This is good, good stuff - it’s starting to finally crystallize some things for me. Please, air out as much as you’re able here, this is a great example.
Within the classes, I'm thinking of breaking down the spoils by quartiles. The top quartile gets 50% of the income; the next 25%; the next 15% and the bottom the remaining 10%.
So taking the cavalry class 42158gp/month (averaging 703gp/month), that actually breaks down as the richest 15 (likely the timoukoi) take 21079gp/month (averaging 1405gp/month); the next richest 15 take 10540gp/month (averaging 703gp/month); the next richest 15 take 6324gp/month (averaging 421gp/month) and the poorest 15 take 4215gp/month (averaging 281gp/month).
For the hoplite class 34585gp/month (averaging 144gp/month); the top 60 take 17293gp/month (averaging 288gp/month); the next 60 take 8646gp/month (averaging 144gp/month); the next 60 take 5188gp/month (averaging 86gp/month) and the bottom 60 take 3458gp/month (averaging 58gp/month).
For the artisan class taking 27012gp/month (averaging 90gp/month); the top 75 take 13506gp/month (averaging 180gp/month); the next 75 take 6753gp/month (averaging 90gp/month); the next 75 take 4052gp/month (averaging 54gp/month); and the poorest take 2701gp/month (averaging 36gp/month).
Interestingly, the poorest of the cavalry class earn less than the richest of the hoplite class, and there's an even broader overlap between the poorest three quartiles of the hoplite class and the richest two of the artisan class, which sounds about right to me.
Festivals - of which there are potentially many in the Greek calendar cost 6000gp, and as mentioned are voted to a citizen to fund as a liturgy, or public service to the city. Obviously there's a great deal of political potential around them - some are prestigious and can make a man's name for the year, but equally they could be used to ruin someone in precarious financial circumstances.
Looking at Demand Modifiers, the factors on that table are relatively straightforward:
Age: 101-1000 years (Massalia is 300 years old at this point)
Water Source: Sea coast (obvious one!)
Climate: Scrub (after some research, apparently most Mediterranean climes are classified as Maquis shrubland)
Elevation: Hills (lots of hilly ground from the tail of the Alps and situated on promontories)
I don't think I want to start with random modifiers for goods-types, but I am confused as to how I apply the reality. The complication is the Massalia was an exchange-point rather than destination for much of it's trade. Its population wasn't that big, things going there weren't for local consumption, but often shipping off again - either to the Gallic interior or out into the wider Mediterranean.
As mentioned before, they exported their own products; local wine, salted pork and fish, aromatic and medicinal plants, coral and cork, salt, olive oil, cups, mixing bowls, to inland markets in Gallia. They were a destination for re-export primarily of grain, amber, tin and slaves.
So perhaps I should read that as negative demand for the first list (since they are produced locally or imported for shipping into Gallia), but positive for the second (since they are things in demand at Massalia to be shipped off elsewhere)? Point then is that if you have the former you need to take them inland yourself, but if you have the latter there'll be someone glad to take it off your hands.
Maybe what I should do is determine the obvious ones, but do the others randomly?
Given the number of settlements Massalia connects to, is this going to get messy when I look at trade routes? The major place it links to is Emporion, which is smaller, and a source of metals.
Your mention of the voting of liturgies on council members makes me think there might be another way to model the income of a trade city with little associated land governed by a council of merchants like the one you are describing. You could build it as a 1-hex domain with an urban settlement of whatever size fits historical estimates of its population. Then, you can determine how many total merchant ships are owned by members of the council, and the total number of people in the councilors’ families. Multiply the number of ships by the average monthly profits for a merchant ship (there’s a table with this info on ACKS pg 145), and the population of the councilors’ families by the monthly cost of the minimum acceptable standard of living for councilors. Subtract the second number from the first to determine the city’s available monthly liturgy pool. Calculate the domain revenue and expenses using the normal ACKS domain rules. Any excess expenses are taken from the liturgy pool. If it becomes important in the campaign, you can calculate the liturgy pool by family instead of as a total, or maybe do that for a handful of important families and then lump everyone else into a “minor councilors” pool.
The only big downside I see is that galleys aren’t included on the Merchant Ships and Caravans table, so you would have to figure out how to calculate average monthly income for trade galleys.
Still, this does give me a good model for a domain ruled by a Venturer and his guild.
That's very kind of you.
All this forum praise is going to my head. My next Kickstarter I'm just going to sell huge Mao Zedong-style posters of myself with GM notes in little red books!
Fantastic!
James, one thing I was very surprised to discover is that even during Antiquity, the heyday of the galley, most merchant ships used in Rome were not galleys. Instead they were sailing ships,the cladivata and the corbita.
I'm not sure if the same holds true of Carthage and Greece, but I suspect it does. When plying known trade routes outside of a military capacity, the cargo capacity of sailing vessels makes them better than galleys.
Climate: Scrub (after some research, apparently most Mediterranean climes are classified as Maquis shrubland)
APM: Scrub is in fact the predominant biome of the Mediterranean area. I didn’t even know what Scrub climate was before I started writing the Auran Empire campaign setting.
For those of you who are presumable as ignorant as I was at the start of the process, imagine a ranked list as follows:
grassland → shrubland → woodland → forest
Shrubbland is land with woody shrubs. Shrubland is divided vertically into tall shrubland and low shurbland, and horizontally into open and closed shrubland.
Tall shrubland has 6’6" to 26’ tall shrubs and is generally known as “scrub”.
Low shrubland has 6" to 6’6" tall shrubs and is generally known as “heath”.
If the land is 70%-100% covered by shrubs, it is called “closed”. If it is 70% to 30% covered by shrubs, it is called “open”. If less than 30%, it’s probably not shrubland.
Each region has its own unique name for these territories:
Closed Scrub: Chapparal, fynbos, maquis, macchia
http://www.ee.sunysb.edu/~serge/ARW-4/PHOTOS/ZASLAVSKY/Maquis_vegetation.jpg
Open Scrub: Garrigue, phrygana, matorral, mallee, batha
http://azalas.de/bilder/2009-05/DSCN0249-1_450
(note how much more scattered the shrubs are, with gaps filled with grass)
Closed Heath: Heathland, Kwongan
http://www.mediterraneanaction.net/ma_v2/thumbs/http://www.mediterraneanaction.net//ma_v2/userImages/DSCF25581195510490.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Heathland_I.jpg
(note how low, yet densely packed, the shrubs are)
Open Heath: Moorland
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Moorland_above_Attadale_-geograph.org.uk-_594916.jpg
(low, widely spaced shrubs with moss and grass in between)
The Mediterranean region is primarily Closed Scrub and Open Scrub.
they exported their own products; local wine, salted pork and fish, aromatic and medicinal plants, coral and cork, salt, olive oil, cups, mixing bowls, to inland markets in Gallia. They were a destination for re-export primarily of grain, amber, tin and slaves.
So perhaps I should read that as negative demand for the first list (since they are produced locally or imported for shipping into Gallia), but positive for the second (since they are things in demand at Massalia to be shipped off elsewhere)?
APM: That's exactly correct. In ACKS terms, you would want to assign a negative DM to Wine, Spirits; Preserved Fish; Salt; Lamp Oil; and Pottery. You would assign a positive DM to Grain, Semiprecious Stones, and Slaves.
Excellent, I'll have a look at those tomorrow, I might even get Massalia complete before tomorrow's session at this rate!
Can I be fairly loose with the existing definitions - for example can lamp oil stand in for olive oil? Presumably, I need to assume different values for ingots of silver, compared to those of tin, copper or iron? There's silver coming out of Iberia in large quantites, after all (via Emporion). Half-stone ingots of silver (going by the table on p145 for measures) are worth 100gp each.
Cool. While I assumed, based on crew requirements alone, that galleys would be ditched as soon as sailing ships became viable, I had no idea that happened as early as Rome.
I didn’t realize it either until I researched it for ACKS.
This website has a nice summary: http://eglewis.blogspot.com/2012/05/roman-merchant-ships-warhorses-of.html
“…The Roman fleet also had higher tonnage vessels. The hull of the Madrague de Giens, that floundered off Gaul (France) in the First Century BC, was 130 feet long with an estimated capacity of 440 tons. In the early years of the Roman Empire, themuriophorio, 10,000-amphora carriers carrying 550 tons were the largest ships afloat. The grain trade also utilized some 50,000 modii vessels which hauled 365 tons. The size and capacity of these ships was not exceeded in the Mediterranean until the Sixteenth Century…”
That’s considerably larger than the 13th century cog (which tops out at 200 tons) and approaches the size of the 16th century carracks.
No, galleys and sailing ships existed in parallel for a very long time. The ancient Athenian grain fleet (necessary to prevent the polis from starving from about 5th century BC) was comprised of huge sailing ships, but no one would ever think to use a sailing ship for war.
Besides which, rowers offer a potential automatic source of marines/raiders for the enterprising captain, if you train and treat them well. One trireme is a mobile base for a small army (around two hundred men all told) which is ideal for raiding coastal settlements and getting away with your loot before anyone can respond.
I’d back that! 
To be clear, I meant that merchants would switch to sailing vessels as soon as it became technically feasible to do so in order to reduce labor costs and reduce the amount of cargo capacity devoted to provisions for the crew. Obviously, these aren’t concerns for a military vessel. No point having soldiers sitting around idle for the duration of the voyage. Make 'em row.
This leads me to ask how you intended the “Climate” factor on the "Environmental Adjustments to Demand table to be interpreted. (And I apologize for taking this thread off topic, but the Forums won’t let me post new topics anymore).
I have assumed that the Climate categories represented a combination of two factors: temperature (Cold, Temperate, or Hot), and dominant vegetation (Trees, Shrubs, Grass, or Barren). So we get:
Cold + Trees = Taiga
Cold + Shrubs = Tundra
Cold + Grass = Steppe
Cold + Barren = Polar [Doesn’t appear.]
Temperate + Trees = Deciduous Forest
Temperate + Shrubs = Scrub
Temperate + Grass = Grasslands
Temperate + Barren = Barrens [Appears in Wandering Monster section.]
Hot + Trees = Rainforest
Hot + Shrubs = ? [Doesn’t appear.]
Hot + Grass = Savanna
Hot + Barren = Desert
But, judging from you analysis above, it looks like you were going for something more like how climates/biomes/whatever are actually classified, and then cramming them into a gameable number of categories. Which means that savanna should apply to places with mixed grass and trees, regardless of temperature, and both the Pacific Northwest and the Amazon should be classified as rainforest. Is that more like what you were going for?
Gotcha.
Well, it's not necessarily wise to make rowers and marines the same thing; you want your rowers fresh for rowing, and you don't want your marines exhausted by rowing before they even set foot on an enemy deck. Thus many ships of the era distinguished quite clearly between the two, though sometimes rowers could be co-opted as light infantry either in desparate circumstances (the ship has been boarded!) or for raiding.
Rowing is also a particular skillset that doesn't automatically translate to being good for fighting. There was usually a small complement of archers and another of marines on board a galley.
If I’m not mistaken, the main advantage of a galley was speed. Except perhaps under miraculously favorable wind conditions, a ship under oar will outpace a similarly sized sailing ship by a huge margin. Speed was important to military vessels in antiquity not only for maneuvering, but also for ramming, which was more or less the go-to tactic in ship-to-ship engagements until well into the Roman period.
Taking that into consideration, I suspect that the switch from galleys to sailing ships for trade had a lot to do with how safe the sea lanes were for merchants. If you’ve got the might of the Roman or Athenian fleet to keep pirates at bay, sailing ships make a lot of economic sense. On the other hand, a sailing vessel in more dangerous waters would be a sitting duck, particularly before the development of the lateen sail (another Roman period innovation).
Actually I think the reason that galleys remained the preeminent military vessel for so long as their maneuverability and reliability compared to sailing vessels. A sailing ship could outrun a fully manned galley if it had the wind with it, and it could definitely outpace a galley from a strategic perspective, couple that with the fact that they were far cheaper to operate because they required a significantly smaller crew and that made them ideal for trading, but they fact that they were so dependent on weather made them unsuitable for naval combat tactics of the time. It would have been extremely difficult to ram an opposing vessel with a sailing ship. It wasn’t until the maturity of gunpowder, when loading a ship with cannons along the broadside rather than rowers made it more powerful in combat, along with the development of more sophisticated sailing rigs that allowed for more fine control of ships,even sailing against the wind, and galleys were finally made obsolete right around the end of the 16th century.
What I’ve been reading about the history of ships mostly agrees with what you’re saying, but I’m not sure you’re right about sailing ships being able to outpace a fully manned galley. I believe that most galleys were equipped with sails as well so that they could continue to move under sail when the rowers needed to rest. Furthermore, before the development of the lateen sail, sailing ships were unable to tack very close to an oncoming wind, meaning that they were vulnerable not only to being becalmed, but also to days when the wind just wasn’t blowing their way.
Going by Wikipedia, it looks like a 5th century BCE war galley probably had a cruising speed of 7-8 knots, and could reach a speed of up to 10 knots for short sprints. The same ship under sail was capable of an estimated top speed of around 8-9 knots in fair conditions, though I don’t know how fast a differently designed sailing ship of the day might have been able to go.
Galleys, of course, were vulnerable to poor weather as well, and couldn’t maneuver under oar in rough seas. Under such circumstances I would guess that a dedicated sailing vessel would be at an advantage in terms of speed, though I don’t know how big the advantage would be. I’m admittedly only guessing, but based on the general fickleness of weather, I suspect that galleys and sailing vessels would be pretty comparable in terms of speed on a strategic scale.
Since originally answering this post, I have expanded and deepened the mathematical models I originally built for ACKS. This has led to some more richness in my understanding of city economics.
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Above I wrote “the total economic activity in a town attributable to its population* is roughly 10 times the maximum amounts listed on the Markets & Merchandise table.” In fact, it is roughly 36 times the maximum amounts.
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Here are the approximate number of merchant ships that a typical city of minimum size for each category could support per month:
Class I: 30 Large Ships, 90 Small Ships, or 45 30-horse Caravans
Class II: 7-8 Large Ships, 22 Small Ships, or 11 30-horse Caravans
Class III: 3-4 Large Ships, 11 Small Ships, or 6 30-horse Caravans
Class IV: 1 Large Ship, 3 Small Ships, or 2 20-horse Caravans
Class V: 1 Small Ship or 2 10-horse Caravans
Class VI: 1 10-horse Caravan -
The profit that can be earned from monopolizing arbitrage, passenger, and shipping within a city is approximately 15% more than the profit that an independent city of the same size generates for its ruler. See “Merchant Ships and Caravans” table for the profit per ship/caravan.
EXAMPLE: the mercantile profit from a Class I city (20,000 families and 30 Large Sailing Ships) would be (30 large ships x $2591 per ship) 77,730gp per month. The rulership profit from the same city, if independent, would be (3.34 x 20,000) 66,800gp per month. Note that 66,800 x 1.15 = 76,820. [Why 3.34? 3.34 = 8.5gp base - 2gp garrisons - 1.5gp upkeep - 1.66gp festivals]
So if you want to create an independent city-state like Venice where the rulers are merchant princes, you can increase their monthly profits by up to 115% to reflect their mercantile holdings.
You could also divide the mercantile holdings between multiple families, if desired.