[Writeup] New Population Mechanics coming soon in Shieldwall Beta 0.7.0
What’s new with population in 0.7?
Well, everything. We were not happy with how population felt or played in previous versions of this mod, so we’ve spent a huge portion of our efforts these last few months redoing the mechanics to meet a few goals we set for ourselves:
- We wanted to tie populations closely to other game mechanics.
- We wanted to make populations important, so that they cannot be ignored by players.
- We wanted to improve the user experience of the mechanic, so everyone can easily understand the mechanics and how they are impacting their game.
Achieving all three of these is hard, but I think we’ve got a pretty good shot at it. Today I’ll be going through how populations work in general and go into specifics for how you’ll acquire and manage each population type.
(If you don’t really care about the new mechanics, an update on our plans and progress is at the bottom).
UI
Populations, while still calculated based on the regions you own, are no longer displayed separately in each province. Instead, your population totals are now displayed in a second row of the top resource bar. These counters act very similarly to the UI used for Dyflin’s slave mechanic in the Vanilla game, and let you get an immediate sense of how each population type is impacting your faction as well as an accounting of what is causing gains and losses for each caste.
Recruitment
With the exception of Clergy, all population types (yes, that includes Slaves if you’re playing as Dyflin) are now used as a resource directly inside the recruitment panel.
When you open the recruitment panel, you will see each population type, and your total available quantity, listed alongside your available food and gold on the recruitment summary screen.
To see the population cost of any unit, simply hover over the unit card. The population cost, along with the icon for the population type, will appear on the unit card directly above the gold cost of the unit. This should reduce confusion about what kinds of population are necessary for which units, though I will still summarize that now:
- Peasant units, such as Gebur and Fyrd, and Marcher units, will cost peasant manpower.
- Noble units, including heroic units, cost noble manpower.
- Mercenary units and Vikingar units cost foreign warrior manpower.
- Thrall units, and Irish conscript units, will cost Dyflin slaves.
Region Capacity
One of the main ways you will increase the manpower available to you is by conquering new land and integrating it into your Kingdom. However, not all provinces are equal in their capacity to support a population. The size of a region matters when determining how many Peasants and Nobles that region can contribute to your overall pool of manpower. The broad regional differences are as follows:
- Major cities and markets, such as London, York and Chester have much larger population capacity than normal settlements.
- Many of these major settlements are concentrated across the South of England, amplifying the rewards of controlling these heartlands.
- Villages across Ireland boast a higher than normal population capacity, owing to the fertility of Irish land.
- Settlements in the Northern Coastal areas are unable to support large populations.
Peasant Manpower
Peasant manpower is the most basic, and the most important, of the four population types. Peasant manpower, in addition to being the resource used to purchase military units, also determines bonuses to commercial income and the replenishment rate of those units. Building up larger quantities of peasants will help you keep a thriving economy, and make it easier to raise an army quickly when the time comes for war.
Factions who find themselves short on peasants will need more time to bring together soldiers, and won’t be able to accelerate their income. If your faction runs out of able bodied men altogether, you will not be able to replenish any peasant units or recruit further units, crippling your military.
However, peasants are also important because of how they interact with the other population types. Large numbers of peasants are overall beneficial, but they do require careful management to keep in check. We’ll explain more of this as we continue.
If you’re looking to acquire more peasants, you’ll need time, food or new lands. Conquest provides a new settlement along with the portion of its population who survived your invasion, and the full capacity to grow in that settlement. This is especially important because growth over time will eventually diminish due to overpopulation, while the additional population capacity of new land will move this overpopulation level further upward, allowing for more growth to take place.
Food increases the growth rate of your peasant population each turn, allowing you to speed up the recovery of your manpower using food surpluses during peacetime. This encourages you to, rather than keeping a standing army, disband and recruit units as they are necessary. This is a major part of the time period’s history, and while we did not want to force this gameplay onto the player directly, we’ve made sure to make it a very viable strategy with clear rewards for doing so.
You’ll also want to avoid losing your manpower. Food shortages are a major issue, and will slow the growth of your peasants. If these shortages become acute enough, famine will strike, growth will stop entirely, and manpower will begin to quickly drop as peasants starve. Another major factor in losing manpower is the devastation of war. In addition to the soldiers actually fighting, raiding parties within your lands will lead to deaths, and allowing your settlements to be sacked will massively reduce the current population of that settlement. Finally, while conquering new lands is a fast way to increase the number of peasants available to you, the same is true for your enemies. If you lose territory, you also lose people.
Noble Manpower and its Effects
Noble manpower is, just like Peasant manpower, essential to your military. However, while it is often difficult for many factions to run their peasantry completely dry, noble populations grow slower and therefore are much more valuable, amplifying the cost of wartime losses.
Yet nobles are not warriors exclusively, they also are the backbone of the Kingdom’s administration. The magic ratio for effective management is one nobleman for every 10 peasants. If you keep this ratio, or better, you will receive faction wide bonuses to your tax rate and allegiance spread. If your peasants begin to heavily outnumber their betters, however, banditry and disorder will more easily take hold in your Kingdom. Making sure that enough nobles are present to maintain order puts further pressure on the player to use their noble units with care.
If you’re looking to improve the number of noblemen within your Kingdom, there are many things you can do. First of all, the same growth factors that impact peasants will impact noblemen to some degree. While the impact of food is lessened for noblemen, who will likely have the influence and money to keep eating during even the worst shortages, they still factor into growth. Conquest once again also increases the potential number of noblemen available, yet noblemen come with a caveat that peasants do not: your ability to draw noble manpower from the land depends on how effectively you maintain your allegiance.
Keep allegiance high in your settlements and you will be rewarded with an abundance of willing noble families to support your king, but if you allow rampant banditry, treacherous characters, or other factions to spread their influence into your lands, this number will dwindle as noblemen change sides and refuse to support you.
Besides allegiance, you can promote a healthy noble population through constructing estates. By designating lands for the ownership and benefit of nobles, you will earn their gratitude and support. In both our previous versions, and often in the base game itself, we find that Estates are largely a negative rather than a positive, as they make it much harder to manage your characters. This mechanic is intended to help alleviate that by making estates a powerful tool for maintaining a noble population which can keep your Kingdom stable.
Finally, the same devastating effects of war are felt by the noblemen, though once again to a lesser extent as their more vulnerable peasantry. It is still wise to prevent the enemy from sacking settlements, and especially to prevent them from capturing estates.
Clergy and Paganism
The clergy are the most simple of the four populations, but can provide very powerful bonuses when you make an investment in their growth.
Churches, abbies, and especially monasteries all have an assigned capacity for clergymen, and can train clergymen to fill those positions. As the number of clergy in your kingdom increases, they bring benefits to public order across your whole faction, and are one of the only (and most powerful) ways of improving your research rate.
If you want to rely on Church income, you’ll need a large clergy. Church income is tied strongly to their number, and without enough clergy you will be unable to earn income from church buildings at all. If you can successfully build up their numbers, however, you will be able to turn your monasteries into a source of significant gold for your kingdom.
To gain clergy, you’ll need to build new buildings which can house them. Each of these buildings trains clergy each turn, meaning that having a large number of religious buildings will train clergy much more rapidly.
However, the wealth and relative defenselessness of the clergy makes them easy and appetizing targets for your enemies. Raiding, Sacking, and of course the loss of land, all contribute to losing clergy. Furthermore, riotous peasants may turn against their suspiciously wealthy religious leaders during times of strife, so keeping order within your Kingdom is paramount.
If you’re a pagan, you’ll still have to deal with the clergy. Benefits to your research rate and church income remain, even for kings of another religion, but the way that the clergy impacts public order changes entirely. Instead of providing positive public order, clergy will instead increase the negative public order effects of bad allegiance by converting disloyal nobles and using their influence to destabilize your Kingdom. Furthermore, peasants will be very unlikely to target your clergy during riots, as they will be more than happy to redirect that anger towards their pagan overlords.
You could, of course, demolish your churches and mothball your monasteries using a new conversion option available to pagan Kings which prevents the monastery from training clergy or performing it’s religious role. However, your research rate will fall behind your enemies, so pushing the church out of your faction comes with its own significant risks.
Foreigners and Tensions
Finally we get to the most complex, and in my opinion the most interesting, of our population types. Foreigners are a major source of conflict in this time period, as the invading Viking peoples came not just as raiders, but also as settlers seeking fertile land for their kin. Differences in culture, custom, law, religion and language will, however, cause significant tensions between these migrants and the Saxons who [strike]invaded the island first[/strike] already live there.
Foreigners are used by all factions to recruit foreign units, such as Butsecarl for the Saxons, and the Tuagh Catha Warband for the Irish. For Great Viking Army and Viking Sea King factions, this role is extremely important as Vikingar units draw from the pool of foreigners.
Foreigners are gained through a variety of sources. They will often arrive in your ports to trade, and may wish to stay in your Kingdom. They may also be invited in by Vikings, due to their central role in their armies. If you’re capturing lands from the Great Viking Army or the Sea Kings, expect to find foreigners already living within those lands and prepare yourself to mediate the conflict.
Tensions rise when the proportion of peasants, foreigners and monks grows to an extent that your noblemen cannot keep the peace. Additionally, tensions are much more likely to flare during times of turmoil. Being at war with Great Viking Army factions, having poor public order, and letting your faction leader’s authority drop too low will make it much harder to keep the peace between Saxons and Vikings.
So how can you stop tensions? There are a number of ways, but I’ll preface by saying that not all of these tactics are ideal. If you’ve failed to plan for foreigners within your lands, you might face some difficult decisions.
For a great first example, clergy will increase the tension level from the start of the game. However, a civil technology allows clergy to calm tensions instead. A player who plans wisely might already have this tech by the time tensions start to rise, but a player who plans badly may find themselves demolishing churches in an attempt to keep the peace.
Other populations matter as well. Improving the number of nobles in your Kingdom will make it much easier to keep the peace, while you can also take actions to mitigate the number of foreigners living in your lands. In many cases, it will be up to the player whether to take on additional warriors or to turn them away. Once they are already within your lands, dilemma will offer reductions in the number of foreigners in exchange for short term downsides. Working to make foreigners more culturally Saxon will cause unrest, but settle tensions. Exiling foreigners will shift the problem to your neighbours, potentially angering them. The history of Viking migrations is often marred by extreme violence, and a king may even encourage violence as a means of restoring order, though Viking Kingdoms throughout Britannia will condemn Kings who allow their people to be slaughtered.
Once you’re at war with everyone due to slaughtering their countrymen and pushing foreigners into Wales, you can also reduce the number of foreigners by recruiting them into your armies. Unless you’re a Viking yourself, these units tend to be very expensive to upkeep compared to your own units, but they can be used, and killed, in battle without harming your economy, and do not contribute to tensions. Disbanding these units, however, will still return their number into the pool, so if you wish to keep the peace by hiring surplus foreigners, it will cost you.
Coexisting, however, is possible. Dilemmas will allow you to change the function of buildings such as the Moot Hill, taking away some of the benefits those buildings provide in exchange for allowing them to reduce tensions.
For the Great Viking Army, who rely on foreigners for military reasons, Here King can be a powerful tool in keeping the peace. When you remain close to the centre of the Here King alignment bar, you will reduce tensions across your faction, but receive little benefit from your stance. Moving towards the extremes of either the English or the Army alignment will provide you with much stronger benefits to your economy and military, but will make tensions worse. Finally, the Great Viking Army also has access to decrees which allow them to dispel tensions by force, mitigating the problem for a time.
As one last note, the Viking Sea Kings of Sudreyjar don’t suffer from tensions like other factions. Many nobles in this faction were not born on the isles of Britannia, and their adherence to traditional norse culture changes the power dynamics within their kingdom in favour of the foreigners. This allows the Sudreyjar to make use of foreigners as a remedy for their otherwise extremely sparse population and makes it easier for them to focus their efforts on Vikingar units.
And finally, an update on the mod and progress
So how much of the above is implemented so far? About 90% of it. There are lots of other changes we’re making with the coming update, but this has been a huge effort for our campaign team and it’s almost done.
We’re going to be releasing these new mechanics in a few weeks. This won’t include the GVA update (which will bring new units, touchups, and a new faction) but will rather include all the changes we’ve made that impact basically every faction in the game. We'll still be producing that GVA update, but we'd rather release what we have now and start getting feedback than wait. I can’t give an exact timeline, as the free hours I have to work on the mod fluctuate heavily with my university coursework, but we’re almost out of the development stage and into polishing things up.
I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have about the new mechanics.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by sobchack
