Written in 2020 but still an interesting read. I wonder what the author thinks of games that have released in the intervening years, like Manor Lords, Going Medieval, and Farthest Frontier?
Yeah, I thought life was hard but sustainable mostly, turns out one was always at risk of extinction:
Medieval villagers were often living on the edge of subsistence. Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords. Bad harvests, banditry, warfare and disease might decimate a village community at any time. For this very reason, the demography of many European villages remained relatively stable between the twelfth and the eighteenth century.
If I remember Devereaux, the village itself was set up to minimise that risk first and foremost, at the expense of optimisation for max yields. So, every year was around subsistence, never much above, but also never much lower.
TLDR: IRL there was a soldier and/or priest that would take all the resources in your spare resource pile preventing you ever building anything beyond the buildings you started with.
The central point is that villages and towns grew only very slowly, and were planned, but if you get rid of the first constraint in order to be fun, you naturally end up with something like “organic” growth.
leidenmedievalistsblog.nl
Ważne