"Silk & Silver" Dev Diary #8 - Trade in Practice

Greetings! @chaddling here.

Back in May we wrote about our vision for Trade in Silk & Silver: Markets, Goods, Categories, Routes, Monopolies, as well as Merchants and their path to become renowned as the Cheesemonger of Europe. We promised that a more technical dev diary would follow closer to release where we dig into the system a bit more.

This is that diary. The previous dev diary was about what we wanted Trade to be, but this one gets to be about how it actually works now that it’s been realized.

Today we’ll pop the hood and show you all the various machinery that forms the engine of our new CK3 economy. As always, all screenshots are work-in-progress and everything is subject to change. That is especially true for numbers: nearly every value you’ll see in this dev diary is a define or script value that is still being balanced. We want to give you the shape of the system, but you’ll have to wait for the release to experience the final product.

Here's a quick reference. These are all base values. Nearly all of them are adjusted by modifiers.

• 922 Trade Markets, one for every de jure duchy on the map

• 44 Trade Goods, of which 16 are Basic Goods

• 20 Trade Good Need Categories

• 10 Base Competitiveness for every ruler

• 1 Base Profit Route per Merchant

• Distribution Routes are based on rank: 1 for a duke, 2 for a king, 3 for an emperor, 4 for a hegemon

• 1 Commission Route per Merchant

• 3 Markets per Profit Route; 2 Markets (only) per Distribution Route.

• 6 Max Trade Goods per Profit Route

• 30 Base Trade Capacity for every Merchant and Patrician

• 10 Base Route Length, counted in baronies along roads (seas and navigable rivers included)

• 2 Trade Posts

• 6 Market Tolls levels starting in the middle at a 3% toll on sell transactions

• 20 Trade Expertise levels per Need Category type

Every Market belongs to a de jure duchy, and every de jure duchy with at least one county gets a Market. On the current map that comes to 922. Each Market sits in its Market Capital and at game start takes in every barony of every de jure county in the duchy as a constituent title. The Market Capital is normally the capital barony of the duchy's capital county, but you can name a different barony for it to occupy in history. We do this for 54 duchies, mostly to put their Market on the coast. For example, Aquitaine trades from La Rochelle.

Markets are fixed for the whole game. If a county drifts to another de jure duchy, its baronies stay in the Market they started in. The Market's name and its Prosperity follow the duchy, but its buildings don't move. (If you load a save from before Silk & Silver, the Markets get created on load.)

The Market Owner is whoever holds the county that the Market Capital barony sits in. The Market Owner sets tolls, grants monopolies, and can issue Commission Routes.

Goods and Categories

We ended up with 44 Trade Good types. Each has a base price and belongs to exactly one Need Category. Any building that asks for "Cereals" has to know exactly which goods can contribute to that category.

There are 20 Need Categories: Cereals, Meats, Alcohol, Comforts, Fabric, Clothes, Base Metals, Precious Metals, Books, Medicaments and so on. Alongside those are 16 other grouping categories (defined in script), such as Luxury, Staple Goods and Forest Goods, which buildings can't ask for but modifiers can target. A good picks up price and production modifiers from its own set and from every category it belongs to, so a single Luxury sell price modifier affects all 11 luxury goods.

16 goods are flagged as Basic Goods: the three cereals, both meats, beer and wine, horses and cattle, wood and hemp, stone, iron and copper, and gold and silver. That flag matters for Distribution Routes, which can only carry Basic Goods. More on that later.

Nine goods can't be produced at all. Cheese, cured meat, beer, textiles, leather, glass, jewelry, lacquerware and books have no county potential anywhere on the map. They only come from buildings that turn other goods into them. If you feed the Weavers' Guild, for example, with 30 Fabric, it’ll produce 10 Textiles. Now we’re starting to talk about trade supply chains.

Production

A County's production comes from three factors. First, script decides which goods a county can produce (wood is possible in 2,276 counties, jade in 8). That potential unlocks the matching Resource District, and the buildings in that District grant production modifiers.

Each month, every barony works out its output for every good it produces:

Add and Flat come from the province's and county's modifiers. Mult also includes the holder's own modifiers, and can never drop production below 10%. Multipliers don’t affect FlatAdd. This is what entrepôts use.

To use some hypothetical numbers: a tier-1 grain farm makes 60 grain. On farmlands terrain (+100%) that's 120 a month, and if your culture has the Heavy Plow Innovation and the farm's iron need is met (+15%), it comes out to 129 total production.

Needs

Needs come from buildings. There are nearly 4,500 separate need definitions across the game's buildings. A Need asks for a good or a Need Category in some amount, and can often be filled several times over, with each fill granting its reward again.

When a need is met, the building gets its bonus. When it isn't, the building simply doesn't. The trade code itself never punishes an unmet need. Script can do that where it wants to. Castles, for example, turn their met food needs into Food Supply, and a Holding that goes hungry lets its settlement size drift down until its people are fed.

@trin tragula will talk about this in more detail in the second half of this dev diary.

Market Priority: Who Eats First

When a Market can't feed everyone, some will go hungry. Here’s the order in which we fulfill Needs:

• The Market Capital's County

• Market Capital Barony

• Market Capital County Capital

• The rest of the baronies in that County, ordered by settlement size.

• The other counties in the Market, ordered by the settlement size of their capitals.

• Inside a county: the Market Capital barony, then the county capital, then the rest by settlement size.

• Inside a Holding: the holding district, then the resource, trade post and entrepôt districts and the other special ones, then your regular districts in the order you've set.

• Inside a district: the buildings, in the order you've set.

The part you get to control is the order of your districts and the buildings within them. If your Weavers' Guild matters more to you than your tavern, move it up.

Surplus and Deficit

Local buildings almost always eat first (see Exploitative Monopolies for the one exception). Surplus is the production left over after local needs, and Deficit is the need left unmet. Those two numbers are what trade primarily works with, and they don't change during the month. Instead, routes claim slices of the pool rather than draining a shared stockpile.

Buy and sell prices have a slightly more involved calculation:

Here, the base price is defined in script along with numeric defines for buy and sell price scalars. Tolls are taken off the sell price after this calculation.

Prosperity is where buying and selling part ways. The sell price rises 0.5% for every point of average Market Prosperity, up to +50% in a Market at 100. The buy price stays flat as long as Prosperity is 50 or above, and drops 0.3% per point below that, down to -15% in a Market at 0. In other words, struggling Markets sell cheap and thriving Markets pay well. Buy where things are hard, sell where people have money.

Take Cured Meat, for example. Its base price of 0.05 becomes 0.04 gold per bundle. Bought in a Market at 11 Prosperity, that's 0.0445. Taking some Character modifiers you have into account brings it down further to 0.0444. Sold in a Market at 12 Prosperity, it's 0.053, plus the Market modifiers, it comes out to 0.06. Then, subtracting the 3% Medium toll, we land on 0.0582. That's a margin of about 0.0138 gold per bundle, or around 0.414 gold a month on a base 30-capacity route.

Price modifiers come from the Market, every barony and county inside it, the route, and the merchant. There are many ways to affect prices via script. Buildings regularly add sell price bonuses for the goods they need: every castle past its first level adds +1% to the Cereals' sell price in its Market, and every grain farm adds a little to iron's.

What isn't in the formula is supply and demand. In the beginning of development, we played around with making scarcity affect buy and sell prices, but ultimately decided against it. Instead, scarcity only decides how much you can trade, not what it costs. We wanted route planning to be about the world you and your neighbors have built (the buildings, the Prosperity, the competition) rather than about arbitraging numbers that bounce around every month. It also didn’t make much sense for the meta to be building a ton of additional buildings that need iron in order to feed the one or two iron-hungry buildings you really want the modifiers from.

Trade runs monthly, but not on the first of the month. Every Market and every Trade Route is assigned to one of 30 daily buckets, and does its monthly work on its own day. On any given day roughly a thirtieth of the world's Markets and Routes are having their month. So a route ticks every 30 days. Problem is: a Market and the routes passing through it will usually tick on different days. That's how a world with over 900 Markets avoids a stutter on the first of every month. But it also complicates how we keep these two game entities in sync.

Let's follow a route that **buys wine **in Market A and sells it in Market B.

Step 1: The Market Takes Stock

On Market A's update day, the Market adds up Production and Needs, lets any Exploitative Monopoly take its cut (discussed further below), feeds its own buildings in Market Priority order, and calculates its Surplus and Deficit.

Step 2: The Route Makes Its Plans

On the route's own day, a Profit Route does the following for each good in the order you've listed them:

1. It works out which of its stops are buy stops and which are sell stops.

   1. A stop with Surplus is a buy stop.

   2. A stop with a Deficit is a sell stop.

   3. Only an entrepôt can be both, in which case the rest of the route’s transactions decide if the route should buy or sell.

2. It adds up how much it could sell across its sell stops, given its share of each (see Competitiveness).

3. It buys that much, up to its remaining Capacity, at the cheapest buy-stops first.

4. It sells at the best-paying sell-stops first.

   1. Tolls are already counted in the price calculation, which is how steep tolls push merchants to sell elsewhere.

   2. In each Market, the route sells into individual Trade Good Needs first.

   3. Anything left over goes to Category Needs, like wine sold into a Market's need for Alcohol.

   4. Capacity is shared between all the goods on the route, in list order, so the first good gets the first claim on it.

Step 3: The Market Divides the Pie

Each route whose day it is first hands in its newly calculated transactions. If it wants less from a Market than last month, its claim shrinks straight away. If it wants more, that claim update waits for the Market's own update day, when every route's claim is reread.

Then every Market whose situation changed has its Competitiveness split (i.e. how big of a slice of pie each route gets per good) rebuilt. This covers a route arriving or departing, a Trader being replaced, a Monopoly appearing, and the Market's own monthly update. The split is rebuilt from every route trading there, not just the ones whose day it is.

Step 4: The Route Settles

Every planned trade is then capped to the route's share of the pool, and the route can never sell more of a good than it bought. Last month's trades are removed from both Markets' books and this month's are written in.

Step 5: Payday

The route doesn't pay you directly. Its income lands with the rest of your income on your own monthly income day, after your trade income modifiers and your liege's cut. Acumen, on the other hand, is credited on the route's update day.

Step 6: The Buildings Get Their Wine

On Market B's update day, the destination Market merges in what the routes deliver and hands it to its buildings in Market Priority order. It does this in two rounds: ordinary needs first, then Category Needs, and finally entrepôts get the leftovers. Buildings whose needs changed have their modifiers refreshed.

Put steps 2 and 6 together and you get two clocks: up to a month can pass between a route selling the wine and the tavern actually enjoying it.

If you remember one formula from this diary, make it this one:

where the pool is the Surplus on the buying side and the Deficit on the selling side.

When two merchants want the same wine, who gets it? Cue Competitiveness.

The Number

Competitiveness is calculated in two layers: Characters have a base amount of Competitiveness based on their own modifiers, but they also have situational Competitiveness where we include modifiers from other relevant sources, like the Market and Trade Route.

The second layer depends on where you are. Trade posts and market-specific modifiers only count in their own Market, so your Competitiveness is different in every Market you trade in. Routes can also get Competitiveness modifiers, so each route has its own calculation.

Let’s look at the Doge of Venice as an example: his Character Competitiveness calculates to about 60 based on modifiers from his Laws, Domicile, Domain size, and skills. In this Market, however, he has a Trade Post, so he gets an additional +2.

Now, on a Trade Route going through this Market, he may assign a Trader with high Intrigue and Martial skills and assign them the Manage Competition task, thus providing a +10% bonus, bringing the total number to 66, since the trader’s task bonus is calculated together with the other mult modifiers.

Your Market Share

Your share of a Market is proportional to your Competitiveness, but shares a route doesn't use are made available to the routes that do.

Each route keeps a record of how much it wants from each Market. On its monthly update day, it plans the month as if it could take everything the other routes leave, up to its Capacity, and that plan becomes its “record,” with a zero at any stop where it plans to trade nothing. A brand-new or freshly edited route starts with its Route Planner projection as its record. A route that wants less than its share takes what it wants, and the rest is divided among everyone else by Competitiveness.

Say Market A has a wine surplus of 40. You show up with 30 Competitiveness and a brand-new route whose projection says it can use everything. A rival with 20 Competitiveness only wanted a quarter of the pool last month (10 wine). A plain proportional split would give you 60%, which is 24 wine, and your rival 16 wine, 6 more than they can use. Instead, your rival takes their 10 wine and you get the rest (30 wine). If circumstances change and you later only manage to sell, say, 19 of it, your route will record that, and the next month the wine nobody wants simply stays in Market A as surplus.

A few consequences:

• If nobody else trades the good, your share is 100%.

• Two of your own routes in the same Market split your share between them.

• A suspended route (i.e. any route that has been invalidated for some reason) claims nothing, so it never dilutes anyone else’s share.

Profit Routes

These are the bread and butter for Merchants and Patricians. A Profit Route must always stop in one of your home Markets: the Market of your capital (for a Merchant, wherever your company is based), any Market where you hold land (Republics), or, for Patricians, any Market where your family has a Trade Post.

Distribution Routes

These changed the most since May. In the vision diary, Acquisition Routes were "incredibly limited" and expected to lose out to merchants. Distribution Routes now trade reach and variety for priority:

• Only dukes and above can create them: 1 for a duke, 2 for a king, 3 for an emperor, 4 for a hegemon, plus modifiers.

• A route connects exactly two Markets, and both must be owned by you or a vassal. In practice you need two Markets in your realm, so they're a tool for large dukes and up.

• It carries every Basic Good that these two markets can supply to one another, chosen automatically.

• It has no Capacity limit and no Route Length limit.

• It doesn't compete. Distribution Routes are served before any Profit Route, the higher title tier first. Merchants compete for what is left.

• It earns no gold and pays no tolls. It exists only to keep your buildings supplied.

Commission Routes

This is the "hire a merchant" loop the vision diary hinted at. A landed Patron uses the Commission Trade Route interaction on one of their Merchant Clients, picks one of their Markets and a good, and the merchant is contracted to deliver it there for 10 years.

No government can use both Profit and Distribution Routes. Feudal, Clan, Tribal, and Administrative rulers get Distribution; Merchants and Republics get Profit.

Stops

Once you've picked a starting Market, the map shades everything still within your remaining Route Length. New stops can join anywhere along the roads your route already uses.

You don't choose the order of the stops. The game puts them in logical order for you along the Roads that connect Markets. That sounds restrictive but it doesn't matter for trading: every month the route buys at its cheapest stops and sells at its best-paying ones, whatever order they're in. Trade in CK3 is about balances.

Route Length

Route Length is measured along the roads your route uses. The game connects your stops one at a time: each round it attaches the unconnected Market with the cheapest road path to anything already on the route. The result is a tree that can branch. A road through N provinces costs N - 1.

There's a nice loop in there: roads give a percentage bonus to Max Route Length (+5% at tier 1 up to +25% at tier 5), so a route on good roads can reach further than the same route on dirt tracks.

Goods and the Primary Good

The first good in the list is the route's Primary Good. You can drag another one to the front to change it. The Primary Good earns Trade Expertise, gets first call on Capacity, and gives the route its name (e.g. The Venetian Silk Route).

Capacity

Capacity bonuses come from you, the route itself (its trader, its roads, temporary modifiers), and from every stop's Market, including all its baronies and counties. Roads count once, at the average tier of the roads the route follows. So adding a stop in a well-connected Market can raise your Capacity.

When Routes Stop

A Profit Route doesn't get deleted when something goes wrong but it does get suspended. That happens when it no longer stops in one of your home Markets, for example, or when it's too long (you lost a length bonus, or its roads lost a tier). A suspended route trades nothing and claims no share, and waits for you to fix it.

On succession, the primary heir inherits the routes, up to their own route limit; anything beyond that is lost. A Distribution Route ends the moment one of its Markets leaves your realm. And moving your company destroys every route you have, so choose where you settle with care.

Monopolies are granted by the Market Owner, through one of three requests: "Monopolize Trade" for a merchant, or the Republic and Trade League versions. Each Monopoly covers either one Need Category or the whole Market (a Complete Monopoly), and is either Normal or Exploitative.

• Normal Monopolies lock out the competition. They don't change prices. A Normal Monopoly decides who gets to trade, period.

• Exploitative Monopolies go one step further. Their holder can buy from the Market's total production, not just its Surplus, and next month that amount is taken out before local buildings are fed. The Holding view tells you how much the Monopoly took out of local production last month, before these needs were served.

A Market can have one Complete Monopoly, or one monopoly per Need Category. Granting a Complete Monopoly wipes out every category monopoly in that Market on the spot, including the new holder's own.

Monopolies don't expire. They're inherited and they survive the Market changing hands. They end when the Market Owner uses Rescind Monopoly (which can't be refused, but costs prestige), when a Trade League holding one falls apart, or through war: a Trade League at 70 Cohesion can take one with the Enforce a Monopoly casus belli. Competitors' routes stop trading that category in that Market when a Monopoly takes effect.

The AI is very reluctant to grant monopolies since they lock out any other trade for the specified Category Need, making the Market rely solely on one source for those goods. Complete Monopolies are even tougher to acquire since they cover all goods in the Market, and Exploitative Monopolies tougher still.

Monopolies never lock out Distribution Routes and never benefit them, but an Exploitative Monopoly can still shrink the available surplus they draw from.

Market Tolls allow landed rulers to benefit from the trade happening in their realms. They may not run the caravans, but they do own the Market that merchants must sell in.

• There are six levels:

  • None (0%)

  • Minimal (1%)

  • Low (2%)

  • Medium (3%)

  • High (4%)

  • Very High (5%)

• Every Market starts at Medium.

• Tolls are taken only from sales on Profit Routes, as a percentage of the gross sale price. Buying is never tolled.

• The Market Owner doesn't pay, and neither do their direct vassals or their merchant clients.

• The Market Owner's toll income counts as commerce tax, so commerce tax modifiers boost it, and their liege can also tax it.

• Each level has two rates: what the merchant pays, and what the owner earns. In the base game they're equal, but they're separate in the data, so modders can make tolls leaky or subsidized.

• Changing tolls has a 36-month cooldown, and the cooldown belongs to the person who made the change, not to the Market. If you inherit or conquer a Market, you can change its tolls on day one.

• Merchants can ask for a Toll Exception, which sets their personal toll level for 10 years. It disappears if the Market's tolls drop to that level or lower, and all of them are wiped when the Market changes hands.

Since tolls are part of the sell price, merchants tend to route around Markets with steep tolls. AI Market Owners review their tolls every five years. A neutral ruler sits at Medium. Greedy, indebted or warlike ones tend to hike their rates up toward Very High. Generous ones typically drop to Low. Those preferences are script values, so modders can retune the AI’s behavior.

Roads are a network across the map specifically built to connect Trade Markets. A road is defined as a connection point between two Provinces. There are 4,119 of them, 2,060 on land and 2,059 at sea. At game start, several are already established, including stretches of the Via Appia and the Late Tang road between south and north China. While playing you’ll see roads emerge on the map, meaning they increase in tier as more trade happens along them, which thus increases the modifiers they provide.

Each month a road checks how many routes use it. Any route counts, of any type; how much they carry doesn't matter.

• If enough routes use it for the next tier, it upgrades straight away.

• Otherwise it upgrades on a timer: 5, 10, 20, 30 or 40 months at each tier.

• A road with no routes at all loses a tier every 24 months, along with any progress it had toward the next tier.

So a single route turns a dirt road into a tier-5 highway in a little over eight years, and a super busy trade corridor gets there almost immediately. On the other hand, a historical road that nobody trades along fades away within a couple of years. A province only takes the bonus of the best road running through it. A route takes road bonuses from the average tier of all the roads it follows.

In the vision dev diary, we said that we aimed for AI characters who are "real participants in the economic world instead of background scenery." Under the hood, the trade AI has three jobs:

• Once a month, an AI ruler can create at most one new route.

• Every so often it re-plans its existing routes: merchants roughly every three years, dukes every two, and kings and above every year.

• And once, at game start, it fills the world with trade.

Picking a Good

The AI ranks the goods in its home Market by how much it could move multiplied by the good's base price, not by the price difference between Markets. Goods nobody in its home Market trades yet get a x3 bonus, so a busy market fills out its goods instead of stacking onto the dearest few. It then looks for the best counterpart Market for the top 8. Finally it holds a lottery: every good that scores at least 60% of the best goes into a weighted draw, so merchants with the same markets do not all choose the same setup. The result is checked with the same projection the Route Planner uses.

Leaving Well Enough Alone

The AI only rewrites a route if the new plan is more than 10% better, and only edits one route per check, to allow the new trade route to settle. A min-maxing player can out-plan it on margin, and that's intentional. We want Merchants in the game who trade sensibly without min-maxing. That doesn’t mean they won’t give you a run for your money though.

Landed Rulers

AI characters build Distribution Routes linking their capital's Market to the best partner in their realm. They also commission merchants through a yearly check: a 50% chance for a duke, rising to 80% for a hegemon, minus 10 for every commission still running. They prioritize food and merchants with high expertise in the chosen good.

Game Start

We have about 430 historical Merchant Companies scripted for each start date. Before anyone has picked a character, the game seeds trade routes for every AI ruler in batches. Then the whole world sets road tiers from the new traffic. If you pick a character who was given routes during seeding, those routes are removed when the game starts, so you begin with a clean slate.

Way back in May we described a system where buildings, characters, geography, and politics push against each other. We hope to have delivered that and then some.

See you in the comments.

Hello everyone, I am @trin tragula and now I will talk a bit about the holding rework in Silk and Silver and the thinking that has gone into the revamp of the economy.

We will cover examples of many of the new districts as well as the thinking of how the intention is that you can use them to build your domain.

As always: Numbers are not final and things can still change all the way up until you get the new update in your hands.

These changes work hand in hand with the trade changes described by @chaddling but our focus now is going to be more directly on landed rulers and less on how trade itself happens.

General Economy

So as you may recall from the very first Diary about the Design Vision we have reworked some central concepts of the provincial economy, which are in many ways corner stones in how you can now build up your lands. We will quickly go over these below but we do also recommend quickly looking at the county economy section of that diary if you want to remind yourself about how things will work.

Control

One of the most important changes in the new patch is that control now has a variable baseline that it trends towards. At below 50 control you will suffer penalties (primarily to your economy) and above 50 your county receives benefits (primarily military ones).

Control baseline is primarily impacted by stationing troops and by building fortifications. This means you have reasons beyond military ones to have a military presence in your counties.

Popular Opinion

Popular opinion is another county value that has undergone a similar transformation. Opinion now has a local baseline, dependent primarily on buildings. A positive popular opinion confers economic benefits, a negative one reduces your taxes and levies. As before a low popular opinion can also lead to uprisings.

Settlement Size & Food Needs

[Screenshots of Settlement size for Morum in Sweden and Kaifeng in China, two very different holdings]

Unlike Control and Popular opinion Settlement Size is a holding value. Every holding in a game has a size between 1 and 10. The primary benefit of a high settlement size is that it is the only way to unlock more district slots. At settlement size 1 you can build 2 Regular Districts, at Settlement Size 9 you have 6.

Districts are what allows you to grow your holdings and make them give you more things. Settlement size also comes with substantial penalties to Popular Opinion and control however and a size 10 city is going to need to devote many of its buildings to keeping the peace and keeping your people happy.

When it comes to needs and trade a high settlement size holding is going to have many needs in its market, whereas a low settlement size holding is likely to be a simple exporter of goods. Big settlements relies on smaller ones to “feed” them so to speak.

Food:

This is also true in a more literal sense. Holdings now have a need for food, how much depends on the settlement size level. If a holding does not manage to get enough food from its market it will lose settlement size baseline and popular opinion.

[Another screenshot from Morum, this time showing its popular opinion which is being harmed by not having enough food]

Taxes:

What was once a single type of income, monthly taxes, has now been broken into multiple specialized tax types. These are all money that you collect just as before but they come from different sources and are multiplied by different things. General holding tax multipliers are now a thing of the past, instead you will acquire things that boost or harm specifically agricultural taxes, mining taxes, and so on.

Hopefully how these will work is going to become clearer as we walk you through some of the districts but I’ll still use two examples here:

Religious Taxes:

These come from religious buildings and holy sites. For most feudal realms it is going to be a rather niche type of income compared to something like Agricultural Taxes, but if you are sitting on a holy site, or for that matter if you are playing a Mandala, that could be very different.

Commerce Taxes:

These are generated and multiplied by market buildings and roads. More importantly though tolls are paid to the market owner in the form of Commerce taxes, and that means any buildings that multiply commerce taxes will also increase how much you gain from your tolls.

Now these are a lot of changes, something that might be good to say here is also that while the new systems are meant to reward you if you want to plan ahead, the intention is also that it should be hard to shoot yourself in the foot.

The game should now reward you more for playing like a medieval ruler, stationing your troops and building castles to control the countryside in your realm. And while there are many tax types, some more niche than others, you should get a very good idea of what will pay off by looking at the resource districts at your disposal (more on that below).

The fact that there is now an economic benefit also to man at arms and fortifications, and that you can no longer ignore these things while you build your economy, should also benefit the AI, since it has always played that way.

With all that said, We will now move on to describe some of the basic districts you can build. This is not meant to be an exhaustive go-through but more of an overview of how the pieces of the new systems fit together

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The resource district is in many ways one of the most important in the game. As a landed ruler this is where you can get your easiest money with no requirements on planning around it in your other districts.

It is also instrumental to the trade system as this is where most basic goods get made, feeding into the trade system where Merchants make money from fulfilling needs.

Every county capital has a resource district and every resource district (with one exception) is geared towards producing 1 main trade good. The owner of the district receives taxes and the market receives the production of a trade good. Inside the district the owner can also build supporting buildings, often increasing their taxes further. These can generally do 3 things:

• Refine the trade good (grain can be used to make beer for instance)

• Buildings that need a second good in order to increase the production of the main good

• Buildings that use some of the trade good the district produces in exchange for more taxes to the owner.

If you want to you can regard the trade good that your resource district produces as a secondary concern. As the owner you get paid taxes either way. The fact that you might yourself have other buildings that need what the district produces however means that you might have an interest in what the district produces, and how much.

That is why it can also be good to know that you can change what your resource districts produce. Every county in the game has a list of 3-5 potential trade goods that they could make, this means you are not locked to what the game has assigned on start for your entire game. Changing your resource district type does mean losing any buildings it contains, so it is a choice that has a certain cost to it. Still it can be good to, for instance, be able to make more of your lands produce food if you have a big city nearby.

Even if you don’t want to change your resource district you can choose to use your resource district building slots to make a small amount of an unutilized potential trade good in the county.

Example Resource Districts:

An example of a very common resource district is the fishing district. Vital for food needs, but perhaps not the wealthiest of resource districts otherwise. In this case you can also build a building to produce Ivory here due to a local modifier.

Another example of a resource district is the Ivory district. Where the fish district generates maritime taxes this one gives you Hinterland taxes.

The mining district is a bit special in that it is a resource district that will produce any minable resources there is potential for in the county, instead of specializing in just one of them. In this case this mine in the county of Gömör is producing quite a few different things.

Tribes are limited in how many of the side buildings they can actually construct in resource districts, as well as in how much taxes they get from them. Wanuas will also have buildings here to convert some of your produced trade goods into barter goods.

Regular districts are where your choices play a bigger part in a holding’s economy. Unlike resource districts these can be built in any holding and where you only ever have 1 resource district, and 1 holding district you can have up to 6 regular districts. They take up the entire bottom row of the County Interface.

Rural and Urban Holdings

Since high settlement size holdings are high maintenance, with penalties that need to be handled to control and popular opinion, and low settlement size holdings have low needs and few penalties, the new economy naturally caters to two main ways to develop a holding.

Rural districts will generally help a holding prosper if it belongs to the second category. They increase the output of Agricultural, Mining or Hinterland taxes, while also reducing your settlement size baseline so that you can be sure that the holding does not grow to cause trouble and consume more food. These represent the majority of humanity in the middle ages, in Medieval Europe these are the farming villages, local rural nobles and land owning monasteries.

Urban districts on the other hand come in many forms and shapes. The basic one is the Housing district, which has one main purpose, to increase your settlement size, giving you more district slots in your holding. Since this is more or less required to start the journey of a small hamlet towards something greater, it also unlocks further urban districts with other niches.

High settlement size means there are more possibilities, both for money and other modifiers, but it also means you will have to likely spend some of those openings to keep the peace in your county.

Speaking of opportunities, one of the main money making ones is the ability to build a Guild District. This district needs high amounts of raw materials that it then turns into more refined and expensive trade goods. In the process it generates artisan taxes for the owner.

Unlike the resource district the guild district does not make anything without a need being filled, so it relies on either local production or trade to bring in what it needs.

The market district is the only district that really generates commerce taxes for its owner, but it’s main draw is perhaps that it increases the prices merchants get for selling trade goods in this Trade Market. As a companion to the Guild district it can help to make it attractive for Merchants to sell the trade goods your guilds need. The commerce tax multipliers in this district can also be useful if you are the market owner since they will apply to your toll income.

The walls district is quite different from the two economic districts we’ve just looked at. The main purpose of the wall district is to push up the control baseline. It does so both directly, through its needs and by increasing how much control stationed troops provide in the county. Like the name implies it also increases the local fort level.

What the walls do for control the Entertainment district does for popular opinion. A secondary effect that is perhaps as useful is that this is where the people of your holding spend their free time (and their money). The entertainment district has many needs for things like Comforts, Spices, and other goods that Merchants can provide. When filled these needs generate Urban taxes for the owner of the holding.

I won’t walk you through the remaining districts now, hopefully these give an insight into how a basic urban holding could be built up, with the different districts that offset the penalties of the high settlement size itself as well as those that will simply grow your economy.

MILITARY DISTRICTS

Not all districts need to be sorted into rural or urban, some do just as well in the countryside as they do in the cities. The military district and its more specialized siege weapon district will provide more traditional military benefits to stationed man at arms in the county.

The new update also adds a number of new innovations in each era. Part of the reason for this is that we now model things in the game on the economic side more and so some genuinely medieval developments can actually be portrayed and be given a place.

Another reason however is that with over 300 new buildings tying them all to the same few unlocking innovations in each era started to feel very silly. Now different districts will get their levels unlocked from different innovations.

Duchy Districts, Holding Districts, Special Districts

I am running out of space here, but we have of course kept the concept of duchy buildings. Where there was once a duchy capital buildings slot we now have a duchy capital district slot. Here you will be able to chose districts that give you the traditional military bonuses that you could previously obtain, as well as a few different districts that will cater to specific economic profiles in a duchy.

For instance you might build a Bailiwick district which increases Agricultural taxes and Trade goods production, or the Assay District that instead focuses on Civic Tax, Mining and Control.

While not a choice you make yourself in the same way the holding itself is now a district with buildings inside it, this is also where you can see your current food needs. In this screenshot we are viewing a Jain holding, which needs Comforts instead of Meat for its food.

Special buildings are also still around, unlike the other districts these do not have buildings beyond the special buildings itself.

And that was all we had for today. We hope this was enlightening, there is much more that could be said but we have already gone on for some time. We look forward to your reactions as you get to explore the new province economy.

There are many more districts, some are only buildable in realm capitals, some associated with specific governments like Mandalas or Wanuas, but in this diary I’ve tried to keep my focus on the general loop for building up your lands rather than showing all the choices.

It is also worth saying that during development we’ve kept tuning this quite a lot. It would not be surprising if we will keep doing so based on feedback after release.

If you have questions we will try to answer them in the Forum.