a success story ... Our kingdom at level 12

Hi all, I just wanted to offer an alternative perspective with the updated Kingmaker Adventure Path, based on my personal experiences so far.

STORY
We are about 70% through the updated AP content, enjoying ourselves and making it work w/o too much effort.

My group is currently at kingdom level 12 / party level 13.

What we learned;

XP
The XP was definitely a mess until the kingdom hit around level 6 or so ... then they easily had enough with events and such to keep the kingdom leveling alongside the players.

SKILLS and House rules
We have a few house rules in place - based on things I read in these forums.
1. non-trained skills add (level +0) but still "gate" access to some buildings.
2. skills every level (rather than 1/2) and players could still spend feats to unlock additional skills.
3. Capital (only) - we ignored the size limits on capital, so they were able to more quickly get farms up -- and so it was always expanding as the center of their kingdom.
4. Item bonuses to actions. To simplify this, we ignore location and instead limit it to a stack of 3 buildings. This results in a +3 max bonus until 9th, then +6 maximum until 15th were it increases to the max +9. This way, players are encouraged to build structures in ALL their settlements and not simply place everything in their capital while ignoring the rest.

With these options … the party tends to have a 40% success chance on untrained skill checks. And by stacking the building bonuses and those from other actions, they often double those chances for trained checks. If not, they find alternatives and/or use their fame to re-roll as needed.

FAME ... My players were sad it wasn't a cumulative total of all the fame their kingdom has earned. Instead it's more like “hero points” (for kingdoms). Regardless, the kingdom starts with (1) Fame each new kingdom turn and any left over at the end is "lost" (resets to 0). So encourage players to use it up every month.

FARMS ... were a big concern early on, but once they hit level 5 or so it was not as much a concern. they could then afford the 5 RP / consumption to avoid starving their citizens.

ARMIES ... in hindsight, it would have been interesting to introduce them earlier. But younger kingdoms often can't afford the consumption and other costs associated with fielding an army.

Kingdom TURNS ... it was a mess when we started, trying to understand the phases and order of operations. Adding armies only made it more confusing. But now (with help of automation) we complete a turn in about 10 minutes - rather than a couple hours.

When starting, it was very helpful to slow each phase down, so everyone understood what was happening and how their choices impact the kingdom.

Phases -
UPKEEP - start of the turn; income and expenses; leadership changes
COMMERCE - collect taxes, trade commodities, manage trade
LEADERSHIP - these actions have biggest impact on events
REGION - players always forget they can do (2 actions as 1) in Heartland hexes.
CIVIC - Besides "gated behind skills" ... the only limit is "1 constructed building per settlement". So we end up with lots in progress at once and track the resources spent each month until successfully constructed.
EVENTS - At the early levels, we did events every month. This added some flavor and earned them lots of bonus XP. If players lacked a specific skill to end an ongoing event, they usually solved it with another leadership action such as Focused Attention, Hiring Adventurers or skillful use of Magic. Or they just failed gloriously, endured the outcome and moved on ;-)

ACTION ECONOMY ... something that was not obvious initially, was the action limits per kingdom turn.

UPKEEP, COMMERCE (no limits)
LEADERSHIP (2 per PC, so 8 initially... 12 with a castle)
REGION (3 per turn, never changes)
CIVIC (1 construction per settlement, gives crazy at high level with dozen or so settlements)
ARMY actions (1 per kingdom army)
EVENTS (varies)
... so the only variable is the number of leadership actions per month. And these can impact all other phases.

TIP #1: CIVICs ... As a GM, between sessions ... to prepare for the next kingdom turn ... I go through the Settlements and add 1 or more buildings the townsfolk and/or advisors are requesting. This greatly helps speed game play up when dealing with many settlements. Players can still choose to build something else, but it helps keep things expanding. And it gives me a chance to suggest other buildings to improve their kingdom stats, where it might help.

TIP #2: LEADER actions ... Over time, action economy is very important with this step. I'd limit it to 8 actions initially and 12 with castle ... regardless of the number of PCs. Also, I tend to be flexible with things like hiring adventurers for things the players roleplay well, such as clearing a map hex for the PCs.

TIP #3: EVENTS ... My players enjoy these events as it adds color to each kingdom month. So I will often roll them up ahead of time and give them vague clues at the start of the month. This way the players can prepare for these events with specific leadership actions or perform other actions to help offset the potential impact of the pending events.

More CONTEXT
However, a few things to add more context that may differ from others' experience.

PF1e
We are also running this using the original pathfinder ruleset, not pf2, which has made things more challenging as a GM … but thankfully, it has no direct bearing on the kingdom side of things.

VTT … FGU
First, we are playing over a virtual table table using Fantasy Grounds Unity … which does help a lot with common tasks and provides the means to automate further (with extensions, see below).

AUTOMATION
Second, we are using an extension toolset I put together over the last year or so of running this adventure path.

With the toolset, we don’t have to track all the details in spreadsheets and swap in/out of context constantly. Instead it organizes our gameplay along the phases listed above (including the un-mentioned “army” phase) … and lets us focus on the story and playing the game itself.

For those interested, here is Link to the automation toolset created for Fantasy Grounds;
FGU Extension: Nation Builder