Things to consider when placing a settlement.

[bognor]

I am interested in tutorials or books or other resources that help to determine where settlements are likely to rise, and an idea about constructing a reasonable pattern of growth or decay. Along with that, some idea about how to construct a suitable road/logistics network.

For example, market towns are not far from market produce, metal mines either need fuel shipped to local smelters, or ship the ore to a smelters where there is plent of fuel.. While a monastery might be a suitable building high up in the mountains, a fishmonger less so..

Ports typically need a good natural harbour, everyone needs water and food and fuel and places to dump waste and (often) other places to deal with the dead..

I guess a sanity checklist would be good - and I would prefer non-software solutions! I want to learn about this stuff, as well as draw wonderful maps!

[waldronate]

Start by searching for "central place theory" and it will lead you down more rabbit holes than you ever considered. The basic notion is that goods and services have a radius in which it's profitable to exist. Outside of that radius, another one will appear, leading to (under ideal circumstances of a uniform flat plane populated by perfectly rational producers and consumers) a hierarchy of settlements laid out in hexagonal grid. Real-world constraints such as mountains, rivers, and politics will distort that perfect grid, with sufficient distortion resulting in additional features (e.g. a ferry on a river or a settlement on each side of a mountain pass) or removal of features (that town done got ate by the dragon, that's why). Towns have a tendency to be about a day's round-trip travel away from each other, with various support features at half-intervals. The kind of goods and modes of transport will also play into it and changes in transportation modes will disrupt existing networks (e.g. the advent of the automobile and interstate highway system in the USA badly disrupted many areas in ways still not recovered). There's a lovely article (dissertation?) on why the counties and states are different sizes that you'll come across: read it!

[bognor]

Start by searching for "central place theory"

I really love it when the answer to my question is "Know these three words, in this order, and a new domain of knowledge will open at your feet!"
This was really useful information and you have earned both my respect and my thanks.

A further question - half-asked in my post - concerns tech trees and/or dependencies. Is there a similar magic spell for, tech tree dependencies // food webs ... eg: firearms? Well you need ammo for that, whic requires fine tooling a source of lead (or similar) and black powder, steel for the gun barrels. So black powder - you'll need nitrates, sulphur and ground charcoal for that. Steel? you need high temperatures to remove all the impurities from that iron you smelted .. etc...
I imagine that for each resource in demand, one could model CPT to represent the links and, again, consider value of resource in terms of final availability?

[Redrobes]

The manufacture of such items would be very localized but you can transport those items so could still potentially be available where the resources are not directly placed for the manufacture of them. As Waldronate says, there is diminishing odds the farther away you get but I think for those items like black powder or ammo its more about the cost. I guess the smaller, more advanced and expensive items have a bigger radius for sale even if their rarity or sheer expense to buy is still a big problem. Also if an item itself is rare or expensive then its transportation would then be more expensive too due to risks and protection required.

Also, I can add that nitrates come from pig farms, charcoal grows on trees. Only the sulphur would be a bit of a problem and generally, although steel is expensive, its ubiquitous in fantasy role playing games. The knowledge of the process to create black powder would be rare though. I would imagine that those who knew it would keep it to themselves.

[waldronate]

Go read the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. Or at least read its Wikipedia page and the list of references / associations. The book is a little wonky in places, but the basic premise is useful for first-order effects.

It's not enough to have saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur. You have to have a reason to combine them and cook them until they accidentally light. Maybe you're trying to make an elixir of immortality or something... Nah, you'd have to be a medieval Chinese philosopher or something to try that.

[waldronate]

Oh, and, um, you don't need steel for gun barrels or lead for ammo. You'd be amazed what rope wrapped around hollowed-out logs pushing rocks out the front will do. And most cannons weren't made of iron for a very long time because bronze was much less likely to explode on you than iron was. There's a very good reason why early cannon makers tended to also be bell makers.

Connections by James Burke is a good way to spend some down time (book or video, your choice).

Now imagine you have "fantasy technology" like a dragon chained in the smelter or a gnome making orbit on the back of a slightly broken decanter of endless water only to discover the importance of air (but their friends to get to see the shooting star reentering if conditions are right well).

Throughout human history, science has just been a way of finding rules for the magic. If it's repeatable and reliable and commonly available, it ceases to be magic (no matter how amazing it might be).

[bognor]

Hi there Waldronate, and thanks also for your further suggestions - there seems to be some crossover of interests with you, as I have already read 'Guns, Germs & Steel', and I watched James Burke's Connections when it came out on TV.. It was really fun.

I guess I didn't ask my question well though, and maybe that's because it isn't a reasonable/coherent question. My example of firearms was really to do with the dependency tracking, in terms of resource production/consumption/demand/logistics: For example, I am pretty certain that a smelting town would have a dramatically larger demand for ore and fuel than a farmer's market town. I think one of my queries is why there are steel towns, but there aren't knitting towns (hm well, there have been weaving towns - maybe it's just as simple as things that work well in teams vs those that are not - vs. economies of scale). I've got some sort of idea regarding the concrete examples - but it was more to do with the underlying theories. Someone decided to place Scranton Pa. where it is - and my guess is that it met a set of balanced economic criteria regarding supply, production, demand, and logistics. (I 'm not really talking about Isaac Trip's Scranton, as much as the brothers Scranton) - and, again, I'm using this as an example - I only know about Scranton thanks to James Blish's 'Cities in Flight' series ;-).

I mean - I get that some settlements are skewed by political issues - the Siachen glacier standoff would be an example - where, for both sides, each egg delivered to the outposts costs hundreds of dollars - and yet, there is nothing that the glacier does (or can do) for either side: It's just ice (Maybe I am naive), but choices are made based upon location and geography - and then those choices have huge consequences to the location, and certainly the human geography - sometimes even the landscape itself (thinking of mountaintop removal mining in the Appalachians, for example).

Years ago, I read a pretty heavy (academic, and not my field) book about the formation and dawn of civilisation(s) - how agricultural surfeit, led to granaries - which then needed to be guarded. It was a heavy precursor to Guns, Germs - far harder to read, but somewhat less self-accusatory (it kept to acheaological and paleolinguistic evidence). Also John Plant's stuff (he does a pretty inspiring YT channel called Primitive Technology) led me to think about - not so much tech tree (I think that the idea of a technological tree, or ladder is quite reductive (as you say - you can use a pig farm for nitrates, and you can make a pretty big bang without needing a gun barrel) - but technological dependencies are still there: To chop down a tree you need an axe (it might be stone, just as much as bronze or steel). So you either make one, or you trade for one. So you made the fire, but want to boil some water - you need a pot. You either make one or you trade for one. You see how much local pots are, and you've got a huge clay pit at the end of your hut.. So maybe you become a potter - but you have to learn how to fire a pot so that people will buy one: travel, trade, or .. experiment (all seem to be reasonable) - or just sell the clay.

Maybe I just need to think more about flexes of the CPT hex-grid...

[Redrobes]

You might like a little experiment I did a while back:

https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=11689

tho I think it could be done a lot better by somebody with better code...

[waldronate]

The premise of Central Place Theory is that goods/services have a natural range. The natural range for low-value bulk goods is fairly small. They need to be converted to a higher-value good to get a larger range. Iron ore, for example, is a pretty low-value commodity that requires significant additional resources (primarily fuel like coal or charcoal) to do much with. Iron is a much higher-value good that you're likely to ship much farther and worked iron is a very high value good. Consider Damascus steel: it required special treatment of special iron that was sourced from specific mines in India. When the traded iron because largely inaccessible due to political changes, the supply of the steel stopped and the ability to produce it was lost. An example of how a trade technology can make a huge difference is Roman hydraulic concrete: it needs pozzulan (a type of volcanic ash usually sourced from Italy bask then) for its properties and the availability of bulk shipping networks allowed it to be used around the Mediterranean for the creation of harbors. Those harbors allowed new trade nodes and shifting of certain supply networks. Some goods are high enough value (silphium and Lebanon cedar being two examples of the ancient world) to have large ranges, but were hunted to extinction and their trade networks collapsed.

Some goods are medium value but gain a lot when transported to processing centers. Wool is a great example. You need sheep and you need someone to collect the wool from the sheep. Then you need to clean the wool, dye the wool, and spin it into yarn. From there it can be knitted into goods or further woven into cloth that can be processing into more goods. Cleaning the wool takes fuel to heat the water and soap to remove the grease, dyes can be very expensive and of very limited production range (e.g. Murex purple or saffron yellow), carding and spinning are traditionally very labor intensive, knitting can be a cottage industry, and looms require a great deal of time and effort to create and use. There are any number of towns based primarily around the production of textiles (wool, linen, cotton, silk, and so on) in the historical record and available technology has had a huge impact on those industries. Cotton production used to be a fairly low-volume operation due to picking the fluff from the seeds, but the invention of the cotton gin gave new life to that industry (and the slave trade in the US) and thread-making and thread-weaving systems powered by something other than humans led to substantial concentrations of industries.

Changes in the landscape (e.g. a natural disaster that permanently closes an important mountain pass, a river that changes course, construction of a Roman road, or construction of the Erie canal) will have huge impacts on the trade networks because the transport cost for certain goods along some graph edges becomes much lower, effectively increasing the range of goods along those graph edges. Those changes will further distort the assumed hexagonal grid of CPT.

I think that you may be looking at the problem backwards. A "smelting town" won't have higher demand for some goods because it's a "smelting town": a town will arise there because the cost of conversion of ore to metal is cheapest there. That's why boom towns arose and collapsed all over the western US: it's usually not worth it to transport the ore very far and it's usually not worth it to transport supplies very far. When the value of the produced good falls below some profit level, the town declines. That value can be affected by simple economic factors like cost of transport, but also by political factors such as cost of law enforcement in the area. For two fairly modern examples, look at the history of Cerro Gordo in California and the story of the Los Angeles aqueduct in the same area. It's stories of boom and bust and transport networks. There is a small distortion available in the case of industries that require significant expensive infrastructure because they will pull in lower-grade materials from a larger area for a little while, but they will eventually decline as well.

[waldronate]

A market sim needs to track three major items: resources, demands, and transport costs. High demand will increase the range at which resources will be developed. Rich resources will increase the market range of that resource when it goes into development. Transport costs will affect overall range of everything. The classic game version involves giving the user control over production units and letting them manually set up trade networks among the demand centers and resources. The high-level planning game version abstracts away individual production units and give the user control over costs of transport networks (roads, ships, rails, and so on) and production node (farms, mines, towns, and so on) placement. The resources in both cases are largely fixed by the generation system and the user is forced to adapt to that. The premise of tech trees is that each advancement reduces the cost of some constraint and the same applies to racial modifiers. There are many, many dimensions for modeling and implementation here.