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Kingmaker, pst 2 (AP n. 32)
At the GM’s whim, using construction magic (such as a lyre of building or spells like fabricate or wall of stone) can reduce the cost of a building’s BP by 2 (minimum of 0 BP). This is a one-time reduction, regardless of the amount of magic used.
Ultimate Campagn, p. 212
Construction: Construction is completed in the same turn you spend BP for the building, no matter what its size is. A building’s benefits apply to your kingdom immediately. At the GM’s discretion, construction magic (such as lyre of building, fabricate, or wall of stone) can reduce a single building’s BP cost by 2 (minimum 0). This is a one-time reduction per turn, regardless of the amount of magic used.
The Lyre covers the manual labor part of the building requirement, but you still need the material, detailed plans for the building, someone with the appropriate skills that direct the works, and the person using the Lyre.
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The Kingmaker pieces say that the Lyre and other magics modify the cost of a building only once.
The UC version of the rule says that the cost of building a structure can be reduced once per turn. As all buildings require 1 turn to be completed you can use it only once for each building.
Construction: Construction is completed in the same turn you spend BP for the building, no matter what its size is.
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To benefit more than once from the Lyre you need to build a structure modularly through upgrades.
To make an example:
you want to build a University
Step 1, Turn 1: you build a Library and use the Lyre
Step 2, Turn 2: you upgrade the Library to an Academy and use the Lyre a second time
Step 3, Turn 3: you upgrade the Academy to a University and use the Lyre a third time
Also keep in mind that the fact that these things can be built in a turn (i.e. one month), sorta implies that magic like the lyre is already being used. Actual historians are building a castle with period tools and methods in a project that has so far taken 25 years (and is expected to take 2 more) and the game just lets you build one in a month.
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Some cathedral has required a century or more to be built.
About Guédelon Castle, the Wikipedia page doesn't say how many people are working on it. It is possible that the crew is relatively small. That notwithstanding, from what I recall, 10-20 years to complete a middle-sized castle (I have visited castles that are way smaller than Guédelon) is the norm.
The 2005 image shows us an already somewhat defensible structure. You don't need it to be completed to start using it.
Returning to the game rules, besides them being very simplified, I am not convinced they represent the building of the complete structure. They seem to represent the laying of the basic infrastructure and the initial investment, leaving the complete development to the private initiative.
1 BP is worth approximately 4,000 gp. 1 lot of houses (750'x750') cost 3 BP.
But, in the same book we find:
House
Create 32 Goods, 1 Influence, 31 Labor (1,290 gp)
Rooms 1 Bedroom, 1 Kitchen, 1 Lavatory, 1 Sewer Access, 1 Sitting Room, 1 Storage
A small cottage that can house up to two adults or a new family.
So 1,290' gp for a cottage with a courtyard. Let's say 15 yards x 15 yards area.
Even considering the space for the roads, 1 lot can have 200 of those houses. At a building cost of above 250,000 gp.
Way different from the 12,000 gp in the kingdom rules.
So, it is highly possible that each homeowner is renting the Lyre and the one strumming it to speed up construction and reduce the cost, but that doesn't matter for the kingdom finances. It is part of the city economy that pay the kingdom taxes and generate the kingdom BPs.
Some cathedral has required a century or more to be built.
About Guédelon Castle, the Wikipedia page doesn't say how many people are working on it. It is possible that the crew is relatively small. That notwithstanding, from what I recall, 10-20 years to complete a middle-sized castle (I have visited castles that are way smaller than Guédelon) is the norm.
The 2005 image shows us an already somewhat defensible structure. You don't need it to be completed to start using it.Returning to the game rules, besides them being very simplified, I am not convinced they represent the building of the complete structure. They seem to represent the laying of the basic infrastructure and the initial investment, leaving the complete development to the private initiative.
1 BP is worth approximately 4,000 gp. 1 lot of houses (750'x750') cost 3 BP.
But, in the same book we find:
House
Create 32 Goods, 1 Influence, 31 Labor (1,290 gp)
Rooms 1 Bedroom, 1 Kitchen, 1 Lavatory, 1 Sewer Access, 1 Sitting Room, 1 Storage
A small cottage that can house up to two adults or a new family.So 1,290' gp for a cottage with a courtyard. Let's say 15 yards x 15 yards area.
Even considering the space for the roads, 1 lot can have 200 of those houses. At a building cost of above 250,000 gp.Way different from the 12,000 gp in the kingdom rules.
So, it is highly possible that each homeowner is renting the Lyre and the one strumming it to speed up construction and reduce the cost, but that doesn't matter for the kingdom finances. It is part of the city economy that pay the kingdom taxes and generate the kingdom BPs.
They actually had the documentary on it where they said they had about 60-100 people working on it depending on the year/time of the year, although that was done all the way back in 2014. They do also as part of that documentary tell us that people would often construct their own houses upon moving in to work on the castle, making a one room cottage (which that House stats is way more extravagant than; your bedroom was your kitchen and your bathroom was a clay pot) and it only took about a day or two's efforts. The kingdom building houses are usually more like tenements than the full stat you've given. So if anything, the cost of said lot of houses might still be accurate to the 3bp, but even then, that is just the cost of the zoning, tools, and initial salaries of your workers (and their families).
Link to the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydoRAbpWfCU
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TENEMENT 1 BP, 1 LOT
Kingdom Unrest +2
Upgrade To House
Special Counts as House for buildings that must be adjacent to a House
A staggering number of low-rent housing units.
Tenements are a different thing from Houses, and what you are describing are basically Shacks.
SHACK
Create 3 Goods, 2 Labor (100 gp); Time 3 days
Size 2–4 squares
Upgrade To Lavatory, Storage
This no-frills wooden shelter contains a simple table, pallet bed, and stool. One person can build a shack with simple tools and basic materials. For an additional 1 point of Goods and 2 points of Labor, you can construct a brick or stone hut instead of a wooden shack.
10'x10' for the largest ones. Let's make it 15'x15' to include alleys. That gives us 2,500 shacks in 1 lot. 250,000 gp to build them.
TENEMENT 1 BP, 1 LOT
Kingdom Unrest +2
Upgrade To House
Special Counts as House for buildings that must be adjacent to a House
A staggering number of low-rent housing units.Tenements are a different thing from Houses, and what you are describing are basically Shacks.
SHACK
Create 3 Goods, 2 Labor (100 gp); Time 3 days
Size 2–4 squares
Upgrade To Lavatory, Storage
This no-frills wooden shelter contains a simple table, pallet bed, and stool. One person can build a shack with simple tools and basic materials. For an additional 1 point of Goods and 2 points of Labor, you can construct a brick or stone hut instead of a wooden shack.10'x10' for the largest ones. Let's make it 15'x15' to include alleys. That gives us 2,500 shacks in 1 lot. 250,000 gp to build them.
You don't need 2,500 shacks to get to the population cap provided by a "kingdom" house, which is 250 people. If we assume that is a shack for an average family size of 5, we just need 50 shacks, or 5,000gp, way less than the 12k it would cost to purchase a house through gold into BP, so you can even make them about twice as nice as said shacks.
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You don't need 2,500 shacks to get to the population cap provided by a "kingdom" house, which is 250 people. If we assume that is a shack for an average family size of 5, we just need 50 shacks, or 5,000gp, way less than the 12k it would cost to purchase a house through gold into BP, so you can even make them about twice as nice as said shacks.
Population: A settlement’s population is approximately equal to the number of completed lots within its districts × 250. A grid that has all 36 lots filled with buildings has a population of approximately 9,000.
That is an average. I am fairly sure that a lot with a Tannery hasn't 250 residents, and that a Noble Villa hasn't 500 residents. Several "buildings" require an adjacent House (or Tenement) exactly for that reason. Few people reside in that "building", they only work there, while they and their families reside in an adjacent House.
And House that is the prerequisite for the adjacent lot containing an Alchemist will have housing for something like 500 people.Tenements have an unrest cost too, so we can assume they are overcrowded and there are more residents than average in them.
If we say that each shack house 4 people and we consider only the cost to build the housing for those 500 people, we need 125 shacks. That is the equivalent of 12,500 gp, 3 BPs, not 1. And we aren't considering the cost of the alleys and whatever structure is in the area (probably at least a couple of water weels, they will need to drink).
Naturally, we can say that each shack houses more than 4 people, but then, what are they doing with all the free space?
A Tenement area with 12,500 square feet of buildings and 550,000 square feet of empty space is a bit strange. The used space is less than 3% of the lot.
Perhaps, but also there's plenty of verticality that will happen by the time you start building those bigger buildings. Just like a shop owner might live above his shop, when you build a villa, you probably do have 500 people in support staff (including their families). The villa itself probably isn't the full 750x750'. For reference, the building itself of the Palace of Versailles is only around 350x250', and that is the villa to end all villa's. That leaves 84% of the space for servant's quarters, if you aren't going to go overboard on 3 square miles of parks.
For the shop, if that's one "shop" and not a bunch of different types of stores or a market, then of course they have virtually the entire lot to fill with housing. Again, even if it is a bunch of shops, you can have all of them with a house above their shop for verticality.
Then we can also look at the fact that a settlement with ~1000 population would be represented with just 4 lots filled in a single district. Take Sandpoint with 1,240 population, where we have several taverns, a church, and several more noble villas (and technically a defunct wizard's tower). So we can represent it as 2 houses, a shop, a tavern, and a temple fully within the rules. But if we look at the map of Sandpoint, and I have used my thumb to approximate it's dimensions to be ~5 by ~6 thumbs which are each equal to 150ft, which gives us 675,000 square feet of town, which is only 24% of the size implied by 5 750x750' lots, even after taking into account things like roads and alleys.
So if anything, the game just way over estimates the size of a lot.
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Perhaps, but also there's plenty of verticality that will happen by the time you start building those bigger buildings. Just like a shop owner might live above his shop, when you build a villa, you probably do have 500 people in support staff (including their families). The villa itself probably isn't the full 750x750'. For reference, the building itself of the Palace of Versailles is only around 350x250', and that is the villa to end all villa's. That leaves 84% of the space for servant's quarters, if you aren't going to go overboard on 3 square miles of parks.
Versaille is hardly the largest, to cite two examples:
Royal Palace of Caserta 810x603', The park is smaller than Versaille, "only" 120 ha of park, i.e. 1,200,000 square meters.
Kyoto Imperial Palace total surface with the park 4,300x2,300', but the main ceremonial hall alone is 108 by 75 feet.
That nonetheless, a lot isn't a single building, it is a district of similar buildings. A Noble Villa is the villas of several nobles, and their surface includes the courtyards.
Most of the people that work there don't live there, but instead in a neighborhood with commoners' houses.
Reproducing something like Versaille would require a Palace, a separate House for the servants, and several Parks with special features.
So if anything, the game just way over estimates the size of a lot.
No argument about that, I fully agree.
The speed at which your settlement can grow is excessive too. There are examples of that explosive growth, see Bodie, but generally, it is not sustainable, and require specials conditions.As a general rule Pathfinder has a very low-density population. I did a bit of maths by the rule of thumb years ago, the total surface of the inner sea area is about twice Europe (Russia included), and the population, even considering that 90% of it lives outside the main cities, is about half that of XIII century Europe.
But in the XIII century, Italy had several cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, France, Germany, Austria all had at least a few. Constantinople had a population of about 400,000 people.
The Inner Sea? From what I recall there are 2-3 cities with 100,000 inhabitants.
The demography of Pathfinder is that of XIII century England, but, no offense meant, XIII century England was a backwater populated by shepherds.
Ancient Rome is estimated to have housed anywhere from 500,000 to 3,000,000 people, granted most of them were slaves or personal servants.
The dark ages (300-800 ACE) are the most likely time, but even then, that only affected western Europe with much of eastern europe and eurasia doing just fine. Meanwhile, Absalom has 300k people, Katapesh has 125k, Westcrown has 114k, Sothis has 111k, Oppara has 109k, and then we dip below 100k with Egorian at 89k.
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Out of curiosity, at what point in European history would there have only been a few cities over 100,000?
Not sure, but probably the V or VI century d.c., the population of the city of Rome decreased from 1 million to a few tens of thousandth, the territory of the fallen empire from 55-60 million to 25-30 million, and the organization and commerce declined sharply. The Carolingian Empire (IX century) was the moment when the population and the cities started growing again.
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Ancient Rome is estimated to have housed anywhere from 500,000 to 3,000,000 people, granted most of them were slaves or personal servants.
The dark ages (300-800 ACE) are the most likely time, but even then, that only affected western Europe with much of eastern europe and eurasia doing just fine. Meanwhile, Absalom has 300k people, Katapesh has 125k, Westcrown has 114k, Sothis has 111k, Oppara has 109k, and then we dip below 100k with Egorian at 89k.
I should have said Avistan, it is more precise than Inner Sea. My calculations are for Avistan and the northern shore of Garund, not the whole 2 continents. Including all the parts of Garund described in the Pathfinders Chronicles we increase the area by another 50% at least and a few more big cities. Yled has 119,000 inhabitants, but I don't know how many are living creatures (Geb is populated by undead).
Personally, I see the Inner Sea civilization as technologically and culturally closer to the XVI century Africa and Eurasia.