Topic explored a bit in this thread Removing the worst logical fallacies in kingmaker
ok so, you cant fit 562 , 1000 sqft homes in 562k square feet, they wouldnt be individual homes, thats one massive apartment building, with no side walk, no right of way etc etc.
This is assuming room for the yard, a fence, the cobble paths between homes, a couple of chickens and a pig in the yard, this block would contain common areas like the well and other things.
Think country cottages not sprawling metropolis.
In my (real life) community, blocks are about 350' x 350' (just shy of 3 acres) to 350' x 700' (5.6 acres). So a KM block, about 13 acres, is about 4-5 blocks of my town.
My block has about 16 buildings (1- to 3-unit houses) on it, which would scale to about 70 buildings in a KM block. Doesn't seem crazy out of line to me.
3 BP to build a KM "House" = 12,000gp / 70 houses, or 171gp / individual house. That's about the cost of a year's stay in a "common" inn (5sp / day), so I'm willing to call it in the right order of magnitude for a common family's house.
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Dont forget your settlements dont start out as a metropolis or New York city tenements. Go look at pictures of late 1800s new york...they had stables and barns in the cities interspersed because of the horses and livestock people kept.
You have to allow for the average person to keep small livestock (say a milk cow, a few chickens for eggs, maybe a few pigs to keep garbage down. Plus they all had a kitchen herb and vegetable garden. We have not even gotten to the keeping of a horse which only a wealthy person could keep in a stables long term. This equates to a small yard with at least a pen, a garden, possible a barn, and an outhouse for each house. Then we get to places for wells.
Plus remember the average builder did not have super skills to build small structures much more than two stories, if even that.
TL; DR - Kingmaker era buildings probably take up a lot more space than we imagine by today's standards.
As far as costs, invisible to the BP cost of the building is all the associated infrastructure costs for planning, construction, materials, well digging, encouraging people to come live there, paying for the city guards and patrols, garbage collection, and road upkeep for adjacent roads. However, if you brought all these into the equation, then we are playing a more detail-oriented game than Civ. and no longer in the realm of even Kingmaker style Pathfinder.
Even given all this, as GM_Sol pointed out, there are a lot of inconsistencies between the rules and even medieval life that we do sort of have to hand-wave and pretend to get past.. :)
When you're going this way, check the varnhold stats and compare it with the map, this will drive you mad :)
The KM City/Kingdombuilding system is very abstract, just "improvise" a little bit, don't crunsh the "not relevant" numbers to much and it's fine
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A few images of the Valle map of Padua (Italy), 1781. It was made with real trigonometric measurements and not as a approximate bird view image, so it is very accurate:
The whole city, in tis scale it is hard to see them well, but a large percentage of the area between the medieval walls and the renaissance walls is fields, a lot of them were property of the monasteries.
A section of the city walls, notice the space used up by cultivated fields.
The medieval part of the city, the houses are the dark gray areas, the light gray areas are parks or fields. Even in the heavily builded up old part of the city there are plenty of open spaces.
You have to mention that this is not a normal medival city. The wall layout suggest that this is a "fortress city" they were specially build to withstand long sieges, so they have fields and more space for live stocks inside the walls.
Most medival cities don't have a wall that encycled the whole city at all.
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You have to mention that this is not a normal medival city. The wall layout suggest that this is a "fortress city" they were specially build to withstand long sieges, so they have fields and more space for live stocks inside the walls.
Most medival cities don't have a wall that encycled the whole city at all.
Maybe in Germany, but in Italy? Almost all cities had city walls.
Milan
Bologna
Montagnana
Verona
and so on.
They were common in large and small cities and even some village had them. Today they have been mostly demolished and the space used to build ring roads around the oldest part of the cities but you can still see some remnant.
Palmanova is a city that was built as a fortress and you see that perfectly from its layout.
And, just to repeat it: most of the farmed land inside the walls was a property of the monasteries.
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@Yepyepyep
About the cost of the buildings, you must remember that the lords of the nations aren't the owner of the buildings. The BP expenses is the cost of preparing the terrain, inviting people to settle in your land, tax rebate on new owners, subsidies and so on. But a good percentage of the construction costs is paid by the actual owner of the building.
The BP are an abstract measure of the kingdom wealth, not actual cash in the hand of the rulers.
My cit-y has a first name... it's B-O-L-O-G-N-A.....
it's an oscar myer commercial. for bologna
@Diego:
ok I got it wrong.
German Cities also had walls which encycle the city. What I meant was that not many cities had farmland inside the city walls.
Also the geometry of the city wall of Padua (the trigon-extensions) implements that it's really to withstand heavy sieges. This forms weren't common in the non-gunpowder medival times as far as I remmeber from school. :)
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@Diego:
ok I got it wrong.
German Cities also had walls which encycle the city. What I meant was that not many cities had farmland inside the city walls.Also the geometry of the city wall of Padua (the trigon-extensions) implements that it's really to withstand heavy sieges. This forms weren't common in the non-gunpowder medival times as far as I remmeber from school. :)
My personal opinion is that D&D fortifications will resemble more the early age of gunpowder fortifications than medieval fortifications.
Magic has the same function of early artillery.Earthquake on the typical Medieval curtain wall, high and not so wide? It probably tumble down.
Earthquake on Renaissance rampart, squat and wide? It will be damaged but it will resist.
Same thing with disintegrate, passwall and so on.
That said, the XVI walls of Padua that you see in the image I linked follow almost exactly the route of the XIV century walls of the city.
For an example of a city with medieval walls that encircle a big swat of green, Marostica. Same city during the living chess tournament.
A another visual of the city, In this image you see that the inhabited part of the old city isn't so small as it appear in the first image.
Good point with the magic artillery and the fortifications... :)