Simulating Trade Routes

[SteelyGlint]

In my unprofessional opinion you need to develop a base cost for all materials that are to be traded. You then need to create a rating system to determine the base scarcity or abundance of the material for each province. Next would be the time scale for change either monthly or seasonal. Then you would have to create a chart for the events that could occur and the modifiers that they could apply to the product war, poor harvest, boom etc. Further more you would have to determine a base population for the provinces and the modifiers that could occur due to events plagues , war, economic expansion.

Yeah, this is essentially what I'm working on right now. I'm working on some quick dev tools to generate populations based on the environment surrounding each city. The amount of settled land within each province will be partially randomly generated, to account for unknown positive/negative events in the recent city history.

What are people's opinions about whether large cities in heavily populated provinces would increase or decrease the neighboring province density / major city size? Could prosperous neighbors cause higher settlement density but smaller major cities?

I'd assume that setting cheap food goods as the most basic economic unit would be a good idea. Perhaps 1 unit of food could be the food surplus generated by an average village (of around 200 people) for a given year. Obviously the quality of the harvest, tax levels, events like locust plagues or war, and so on would have an effect on how much food a given province produces per year. Anyway, this "food unit" would itself be equivalent to the ubiquitous gold piece used in so many settings.

The actual sale price of a unit of food would of course fluctuate, with 1 gp being the value in a good year, and the value skyrocketing in the case of famine or war. All other goods follow the same pattern locally, with base values that are adjusted by the ratio of goods in the province to the demand or consumption rate.

Anyway, another excuse for this post is to show the current state of what could be called an interactive map. The attached screenshots include a dev view of how cities are connected and an overlay that shows the connections in a more stylish way.