City

Photo: The Shambles at York

City is a spreadsheet tool for country designers. It tries to answer such questions as

'If Freedonia is this size how many cities will it have?'

'How many people live in Minas Tirith'?

'How many cabbage farms are there around Ank-Morpork?'

Use is made of formulae devised by Ed Stephan, spreadsheets using them by Burton Choiski and equations added by Juha Vesanto. Without all three, this present work would never have been contemplated. Quite a few changes have been made but (hopefully) the original ideas are not too distorted.

A caveat: this is a tool for designers, not a college textbook. If you think you can improve on something, do it.

Downloading

Unfortunately Spreadsheets are no more compatable than anything else in the Wonderful World of Computers, but let's try...

Here is a zip file (it's about 40K) that has the spreadsheet in four formats: Works for Windows 3.0 (wks), Excel 5.0 (xls), Quattro Pro 7 (wb3) and 1-2-3 (wk1). The 1-2-3 version is monochrome but is included as just about any spreadsheet program should load it, and the Quattro Pro version is unlikely to be up to date as I can't produce it myself.

Why zip them? Well if you downloaded one format, found it didn't load properly, and had to come back...

If you're not sure what formats your program will accept, find the 'Import' menu item if there is one or 'Load' and 'File Type' if there isn't, you should be given a choice.

If anyone manages to load into other spreadsheets successfully I'd appreciate a copy.

And if you're really stuck e-mail me and moan and we'll try something else.

Oh, and this zip file has these HTML pages in a handy package.

On other pages...

A guided tour of City takes you through the easy bits and invites you to inflict famine, murrain and plague on my homeland.

City Technical Stuff tries to explain how the formulae work and what the Warnings mean.

City Setups has settings for such exotica as Japan, Egypt and AD&D^TM England.

Medieval Economics is an article by Philip McGregor about wages and prices, including a medieval price list.

Here are some books that relate to the subject. Any suggestions for additions welcome.

Some links

As is often the case on the Net there are some academic sites but much of the interesting material is produced by enthusiastic amateurs.

A Medieval Sourcebook is intended for college courses, it has links to on-line versions where possible. If you want feudal fealty oaths, viking sagas or saints' lives this is the place to go.

A page for Gothic Cathedral fans, recently revised and expanded. Part of the larger Earthlore site.

The Society for Creative Anachronism have a large site, they are an old established medieval reenactment group originally based in California but now worldwide.

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