Economics is something I think about all the time when playing these games or reading fantasy. We know that the ratio of farmers to non-farmers in the medieval period was something like 29:1. But so little thought is given to just the sheer amount of work and space it took to fill mouths and clothe bodies.
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.
People talk about some areas of the real world as boring because you just see endless wheat or corn fields. Things widely viewed as boring are not going to feature heavily in entertainment products.
In a zombie setting the fact that agriculture takes up a lot of space could be really useful from a story-telling point of view. It provides a reason to expand past the walls of the settlement.
It’s weird because in these settings a successful settlement is usually portrayed as basically impossible for the zombies to break into. Then, somebody has to do something stupid to let them in. Movies where things fall apart despite nobody making an obviously stupid mistake are a lot more satisfying IMO.
You don't expand beyond the settlement - your fields are already there. You leave the settlement to tend the fields. You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.
expanding is done when the fields get too far to walk there and back in a day. Then you make a new village.
more likely you practice what birth control you can to limit population. Your other choice is go to war and kill some other village so your kids can move there. There was essentially no unclaimed land you could expand into.
I agree. The main point here is that the inability to put the farm inside the walls provides necessary motivation to have people go out and get bit, which is what we need for the story to happen.
Walls themselves are a symptom. People generally build walls when they are afraid their village will be attacked. They are a lot of work so a safe village won't have them. (safe sometimes means you have a watchers and run to a nearby city with walls on need)
> You can't wall all the fields but you can wall the village.
An interesting take on this is depicted in Attack on Titan, where they do in fact wall all the fields - the city (I don't remember if it's like the last vestige of humanity or whatever) is surrounded in concentric ring walls, the outer one which contains villages and farmland having a circumference of about 3000 kilometers for an internal area of 723,822 km², making its area just a bit smaller than Zambia and Chile.
Of course, a 3000 kilometer, 50 meter tall wall is ridiculous. But then again the great wall of China is 21.000 kilometers long. I believe there's more info about the walls and their construction in the source.
Ballpark figures based on the ram earth construction for TGE vs AOT would have the AOT wall be 5-10x the volume & mass of the TGW. The issue is labor — the Great Wall probably represents 20–100 million ma years of labor. The AoT wall probably has at most 100k man years of labor it could've pulled from. That'd mean it's labor-mass ratio is off by 1000–10000x.
This gets into spoiler territory, but the walls in Attack on Titan weren't made with human labor. The first hint that something funky is going on was at the end of the first season finale, but we don't get the full story about the walls until much later.
It also was built when Marley was still very much a massive empire. So it wasn't limited to the manpower inside the walls. This is clear from how many of it's actual construction materials were used.
Enclosing a settlement gets easier as it gets larger. The amount of work is proportional to the perimeter, while the number of people to do the work is proportional to the area. The area is proportional to the square of the perimeter, so the work per person is inversely proportional to the length of the wall.
That only applies if you have the people. The limit of village population is the ability to grow enough food to feed it withing walking distance of the gate. And so your village cannot get a large enough population to overcome this.
Cities can only pull off a large population if there are a lot of villages growing surplus food (which is not what the village wants - in the medieval world cities were not making luxury goods farmers wanted so farmers would want to work less), and cities needed good bulk transport for all that food. Rome was a massive city in the day with just over a million people - today that is considered a tiny city and there are many much bigger.
What forest? Either it was owned by a noble with enough of an army to stop you, your great...grandparents already cut it, or the land wouldn't be useful for farming for some other reason.
North America had vast empty forests - but remember just before Europeans arrived disease (small pox) killed large portions of the population. We have very little recorded about what life was like before Columbus, but archeological evidence suggests that the land was already used to the max capacity of their technology. (Europe did bring technology to better use the land - for some definition of better. I'm not qualified to comment on why they didn't develop the technology, but there seems to be some interesting culture factors - perhaps you can find an expert)
Just like in I guess a large portion of human history after farming started. You abandoned the fields and retreated to the walled hilltop when the enemy came. Maybe that's what we have been genetically conditioned to expect and that's why we have these zombie films and series.
People always talk about how reality is too boring, and that's why shows need to have spaceships bouncing around and explosion sounds and superhumans etc.
And then something like The Expanse comes out and it turns out that realism is actually really interesting. Sure, the space is unfamiliar realism, but so is serf life to most viewers. And direction is also very important.
One example I can think of is armour. In movies armour don’t seem to do anything at all. You see fully cladded soldiers getting killed by single sword blows, but people in armour are actually really hard to kill. There is a lot of story potential by treating armour like super suits, where characters get stronger with armour upgrades and elite soldiers are like Space Marines.
I've seen clips of medieval reenactments, iirc in Poland they don't really hold back. But they try to use swords on people in full plate armor, which... does nothing, really.
Anyway, you mention Space Marines, there's animations and lots of media about them. Some depicting them as basically invulnerable (like the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level), but plenty of them where they die en masse - because while they're super suits, they're up against the worst the universe can throw at them (like the British).
40k is weird. The scales are often entirely off. Considering the stated populations and areas involved. Or the amount of equipment fielded.
This comes from it fundamentally being small scale skirmish game. So realistic army sizes are not possible. And on other hand you need some level of game balance. You can't expect one side to have dozen models and other to field thousands or tens of thousands.
And even there. Considering stated population of any reasonably build world to be in billions and more populated to go to hundreds of billions. Number of normal humans you could stick a weapon in hands and told to shoot at that direction would still be in at least millions if not billions. A few thousand whatever can do very little against that.
The funny thing about this is that pre modern cities featured in modern media are always surrounded by unformed grassland because it makes the shot more dramatic and it’s easier to do than showing lots of little farms growing in density up to the city walls.
that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like nice clothing even when the weather (and culture) allows nudism
Women may have done half the labour but they didn't spend all their time weaving cloth and making clothing. You're forgetting about all the food preparation and preservation that women did. Women cooked meals, baked bread, preserved fruits and vegetables, and brewed beer, in addition to all the farm work they did (feeding chickens, collecting eggs, milking cows, working vegetable gardens, harvesting). Of course, women didn't do all of that work alone, they taught their children how to do it and supervised their labour. Large families were preferred because children are inexpensive (cheap to feed and clothe) relative to the labour they produce under proper supervision. Expensive entertainment and education for children was still centuries away.
Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work.
of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done.
women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids.
you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives.
not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)
History is long - I'd call 14th century slightly before. The end of the medieval period does reach the 14th century, but most of the time period we are talking about didn't have it, and the culture effects of it would (as always) take longer to settle out.
> spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all)
Nope. You can invent it, but if there is no economics to drive its adoption it won't spread.
Medieval thread production and thread consumption was roughly balanced so there was no great economic incentive to engineer it.
A spinning wheel is significant labor from a craftsman which means you need to have excess cash to buy and maintain it--farmers surely didn't have that. In addition, if you suddenly generate 10x the amount of thread, that doesn't mean that it can be consumed--weaving doesn't magically get faster. There isn't a lot of trade beyond a single village, so there is nowhere for excess thread to go in order to become money. All this is even before you have engineering limitations--spinning wheels didn't create great thread for weaving from most fibres.
(Side note: In fact, the excess thread from spinning wheels basically didn't get consumed initially. It just created a surplus of rags. Which then led to printing because there was suddenly a cheap supply of something looking for a usage to consume it all ...)
Contrast this to later: The invention of the flying shuttle suddenly kicked up demand for thread which then needed the spinning jenny which then needed the cotton gin. That was all "demand pull"--there was pent up demand that would result in profit if you could fill it. And, even still, a LOT of "inventors" went bankrupt inventing all those things!
I think you are completely right about demand pull being a deciding factor in adoption of new inventions. Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].
Although I would question if multiple hours of daily labor isn't itself a significant demand pull? I assume everyone wants to free up time spent on monotonous tasks, but maybe this is wrong.
> Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].
They simply didn't have the metallurgy.
A more interesting question is why China didn't kick off into an Industrial Revolution given that they effectively had all the same technologies and perhaps actually had a few more.
There were some cultural issues like considering philosophy more important than trades and technology. However, the general issue seems to be that demand and supply were balanced enough that there simply wasn't a huge incentive.
The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.
The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.
> steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode
That's an interesting insight. I had not thought about the possibility of a scientific understanding of pressure developing prior to the steam engine. If you have some pointers to read up on this, I'd love to learn more.
Also, there were demands for pumps in antiquity, particularly in hydraulics. Lot's of labor was invested in building aqueducts and underground waterways. I always saw the Aeolipile as a tech demo showing that heat can be used as a power source for mechanical motion, but this is probably because I live after the steam machine, knowing it's true potential. I've long wondered why the idea wasn't expanded upon by the Romans or later the Greeks or Egyptians, but I suppose it wasn't convincing enough on its own.
I don't have specific links to this but it's more general reading of tech / military history over the years. I'd love to see a definitive study of the tech tree behind steam engines, but I do know that making bullets/shells precisely fit gun barrels took a long time, and this is analogous to making pistons in engines that don't lose pressure. The first mine-pumping steam engines were the size of small houses and stupidly inefficient, but, assuming lots of coal, they were still cheaper than having people / animals working water pumps all day. And they provided a good opportunity for engineers to properly iterate the technology with commercial pressure. They had a lot to learn though trial and error about how to optimise the things, e.g. adding condensing chambers that separated out initial water heating from power generation. This was all way beyond what the Romans could have achieved.
As you say, with retrospect we can see the Aeolipile as a tech demo, but at the time it was an interesting novelty with zero practical application.
Historians have come up with a lot of theories. There is no way to answer for sure though. General thought is they didn't even try because they had slaves they could force to do the hard labor, so there was not point. England developed steam engines in a world where slaves didn't exist. The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology as a society like England did, and so they mostly didn't try to develop technology (except as it related to winning wars - anyone who wins wars was a big deal)
However it isn't clear if the Romans could have developed the metals needed even if they tried. There are a lot of parts to better metal alloys that they didn't know and trial and error is a slow process when you don't have why something didn't work.
> The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology
The Romans were engineers par excellence.
They worked both steel and glass in this time frame. Look at how they built Pompeii for the local conditions. They built the Colosseum with lead clamps and rebar to prevent it from collapsing with earthquakes (it eventually collapsed because everybody stole the valuable lead as Rome failed). Their art was better than anything produced until the Renaissance happened. I can go on and on ad nauseam.
Romans most certainly did not look down on engineering and technology.
England developed steam engines in an era where slaves were increasingly expensive and less socially acceptable than before and , contrarily, in an era where exploitation of the poor was still very normal and acceptable.
Hephaestus/Vulcan was disabled, yes, but also was very powerful (governing volcanos and fire in Italy isn’t a weakling’s domain). They absolutely valued technology… to say otherwise is wild.
There was this synergistic interaction between coal and iron ore deposits, trains and the steam engine. Having a portable steam engine meant that you could build trains, which meant that you could transport coal and iron ore to the steel mills, which meant you could build more steam engines, which meant that you could build more trains and expand the rail network. The fact that these things followed one another wasn't a coincidence.
And then later they realize the tar that comes out of making coal coke can be used to treat railroad ties to prevent rot, letting you lay larger networks of rail.
Women and children very much participate in farming back then, harvest was a “all hands on deck” situation.
Similarly by adding ‘and clothe bodies’ that captures well over half of a typical woman’s labor back then. Drop spindles sucked up an enormous amount of labor before you even had cloth.
Bret Deveraux linked to estimates that 70% of producing clothes is spinning, 20% is weaving, and 10% is sewing.
We tend to think of weaving as the time consuming thing but that’s because the spinning wheel had been around for a while by the time the Industrial Revolution happened.
At times it was all hands on deck for harvest - but most of the time it wasn't and that rest is an important part of village life missing. As you say, drop spindles suck.
If you aren’t reaping of sowing, your labor isn’t in the fields anyway.
People don’t understand that there are ebbs and flows to a farming life. There is always work to do but no one is out in the fields much unless it’s harvest or seeding times.
Many crops are not hands off. wheat chokes out weeds, but you need to weed the garden. You need to water crops in a drough - if you could get water (from a well or river). rice needs a lot of labor to manage water levels
Yes, but also the other side of the ratio includes everything like guilded craftsmen, monks, merchants, etc. Not exactly people who weren't doing work themselves.
Abandoned? What was unfinished? I was satisfied when I played it. My only complaint was something about population growth or the ageing of people being too quick IIRC.
No I haven't, sadly I can't find the real one on Steam as it suffers the same problem every other Steam game does; hundreds of suspicious copy pastes of original mods.
A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.
I'm glad there was a mention of Banished, which does a decent job of capturing the slow struggle of subsistence living. It cannot be understated how many games Banished inspired - of them Manor Lords probably comes the closest to something historically accurate. And definitely fits the author's interests in a non-linear, non-grid based city builder.