Jos Elkink wrote:julie2 wrote:Big Cities IRL do tend to be surrounded by fertile farmland which supports the population of the city. I pictured it much the same in Cantr, except there's no practical way to distinguish the countryfolk from the towsfolk. They all share the same bit of cyberspace. Hardly their fault, it's just the way the game was designed.
I think this is only the case because people tend to be rather strict in saying that one location is one settlement is one state. When I created Cantr, I always envisaged groups of regions to be part of one 'country', much like for example the Lad. Empire.
Again that has a lot to do with the basic game design, imo. You have vast distances between settlements and no means of instantaneous communication, so, naturally, settlements are much more insular than they are IRL. It must be about one year's march from one end of the Lad Empire to the other- and it's only a little cluster of roundabout half-a-dozen settlements. Seems to me that Cantrians respond to these conditions in much the same way real people would- if the same conditions were to be found IRL. Unless you shorten the distances considerably, you're trying to squeeze blood out of a stone, asking Cantrian's to organise themselves into effective"states"
Jos wrote:So for me, the countryfolk are those people living in sparsely populated areas, and the townsfolk are for example the inhabitants of Siom.
And yes, the countryside should deliver the food to the cities, while the cities contain the industries and trading centres.
But---Siom is only food producing Town in a vast region, mostly comprised of woodland. Lad is in a similar position, so are most "Cities". That's precicesely they they grew big and powererful. Seatown Forest is a rare exception. There's no way you can force Siom's neighbours to supply food to Siom instead of vice-versa, because Siom's neighbours quite simply don't have any food to export. . Food is, in fact ,the only resource Siom has that has any serious ecomnomic sinificance. They import practically everything else.
Think again about the distances between towns in Cantr. What happens in Cantr is precisely what happens IRL. Settlements spring up IRL near sources of water and food, and food-producing regions become much more densely populated than non-food producing regions. Same in Cantr. The densely populated regions of the world (such as England) ) tend to be the fastest to develop industrially, and these tend to become the Empire bullders. English cities sprung up in the fertile plainlands, not in barren mountainous regions, and remain there to this day, even with modern transport enabling us to fly food in from across the globe. They remain there because its simply a whole lot more convenient. What's more , the millions of buildings in those cities are still not enough to blot out the surrounding countryside and eliminate our local food suppies. We don't actually need to transport our food across the globe. Why should Cantr function so differently? Why should the development of a single city in the fertile plains affect the availabity of food rightacross across a region the size of England?
A town like Siom, together with its satellite woodland towns represents an area approximately the size of England, to judge by travelling times. How far would you expect English farmers to travel just to take their goods to market? As far as Siom Forest North (Unusually - in Cantr- less than two day's trave from Siom) would be the maximum, I guess, IRL This already happens, and more. Siom supplies food to almost every town within a ten-day radius, except Jakara ,(which has it's own food--inconveniently for Siom ,since Jakara supplies Siom with limestone. Siom's industrialists therefore have quite a bit of running around to to do, in order to get hold of goods which Jakara actually needs), but you want Siom to focus near-enough exclusively on industy instead of farminng since it's a "Big City " in your view. Not a big fertile plain containing just one big city, which looks to me like the only logical way of viewing it) , or else move it's industry away from the fertille plains into the woodlands.No way would that happen IRL. Even if the woodlands have some vital resource, like coal, you get a small mining village springing up there, and nearly all the major industry which deprends on that coal remains in the plains, just the same as IRL. Or do you want towns like Siom to import their food from other fertile plains (tantamount to exporting them from right across the globe, given Cantrian distances) as the following quote suggests
Jos wrote:Sometime in the future, buildings should also take from the land scarcity - Jur and I are already talking about possible ways of doing this - and then you get more of that effect. But even without that, you would expect that cities are already useful as markets - you shouldn't have to travel to all surrounding locations to find a place to sell your goods, but people should organise central trading centres. Cities should grow at the crossroads of trading routes, on coasts with harbours, etc., while more inland you have the farmers producing the goods for the cities. Cities can organise regular transport lines from the city to its hinterland.
So Siom somehow has has to discover a "fertile hinterland" does it? And so must Lad? And so must the Lad Empire's only other major City, Naron? (which has also grown to faily sizable proportions, by dint of the fact that it also produces it's own food). So must Brunoi? And Lake Village? And Blojt? And...
As the game's designer, I guess you should know better than me. But still,
I always thought that those locations included an intrinsic fertile hinterland, and --given those vast inter-location distances, and given the distribution of resources-- I'm at a total loss for finding some other way of viewing it. Seems to me, if we all have to travel for a year or more to find some undeveloped farmland to serve as our hinterland, we might as well stay where we land and set up shop over there, with a nice convenient food supply. But then again , as soon as we start to develop any serious industry the ProgD will be wanting to move us on.
Jos wrote:Julie wrote:there has to come a point when the poulation is too big to be supported by the available resources.
I really fail to see why cities cannot import enough food.
I say again, because most cities don't need to import food. Most Cities supply food instead. That's how they came to be cities. And if you must squeeze the City's food supply, then you squeeze their hinterland's food supply too (if you define the hinterland as the surrounding towns, which usually don't producce food) And then food transportation will begin to involve such huge distances and such a large degree of organisation, that
I can see most players simply giving up.That won't be anything like IRL food supply chains, but more like a perpetual famine-relief operation. At least give us aircraft, first, before imposing that kind of situation.
Jos wrote:Julie wrote:The process of identifying a maket for your raw materials and actually transporting them there can easily take years.
Totally true. But this can be improved also given the current design of the game. Just institutionalise better trading markets. Why does Siom not have a central goods exchange market, for example?
It's not lack of markets that's the problem. It's the distances you have to travel before you can even befgin to communicate with your neighbour. And the unique Cantrian uncertainties imposed by people suddely dropping off to sleep for long periods, or even dropping dead with distressing frequency (Worse still, the long wait to see if the former turns into the latter) Also, all kinds of social and economic changes can occur between one trip and the next, because they take so darned long. To a large extent Cantrian's just have to "play it by ear" and hope for the best. Trading trips may well fail. for any number of reasons, however carefully planned. If you want Cantr to develop economically, and form efficient, unified , statesyou have to shorten those distances. That's the only thing which will seriously help to facilitate all that.
To an extent, we can shorten those distances ourselves, by building vehicles and improving roads. But that takes years, under the best of circumstances( the best circumstances being that you already have good vehicles and good roads) Actually motorised vehicles currently represent the summit of Cantrian achievement, don't they? So you bound to be without them all the time you're struggling to reach that summit (after ten years of struggling to build up the local steel industry, my charavcter is pleased to have finally produced all the tandems she needs. Now a van is a serious possibilty, at last. It will still take years, but after that it's plain sailing...probably. However if Siom has to choose betwen producing food and producing steel, that creates a whole new fundamental problem for her. Fortunately the current implementation doesn't actually enforce that kind of choice. The current implementation encourages excess gatherers to get a job and move indoors. But if that process of building up industry then forces the gatherers out, as seems to be the plan, well then that's when the Sh** rteally hits the fan. There's no reason on Cantr for locating that industry in Siom
except for the proximity to food supplies.Alter that, and the whole thing becomes one giant folly, and people of Siom will have to hope to Jos, that you give them some way of dismantling their buildings, so they can all go back to being farmers. Food trade is the cornerstone of Siom's economy. Take that away, and it's going to becomea ghost town. I'm sure the same can be said for many other similar towns)
Jos wrote: Now Siom has a serious interest in controlling or at least maintaining good trading relations with surrounding towns, because it depends on their food and resources (this is an example, I'm not sure it's accurate in the case of Siom), so there is much more incentive for Siom to be powerful and for people to be powerful in Siom.
Nope. Siom has a serious interest in controlling or at least maintaining good trading relations with surrounding towns, because it depends on them for everything but food. My character amongst others has spent tent ten years developing good trading relations for that very reason. It ain't broke. Don't fix it. Siom's only major problems with trade are the distances involved, as mentoned, and the sleepiness of some of the surrounding communities. My character was forced to send people down from Siom to populate one of the surrounding towns., to fix that. Another important town for trade is already pretty well populated, biut the town leader keeps suffering from sleeping sickness, and won't appoint a deputy...a much trickier situation to fix. Despite sitting on top of a mountain, they apparently don't need Som's food nor anything else enough to wake up and trade when deliveries arrive. None of these suggestions look set to fix that one, they just look set to lay waste all the efforts Siom's people have already put in towards developing local trade relations and industry. I'm convinced those efforts have only born fruit at all, because Siom possesses a food supply, and hence possesses a pretty large poulation to draw upon. When some key character falls asleepholding some crucial bunch of keys, that it isn't quite such a large scale disaster for Siom as it for smaller places. They can weather that kind of thing that much more easily. And, of course. if the worst comes to the worst, and whole town loses access to it's food stores(as happens almost everywhere on occasions) they can always dig up more while it's sorted out.
Whatever. I personally find this silly and annoying.
If there is no restriction on the number of people that can gather resources - but that above a certain number and the yields will be less - will result in the Cantr-in-game equivalent of taking all the long-standing 'day value' trading that has developed, tearing it into tiny pieces, miking it with kite-cat cat food, feeding it to a hundred different kittens, then taking those kittens, and placing them on a steamboat headed to total oblivion, then sending a couple of cruise missiles and a nuclear warhead after them just for good measure.
Thanks again for your detailed reponses, Jur.
