Probably economy for now? Can't have big armies without lots of money. We do want big armies right? ;)
Yea we want moar money. can't have anything without a good capital. And Orsano, I'm listening :D
Alamander, Why are you stopping the conversation? Are we moving it here?
Captain, What other things must we decide before exploring?
Trust me Alamander has a good reason for ducking out even if only for a while.
Edit: I suggest the rest of you carry on in game 'without' him.
I'd be good with CM saying something like 'and they hashed out the details of governance into the night' IC and having us decide this stuff in this tab.
I'm fine with the positions discussed above.
Positionally, it looks like we have things pretty well figured out. I didn't check to see if we had heard from everyone, but I think what we have hashed out makes best use of both character and mechanic.
Do we want to hash out the next step as well in this tab or in the game thread?
It seems to me that there are a few options for us to deal with... 1) exploring for the sake of adding hexes. 2) trying to provide say food source and such for people (I think we have to explore and then edict to do that? If I understand all that Capt. has said correctly that is lol). 3) Providing a safe passage to their settlement.
I think Kierk will push for a safe passage first, even though I know that our first step will probably have to be exploration and edicts for farms and such.
In terms of passage, what are we talking about? A hex explored, than an edict for a road? Control of the river? Just curious on this.
The Overlord’s Guide to Kingdom Building provides this selective guidance:
In the early game you are limited by the amount of BP income you receive per month. Therefore you should buy buildings that give the most stat bonuses for the least amount of BP. This typically lasts until you have between 25 and 50 hexes in your kingdom and several cities or city districts.
Economy and Stability you need every month. Loyalty you need infrequently unless you are at war. Ideally we want them all within 2 of our Command DC and never fail a roll (except on a natural one which is always a fail). You likely won’t have that luxury until you enter the middle game. The kingdom building rules and initial BP set up are designed so that you have to take some risks and thereby generate adventure. Of course you may not want to totally eliminate risk, just reduce it to your required level of fun.
At the outset get the statistics in order: Economy first, Stability second and Loyalty last. At this point Economy and Stability are likely within five of your Command DC and Loyalty within ten. Adjust leader bonuses accordingly to achieve this. At this level you will fail perhaps one in four Economy or Stability rolls and one in two Loyalty rolls.
As you expand aim to get Economy as high as you can while keeping Stability within 5 of your Command DC and Loyalty within 10 of your command DC. Once you hit the middle game these will all rise above command DC in a few months. Until then these targets will limit your expansion capability.
The best build options change as the game progresses. In the early game when you are struggling to expand and keep your stats at target levels you should focus on the most economical choices for increasing your kingdom stats. These are listed below, most economical first:
1. Grassland Farm – the cheapest build to support consumption and to support level 1-3 Promotion and Festivals Edicts
2. Hill Farm – still great value though not as good as Grassland farms
3. Caster’s Tower (1 off) – build one at the start of the game to get the BP flowing
4. Black Market and 2 houses (1 per city district after the first) – the income generator of choice
5. Edicts level 1-3: Promotion and Festivals - supported by farms
6. Monument – the cheapest build to get Loyalty fast - you may need a couple of these to get Loyalty under control though Brothels and Libraries are better alternatives as they provide Economy.
7. Dump – the cheapest build to get both Loyalty and Stability - generally you should steer away from this as it doesn’t provide Economy, though it can be useful when things go wrong.
8. Roads – the cheapest build to get Economy and Stability
9. Brothel and House – the cheapest build to get Economy and Loyalty
10. Library – cheap Economy and Loyalty
11. Mill/Smith/Tannery – cheap Economy and Stability
Following these guidelines should get you through the first 25 or so hexes until you establish your second city district. Probably expanding at an average rate of 1 hex per month during that time.
Key point: In the early game you are limited both by BP income and by being able to keep stats within target ranges. Therefore the early game goal is to minimize BP per stat point with the focus primarily on Economy.
I'd really appreciate it if you guys don't try to metagame the Kingmaker rules. They're not hard to break if you want to be a jackass power gamer about it and then everybody loses.
They're pretty intuitive; you shouldn't need a list of instructions.
Edit: I mean, really, do you want to play the game or recreate the game some other guy played? I'm really disappointed. I thought I had a group that wouldn't be pulling dumb Kingmaker metagame bullshit.
Edit: To give some insight into my perspective on this: would you post a step by step guide for how to play Serpent Skull in the discussion of a thread where someone was trying to run that AP? Because that's borderline what you just did.
I think Kierk will push for a safe passage first, even though I know that our first step will probably have to be exploration and edicts for farms and such.
You have a better plan for securing safe passage than pacifying hexes? Also edicts are just the three things I mentioned.
In terms of passage, what are we talking about? A hex explored, than an edict for a road? Control of the river? Just curious on this.
You can build roads, that'll help, you also have a river route made treacherous by nearby demon apes. Pacifying hexes allows people to get close to your city without getting murdered by Serpentfolk. There are SF enclaves out there you can discover and destroy.
You can also build other settlements along the route to your capital to help protect it. Raising armies in these settlements would also be a huge boon.
You could also come up with a wacky PC-type plan that involves spells from like 3 different lists and a Wonderous magic item. Some kind of self driven guard broom with +20 to trip or something.
2) trying to provide say food source and such for people (I think we have to explore and then edict to do that? If I understand all that Capt. has said correctly that is lol)
In order to make a hex a farm you have to explore it, add it to your kingdom, clear it, then declare it farmland. You add stuff to your Kingdom during a special part of the Kingdom phase. You have a monthly allotment of hexes you can add that you can't go over based on kingdom size. You can only add explored and cleared hexes.
Okay I'ma plug the leadership roles into your sheet and we can do the first month of Kingmaker rules. Obviously if anyone is unhappy with their role we can always change them. Stuff is fluid. But if you didn't speak up before now I have little sympathy for you; we gotta keep moving. A PBP game is a shark.
I'll be back with choices for you guys to make.
Firstly: You all get 3,600 XP. 2,400 for founding a kingdom, and 1,200 for founding a capital. It still needs a name though. What about "Moon Temple Colony". Haha. Or "Last Temple".
Okay, I'm going to cut you guys a break and say that since your settlement is so small at this point you can use random volunteers for the first few months of Kingmaker to take up the slots of the two remaining leadership roles. They give no bonus but remove the vacancy penalty. You can keep this situation until you reach Size 3 at which point you'll need real NPCs or they'll count as vacant.
Right, so I've processed the first half of the kingdom turn, I just need you guys to decide what buildings you want to build and where. There's a map in campaign info. I was going to list some possible buildings but not much point now is there?
Sounds fine to me.
What's Nerith mean?
For Azlantis! :D
Ser King is what you'd call a knight named King, not nearly fancy enough. You should never have a title that some barely landed thug with a lucky family name could share. You guys need to figure out what the correct form of address for Wilhelm will be. Your majesty would be standard, but uninteresting. Maybe "your most high royal imperial blue-blood bossman"
So we got some extra gold from the goddess herself? We should put it to good use right away.
Azlantis is kind of on the nose, isn't it? I like Nerith, though.
I was reading through Occult Mysteries last night (it's great inspiration for Dexter) and in the part about the Knights of the Ioun Star, a knightly order from ancient Azlant and supposedly looking for the Last Azlanti (half of them didn't believe Aroden was it), it mentioned that the word Almorain was the Azlanti word for family or alliance. How about Almorain for the name of our nascent empire and Nerith for the city?
I was also thinking that calling the ruler of a village in the middle of the jungle an emperor was a little grandiose. How about we just call him the leader until we get more than a couple hundred people living here?
Urzan will call Wilhelm, chief, regardless of his title, unless under significant social pressure of the moment.
Azlantis is cool.
Why not call the first city Azlantis, too. Like the Roman (Rome) Empire?
Is there anything more that we need to decide before we go exploring hexes?
Well, we've got 3 houses and a graveyard. Is the pyramid a stand-in for a cathedral or a castle?
From both an RP standpoint and the minigame perspective I'd like to see a mill to cut lumber. There are lots of trees around us and we need building materials.
Also, there's a sheet of map tiles here for anybody wondering what the buildings are.
For anybody who would like to see the rules, they're on the SRD.
Pyramid is a Cathedral.
The temple's treasury has 50 BP worth of gold. You guys can pull as much out as you want for personal use (if Alamander will let you; unlikely) without causing unrest. Looting the treasury after this will upset the population. But they won't be upset about what they don't know...
So that means you can afford a lot of stuff. Buildings take one month to complete, but we skip months like they're nothing in this game. You can build one house for free, and then one additional building this month. The house is only free in the sense that it doesn't count towards your building limit. You still have to pay for it. Anyway you have to decide what, if any, buildings to build before you can go adventuring.
I was waiting to see if Alamander was going to turn over the treasury immediately to point this out: you raised exactly enough money in taxes to pay for your expenses. That would have caused unrest at one phase if you hadn't had anything in your treasury, but you avoided that.
Wow it looks like they changed the Kingdom building rules from the ones in the AP. I'm going to have to read through because they look better, I might have to switch.
Okay, nevermind, they're not really much different they just hook into the settlement rules. They've got some cool new stuff though, like magical streetlights, so let's definitely use these.
Any suggestions what we build the first month? Along with a house, would be maybe good to make a town hall. It costs 22 bp, gives us all 3 attributes +1, and discounts for some key buildings(barracks, watchtower, jail, cistern, dump). Also, law +1.
orsano likes the idea of a new name for our new nation - fresh starts and all that. calling it azlant could give us certain pressures or ideals which we might not necessarily want or need. (i like almorian too)
besides, azlant failed right?
andrezi - i thought you were going to be general? anyway the idea was the grand diplomat should rush off and find wilhelm a bride.
was just fooling around though :)
town hall seems like a good place to start!
seems expensive though...
Town Hall is a good choice; you'd have a place for people to gather for you to tell them stuff. A lot of these will have roleplaying ramifications as well. Until you have a town hall you don't have a convenient place to gather people if you want to address them. Until you have a shop or a market or something you'll only be able to barter with people for goods. Until you have a barracks you won't have an organized town guard, just whatever posse you can round up on the spot.
Edit: You guys have a high law value, so it would be trivially easy to round up such posses, but posses they would remain.
andrezi - i thought you were going to be general? anyway the idea was the grand diplomat should rush off and find wilhelm a bride.
He wanted to, but this was the only way we could jigger it and I think diplomat was his second choice. He really is the best diplomat. None of you are as qualified for your jobs as he is for Diplomat.
Mwangi Mail Order Brides
But seriously, Nantambu is where you should go if you're looking for a political marriage for Wilhelm. It's a powerful Neutral/Good settlement, it happens to be the nearest human settlement to you guys, and they have a powerful and peaceful reputation in the region.
Now, it's governed by a council so there's no princesses you can marry, but the daughter of one of the chieftains on the council is just as good. It's not going to unify your lands as though it was a feudal state, but it gives you strong political ties to the potential ally in the region whose friendship you would most benefit from.
Then it can serve as pretense for annexing them when you get powerful enough.
Captain, you've offered a house rule to transform jungle into plains for farms. Why not play it RAW? It would force us to build fisheries (because we have that river near us) and sawmills instead of farms to really demonstrate why empires are not built in jungles.
My first building pick is an Everflowing Spring at the Cathedral for 5 BP and Sawmill terrain improvement for 3 BP.
Captain, you've offered a house rule to transform jungle into plains for farms. Why not play it RAW? It would force us to build fisheries (because we have that river near us) and sawmills instead of farms to really demonstrate why empires are not built in jungles.
That's a good idea. The rules in kingmaker don't have fisheries and stuff.
I still feel like it should be possible to turn jungle into farmland, just ask McDonalds, but maybe it could be some kind of funky druid jazz and involve a quest to invent some kind of farm jungle spell that produces enough edible fruit to count as farmland. That's more interesting.
Edit: Yeah, wow, that everflowing spring is a good idea. The kingdom maker rules really were missing cool magic improvements like this.
Ser King is what you'd call a knight named King, not nearly fancy enough."
I was drawing inspiration from King Kieri from here :)
Anyway we could certainly go for something more highfaluting, but what? Wilhelm how will your character style himself?
It needs to be the most highfaluting name possible (holy crap no red underline?). That kind of stuff impresses NPCs.
Edit:
"This guy is His Most Imperial Royal Majesty. Our king is jut His Most Royal Majesty. We better surrender."
If you decide to go with my suggestion of funding some guys to build the buildings, I'll do short scenes with them because we need to start establishing some NPCs.
Azlantis - 4 Votes
Almorain - 2 Votes
It could still be a tie, but it looks like the Azlantises have it.
Feels like we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit there ;) If the bard I play in the other pbp was teleported here and heard about his new imperial majesty there'd be tavern talk about the emperor of mosquitoes and the satrap of the seven swamps etc...
I'm not saying he shouldn't have an awesome title, just perhaps we kind of need an army and should annex some stuff first.
We need a better system for doing kingmaker turns than just discussing it to death with everyone; that will take too long in PBP and there's no way to tell when there's been a consensus. Maybe you guys could elect a picker from amongst yourselves.
Anyway I'm going to go with town hall since a few people seemed to like it and that lets us get to the part with adventures.
I plunked down the town hall and uploaded the city map. Unless there are objections to placement or something that'll be that. You can discuss your next move OOC while you're adventuring IC.
Don't we get a terrain improvement for our 1 hex, too? For a sawmill?
Don't we get a terrain improvement for our 1 hex, too? For a sawmill?
You don't control any hexes yet, you need to explore some before you can annex them.
Can we build some more houses? Presumably we'll need to before long.
Okay, wow, I just rolled random encounters for the entire exploration period and neither group got any. And none of those hexes have special features so... you guys spend a week mapping the area around your city and enjoying a pleasant hike.
Now every hex touching your settlement is explored. And just let me change a few things on your sheet and we can jump right to your next kingdom turn.
Edit: and you can just build two free houses this turn to compensate. Say where on the grid you want to put them.
I thought the hex with our settlement counted as a hex, no? The city is technically a small part of the larger hex, right?
Feels like we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit there ;) If the bard I play in the other pbp was teleported here and heard about his new imperial majesty there'd be tavern talk about the emperor of mosquitoes and the satrap of the seven swamps etc...
I'm not saying he shouldn't have an awesome title, just perhaps we kind of need an army and should annex some stuff first.
I agree. If I was chief of a village with a solid wall, a militia and 300 people and met this dude with 70 something people and a couple of huts calling himself "His Imperial Majesty, Son of Earth and Sky, Heir to the Throne of Glass, Foreordained Master of Garund, Ruler of all the Mwangi," I'd be like "...what?"
I get being aspirational, but an Emperor needs an empire.
Okay so you passed your stability check, raised taxes for a profit this time of 3 bp, and you can claim a hex, build buildings and improvements, and whatever else.
Made a gameplay post to bring us up to speed.
The city is technically a small part of the larger hex, right?
It is, but even then it's not a jungle hex anymore after you level the ground for buildings. And it's not that small a part, you can only fit so many city districts in one hex. I don't want to over complicate things by having other stuff in there as well, and anyway now you guys have lots of explored hexes to make improvements to.
Can we build some more houses? Presumably we'll need to before long.
CM, correct me if you see it differently, but as I mentioned earlier the 'buildings' are an abstraction. A 'house' is more like a neighborhood than a house. Each 'building' is actually a... here, this says it better: "In most cases, each lot represents numerous buildings of that type, rather than a single edifice."
So until we start bumping up against Unrest we don't really need more Houses. We've got 3 lots full of housing right now. Our Economy stat is okay; it could be higher but it's alright. For a building, a Mill would be a good build right now- it helps Economy and Stability. If we're building with wood, a mill also makes sense since it would help speed up making lumber.
We should Claim one (we can only do 1 per turn at this size) of the adjacent hexes and Improve it into a farm hex (or a fishery hex, if that's the same thing, CM). If the intelligent apes are to the north, maybe the river hex to the west or the jungle hex to the south.
Perhaps we should build a barracks or watchtower now that we have them on discount? Also, how do we prepare for the coronation of our "king"? :D
And what Dexter said.
Some buildings (a lot, actually) need to be adjacent to a house, so it can be worthwhile having them built already, but yeah you don't need them. Like you said these buildings are more districts and they're all assumed to have housing in them in addition to the key building. You could have a city that had no houses, and that would be perfectly legitimate (people would live near where they work). A lot of ancient cities didn't have a clear delineation between residential and industrial districts.
The only buildings that are supposed to occupy their entire space are the 4 square ones.
There are a few buildings, however, that have to be adjacent to two houses, and you have no blocks with two houses, so that's really the only reason you would have for building houses now. Your population is low enough that there really isn't a housing crisis.
Yeah I agreed with Urzan's idea that we use RAW since the new rules have lots of new options for feeding a jungle kingdom so we don't need funky jungle farms. A fishery on a river hex would serve the same function as a farm.
Also, how do we prepare for the coronation of our "king"?
Whatever you want. Right now it'll be one of you throwing the crown at him and screaming "you're king now". You can modify this ritual to suit your tastes.
You might just have a public crown ceremony, you could throw a party, declare it one of your 6 festivals, or you could be low key about it and do a private thing. Up to you guys.