I used kingmaker to pay attention to the little things that players rarely think of. I was wondering if anyone else paid attention to things like this and what else they may have paid attention to that had an effect on the game.
Food
A lot of players don't think about stocking up on food. I made this a crucial issue when wandering through the stolen lands. Not only players need food, but their mounts as well. Remember that a large sized horse eats 4x the amount of food as a medium creature. Some characters are able to hunt for food. Those with a high enough survival check can get food for the entire party. Rations were one of the biggest reasons my party came back to Oleg's. Also rations contributed a lot to carry weight, especially food for horses.
Carry Weight
This is something that I usually don't pay much attention to (within reason). However the weight of food for horses and other basic essentials contributed a lot of weight to the PCs. I also thought that I would track the weight of coins as well (50 coins=1 lb.). It turned into a lot of micro-management, however I just delegated the task to one of the players. This turned into a few interesting encounters such as having to protect the cart of loot and chests of gold from rogue fey and bandits. Also, players had to navigate terrain with thoughts of clunky carts in mind
Weather
I have thought of this, and it contributed a lot to my story. Especially when it is raining so hard that spell-casters have to make a concentration check to cast!
Down-time
This was an interesting part of the game that I tried to take advantage of. I had one of the players print a calendar and track time. That helped when it came to weather as the time of the year would determine what type of weather system the players would encounter. Downtime also helped players make a little money on the side or create magical items.
Purchasing power
This is something that came up often. Whenever players came back to Oleg's or their town with a ton of loot to sell or a bunch of gold to spend, they had to keep it within the purchasing power of the location that they were in. Oleg could only deal 800g per week. If they needed more than that, Oleg had to make a special trip to Brevoy to buy the items they needed. This turned into a wait for the items that they wanted.
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I'm in the middle of Stolen Lands with my 6 players group. All of them have horses (either cavaliers, from trait or from bandits).
Food
My players were wise enough to stock up on food rations with their starting gold, but didn't think about their horses (only cavaliers did). In the middle of the forest, when they broke camp, I asked - how do you feed your steeds? "They eat grass, don't they?" they replied. "But not in the middle of the forest, in spring, in harsh brevoy spring...". I didn't remember the exact rules of trail rations/needed food for larger creatures, but we settled on 5x Trail Rations = horsie food for one day. It's not as heavy, but costs a lot more. Also, they can graze on grass when in hills or plains, but no longer than 5 days in a row. After that, they need either to rest for some time (no travel) or eat quality horsie food (Oleg can stock them). I have a lot of those tin cans that men cologne sometimes come in. I gave one to my players, along with sack of glass gaming tokens. They color code them, and put in the can - one token is either 1 trail ration, 10 trail rations or 1 horsie food. They can just look in the can and visualize how much food the party has. Quick, elegant, simple :)
Carry Weight
I wanted to go nazi with this, but all my players ride horses, I nitpick when they want to retrieve something big in middle of combat, when the not-combat trained horses scatter around.
Weather
I use donjon weather generator - https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/weather/ - to generate a month worth of weather and have it at hand. For stolen lands I use Cold climate and uncommon supernatural (because the Fey influence). If it's just rain or something simple, I tend to just focus on it while describing everything that happens. If it gets more extreme - it's fun time. As they were going back to Oleg's, thunderstorm rolled in. I was just casually rolling d100 for every hour of travel. I rolled a 100 once, so thunderstrike fried a horse pulling a wagon, just in front of them. Barbarian who worships Gorum told stories about the Horse That Was Chosen By Gods, Which Was A Great Horse Indeed ;)
Down-time
The downtime rules will be present in our games if players will chose to use them (and I know they will). But for now, there's no way to earn capital in Oleg's (it's too small). We also have a callendar, but in digital (we have a campaign site). One of the players have a job of keeping the record.
Purchasing power
As my players strip fallen bandits from everything that's remotely worth some gold, I tend to keep my eyes on Oleg's finances closely. I will enforce those rules heavyily later, when the Kingdom is already up and running.
We have played four 8hrs long sessions already. We're still in middle of stolen lands (not many quests finished, just defeated the bandit camp), but we go slow. I use Alexandrian Hexcrawl ideas to spice things up, so it's possible (although extremly low chance) to have 8 random encounters in 24hrs ;) But only part of those are combat encounters - got a whole table of that.
I'd love to share everything I have prepared for Kingamker, but would have to translate it beforehand, as my native language is Polish, and all my stuff is in polish :/
We're in the middle of Jade Regent which is the ultimate "have to pay attention to the little things" adventure. You literally are taking everything with you on a 4000+ mile caravan journey. The AP provides rules for cargo and provisions (the rules for "caravan combat" are stupid and broken, but the rules around the logistics are solid).
It is, however, a lot of work to do this sort of tracking which IMHO is a big part of why the default for players and GM's is to hand-wave it, or simplify it down to just a "tax" of so many gp/month to cover upkeep. Given the size of the task, it's really only worth putting the time into the details of logistics if you have players that are motivated to do it, or the campaign has a valid reason to make it an issue.
That being said, it is worth bringing up logistics for exceptional situations. We recently came across crates filled with copper bars in our AP. Doing the math, it came out to (IIRC) 2,000 lbs of copper valued at 1,000 gp. We left it behind. It just wasn't worth spending the resources to take it with us.
Our GM tracks the phase of the moon (shameless plug: see my web-based Golarion calendar) which is great and extremely useful for night adventures/encounters. Weather is not something we track regularly, though it does come up from time to time.
I think it's definitely worth sweating the small stuff at the start of Kingmaker, because it really helps drive home the frontier nature of the place they're exploring. Here's another one:
Rivers
The largest impediment to travel across the Greenbelt (aside from deadly wandering monsters) is the rivers. It's definitely worth making a big deal of them early on. Swimming across a river is risky and should not be undertaken lightly (or hand-waved), and locating fords or other ways across rivers is a very concrete reward for exploration... learning how to navigate around the territory efficiently rather than going miles out of your way will be significant for many months of game play. The Stolen Lands AP has a little description of the rivers hidden up the back in Appendix II on page 55 which is definitely worth having on hand. Each river has a distinctive character which allows players to recognise them again if encountered elsewhere, and some present additional challenges to those seeking to cross: the Skunk smells sulphurous (and IMC is warm even in Winter), the Shrike has flocks of small birds along its banks, the Thorn is bracketed by tangled brambles making it difficult to even approach the water, the Murque has ~50 foot of swamplands either side of it...
Once the players become the ruling council of a nation and get up a bit in levels, it becomes less important to track many of these things IMHO. The players will often only be a few days away from civilization, they'll have loyal minions to go off to major cities to sell and buy expensive items on their behalf (and eventually will have major cities of their own), they'll have Endure Elements and bags of holding and rings of sustenance and Create Food and Water and flight and so on, which will make many of the challenges they had starting out vanish. But IMHO it helps players enjoy their increasing power more at later levels if they really felt those problems initially and dealt with them the hard way first.
The ultimate cop out line of, it all depends on your party with the small stuff. For the party that is likely going to really dig into the small stuff, they are the right people for the sandbox of Kingmaker.
Personal experience wise:
Down-time - come book 2 it has been a lot of fun though a little time consuming. Definitely something though to help make the world feel more full.
Hexploration - This becomes a small thing likely around the end of book 2. I'm guessing the broad strokes of exploration won't be handled by the true party moving forward and they'll just go hit the big things.
Money at Oleg's - a huge deal, especially if the party has a number of mounts with them and are looting everything in sight.
Weather and things by the side of the road - definitely a way to help keep the hexploration from getting dull
Food - a good way for the character(s) with survival to show off a little and help feed the party while on the road.