When we first started building our kingdom in Kingmaker there was a rule that a hex needed to have a Road before it could have a Farm. I was double checking to see if Mines and Sawmills had any similar prerequisites, but I couldn't even find the rule regarding Farms requiring Roads. Has this rule been dropped, or am I just missing it?
It might be nice from an aesthetic if the rule was dropped since the map is getting really clogged with way more Roads than it would normally take to connect our cities. It isn't a big deal either way, but it makes me curious.
I am not sure about the newer rules from Ultimate Campaign but it was a requirement in Kingmaker on page 64 to have a road before you built a farm.
"You can develop any grassland or hill hex that contains roads into farmlands to help sustain your kingdom’s Consumption."
Besides, we tried to build roads as much as possible because they are just so beneficial. I think our kingdom looked like the US after the Interstate Highway program with roads going everywhere.
Yeah, we had been using the rules from the Kingmaker AP before UC came out, but I'm not sure if UC includes the prereq of Roads for Farms. I agree that Roads are nice, but at this point I'd rather spend that BP building Highways, which not only offer the benefits of Roads but might help make our troop movements a little faster, something the US Interstate system was designed for.
That seems like a big deal since it is tough to recruit as many armies as we have cities which need protection. Our problem isn't the BP cost of Consumption but the fact the GM says we've recruited all the troops we can given our Kingdom's size. I'm not sure if Kingmaker has specific rules on that or he's just going with what seems reasonable to him.
No.
Farm*
A Farm helps feed your kingdom.Terrain: Desert (requires canal, coastline, or river), hill, or plain.
Effect: Consumption decreases by 2 BP.
Cost: See the Terrain and Terrain Improvements table.
Yes, this was a rule in the Kingmaker rules, but it was altered in UCam. I presume intentionally.
Also note: the requirement for canal, coastline, or river only applies to farms built on Desert hexes, not hill or plain hexes.
Thanks for verifying that the road prereq for Farms is gone.
It was my understanding that Farms which aren't within 1 hex of a river, lake, swamp, or Canal, must be adjacent to at least 2 hexes that already contain Farms. I thought this due to footnote #4 on the "Terrain and Terrain Improvements" table. In the entry for Farm in the Terrain Improvements section of the rules seems to agree with your assessment.
Farm*
A Farm helps feed your kingdom.Terrain: Desert (requires canal, coastline, or river), hill, or plain.
Effect: Consumption decreases by 2 BP.
Our kingdom doesn't have any deserts, so this is good news. While looking it over I noticed an asterisk next to some improvements though. Apparently it means that the starred improvement can be in a hex with other improvements. I notice that Mine isn't starred but recall that you need a Road to a Mine to benefit from a Foundry. This leads me to the conclusion that starred improvements can share a hex not only with each other but with one unstarred improvement. Is that correct?
One last thing I'm uncertain about is whether you can make (or keep) terrain improvements other than roads in hexes which have settlements. If so this would give us a few more Farms and maybe a Fishery or two. For some reason we thought we couldn't build Farms in city hexes, but I can't seem to locate that rule at the moment.
Huh. Never actually noticed that footnote. That seems to contradict the Farms entry. Methinks we have an unanswered discrepancy in the rules. Might be worth an FAQ. For now, I'd recommend going by the more restrictive limitation, per footnote 4.
The 'starred' improvements are a cause of constant questions, but we did get an answer out of Jason Nelson once upon a time, and it works like this:
A hex can have any number of allowed 'starred' terrain improvements (one of each), and only one 'non-starred' improvement.
I'm of the firm opinion that they 'starred' the wrong set of improvements. If you reverse the notation (remove the stars from the improvements that currently have it, and add it to those that don't) and change the rule to "a hex may only contain one improvement marked with a *." then everything becomes clear.
A settlement would need to have 95 districts to completely fill a hex. Since that's highly unlikely except for the very largest kingdoms, assume that any terrain improvements can share a hex with a settlement. If you do manage to get a single settlement up to 95+ districts, the loss of a single hex's improvements won't really matter one way or the other.
I agree that different wording might make the * notation easier to understand, but the concept seems simple enough once explained. Thanks for confirming that we can have terrain improvements in our settlement hexes.
I agree that the adjacency requirements for Farms might need some kind of official clarification for us to understand the RAI, but I wonder if requesting a FAQ on a low impact rule like this from UC would be going too far when there are probably other more game impacting rules to worry about. The Farms in our game had no trouble meeting the requirements anyhow.
| 2 people marked this as FAQ candidate. |
The kingdom my players are building (and if you use the kingdom tracking spreadsheet, you'll occasionally see a missed data deletion referring to "Shelar" in an update) is only 27 hexes right now (with a river running right through it), so I've never had a problem, either.
I don't think it's a waste to FAQ it, and could be a quick fix for the designers.
So, here's the question:
In Ultimate Campaign, the Farm terrain improvement has fewer apparent restrictions on placement than footnote 4 of the Terrain and Terrain Improvements table. Which is correct?
Ok, I decided to FAQ it too. I do use the kingdom tracking spreadsheet, but I'm stuck on one of the earlier versions since yours wasn't compatible with Google at least when I downloaded it. I think it is great that you're helping folks track this stuff though. It can be a real burden. I wonder if we might eventually see a Paizo or 3rd party application to handle it, something with maps and menus kind of like Civilization 2 might be nice.
I'm probably way too lazy for that and haven't programmed anything more complicated than shell scripts with a little Perl in many years.
Yeah, sorry about the Google Docs incompatibility problem. If you've taken a look recently, though, you'll see that I have a plan in place to (hopefully) allow a GDocs version in the (relatively) near future - just as long as I can crunch it down below the 400,000 cell limit (which might mean sacrificing some functionality).
I doubt we'll see any more official support than the Hero Lab kingdom implementation, unfortunately, which lacks maps.
@LazarX - We have a couple of "gypsy" PCs of mixed Varisian heritage, and wagons, especially gypsy vardos, have long been a part of the campaign. Wagons with large wheels can travel overland pretty well without established roads. If a lot of wagons take the same path and wear some ruts in the ground I don't think that's the kind of road our kingdom needs to pay over 330gp per mile to construct. I could also imagine Farms moving a lot of their goods via boats or even by sled in the winter. I suppose that even oxen packed with bags of grain could move quite a lot of goods.
However you imagine it though, it looks like the UC rules don't require a Farm to have a Road improvement. I doubt that means there are no roads and paths in the hex any more than the lack of a settlement would mean that there aren't homesteads and farmhouses. If there weren't some small scale things which don't show up on the map then who would run the Farms?