only other reference to consumption that indicates Cities cost consumption is on page 227 in the Kingdom Sheet. However, it doesn't state if that is per district or per settlement. I am guessing it is per district but the rules are unclear.
Regarding farms in the city hex, the Stockyard states that "Farms in this hex or adjacent hexes reduce Consumption by 3 instead of 2." So it appears that the intent is that farms can share a hex with cities.
An additional note: The author intended farms to not have an asterisk (like Mines, Quarries, and Sawmills) but was apparently overruled during design editing. My group finds his intention reasonable and house rules his intent back into the game. If Mines, Quarries, and Sawmills are so large that only one of those can be in a hex why should farms (which are also large) be allowed in those hexes? Anyhow, just my house rule. :)
- Gauss
I think having farms, mines, quarries and sawmills all be mutually exclusive makes for a more interesting dynamic - the players can choose between high economic advantage and safety in knowing that their consumption is low or nonexistent.
Farms are priced at either 2 or 4 BP and reduce consumption by 2 - they earn in their own cost in 1 or 2 turns. If there's no downside to building them, it's incredibly easy to build enough farms to put your consumption at 0 and keeping it there. And "excess negative consumption" can be used on edicts.
Furthermore, farms can't be built in forests, making forest hexes significantly less attractive compared to hills or plains. I had my players scoff at the option to build a city at the temple of the Elk God because they couldn't farm up there.
With the designer's restriction in place the distribution of terrain improvements makes more sense - forests can't build farms but they get low-cost economy benefits via sawmills, plains get low-cost farms and rapid expansion but can't build economy buildings at all, hills can build either farms or economy buildings but that flexibility comes at a higher cost.
If we build on that restriction, this would mean that kingdoms would build farmlands in their plains hexes, sawmills in their forest hexes, and a mix of either farms or mines/quarries in their hill hexes, depending on what they need. It seems more organic development than to just have farms all over the place.
However, it also makes it (potentially significantly) harder to reduce or eliminate consumption. It could be the farm restriction was lifted to make it easier to get a kingdom off the ground - the starting phase can be grueling if your council is not full and/or no one wants to play the high priest or councilor positions.
I haven't found that to be the case Kudaku. In the Kingmaker rules there were no mines, quarries, or sawmills and we still got our kingdom off the ground. :)
Mostly, Ultimate Campaign has added options in addition to tweaking some things. My group keeps a record of each of our turns (including dice rolls) so I can look back to see what the progression would have been and if we had started with the Ultimate Campaign rules from the start we would have about the same progression now.
The biggest difference would have been the requirement for water which would have only changed two of our turns as we claimed hexes closer to water. Eventually the new taxation divisor would have made up the lost BP from consumption via the delay in farm building.
- Gauss
From what I can recall the Kingmaker AP provides you with NPCs to fill vacancies in the council - my (6) players decided to not use NPCs in our custom campaign and left the council seats they did not claim vacant.
About two turns later they realized not having a royal enforcer, councilor or high priest meant that Unrest was going to be a pain ^^
Kudaku, correct, NPCs should generally fill vacancies. I don't know why your players would decide not to use NPCs as that deprives your campaign of many RP opportunities. :)
As a sidenote: one of the things my group has done is instead of converting excess money to BP we bought ability score boosters for our NPCs. Told the NPCs that the items go with the office. It is a longer term investment. :D
- Gauss
We were trying out a test game to get the feel of the kingdom rules before actually launching a campaign using them - putting our toe in the water, so to say.
I don't think they quite realized how fast the "vacant seat"-penalties rack up.
Their event phases were equally painful with a Feud rolled on turn 2 and the Plague making a visit on turn 5. Gotta love them random event tables ;)
|
|
We were trying out a test game to get the feel of the kingdom rules before actually launching a campaign using them - putting our toe in the water, so to say.
I don't think they quite realized how fast the "vacant seat"-penalties rack up.
Their event phases were equally painful with a Feud rolled on turn 2 and the Plague making a visit on turn 5. Gotta love them random event tables ;)
In Kingmaker you don't roll for events during the first year of the reign.
Diego, really? Wow, somewhere we missed that. What page is that listed on?
- Gauss
|
|
"Because all of these events assume that the PCs take the time to build up a capital city for their kingdom, it’s a good idea to give the PCs a year of game time with which to start building up their city so that there is a place in which the events can occur."
Page 9 of Rivers Run Red.
Re-reading it, probably it was meant to be applied only in relation with the "Events at Home" at pp. 9-12 of RRR.
Still, it don't seem a bad idea to apply to all random events.
Just a few points that I'm sharing with nobody in particular:
I think the design team messed up with the "asterisking" of improvements. I think they should have been reversed, and that the rules should say "only one improvement with an asterisk can be placed in a hex" which would mean that you could have a quarry in a hex with farms, roads, and so forth - as it stands, it is possible to read the rules as saying that if a hex contains a mine, it cannot have any other type of improvement in it.
Having NPCs to fill in the gaps for leadership roles is pretty vital. In my current campaign, the 20th level party have just created a kingdom and are working on expanding it. Not really a big problem, most of the time, since they have huge bonuses to Economy, Loyalty and Stability, but their most recent adventure has dumped them in a plane where time travels more slowly (and they don't know this little fact). We're in the process of running the various Kingdom turns that they're missing, and the lack of the Ruler, Royal Enforcer, High Priest, Grand Diplomat, Spymaster and Warden has made things really interesting. Fortunately, there are enough NPCs to take on a couple of those roles, but the drastic uptick in Unrest caused by the necessary abdications has had a serious impact.
I've just started running a low-level (started at 1st) group based out of the kingdom (same players) who are acting as trouble shooters for the (currently entirely NPC) leaders, and it's proving to be a lot of fun.
"Because all of these events assume that the PCs take the time to build up a capital city for their kingdom, it’s a good idea to give the PCs a year of game time with which to start building up their city so that there is a place in which the events can occur."
Page 9 of Rivers Run Red.
Re-reading it, probably it was meant to be applied only in relation with the "Events at Home" at pp. 9-12 of RRR.
Still, it don't seem a bad idea to apply to all random events.
Personally I read that as "give the players a year to establish their kingdom and explore before progressing the AP storyline", but it can certainly be read differently - that's just my take.
Ignoring or downplaying events in the first few turns is not a bad idea, but this is also why we decided to test play the rules before implementing them in force :)
Realizing how important it is to fill all (or at the very least the majority) of the council positions and being lenient on the kingdom-killer events in the first few turns is exactly the kind of information we were looking for. We also wanted to test out some of the custom material introduced via Ultimate Rulership. Some we'll use for sure, some we're not so sure about, and some will not be implemented.
@Chemlak
I agree that if you reverse the asterisks that particular section of the rules would both be clearer and read better.
I agree with Kudaku's reading of that quote. I believe it is intended to say that adventuring should slow or halt for a year.
- Gauss