I’m converting some old 3.5 material into an ACKS domain, and I wanted to make sure I’m basing it off what would strike folks as sane logic.
I start with no more data than having a town of 4,807 people, which divides into 961 families per ACKS (5ppl/fam), a Large Town.
If I continue with the presumption that it is the largest settlement in the realm, I end up on line 7 of the Villages, Towns, Cities Placement table on pg 231 - I solidify the population number to 47,280, and 4,782 of those are urban (counting the large town)
So at the outset we have a realm consisting of:
42,552 peasant families
961 families in a Large Town
3,767 families in other urban settlements (4,728 total).
We place the large town in the realm ruler’s personal domain, which we say consists of 1,330 peasant families, plus the 961 urban families in the Large Town.
At the default population density, that’s a 5 hex domain. The realm itself is 140 hexes (6 mile) (we don’t count urban families when we divide by population density, do we?
Taking out the realm ruler’s population, we’re left with:
41,222 peasant families
3,767 urban families
All well and good.
We split that between 5 vassals. For ease of presentation, it’s split evenly all the way down. Each gets a realm consisting of:
8,244 peasant families
753 urban families
31 6 mile hexes
with a personal domain of (assuming they take the largest settlement)
728 peasant families
168 family Village
3 6 mile hexes
If they have 5 vassals underneath them, then there are 5 subdomains splitting the remaining:
7,516 families
585 urban families
28 6 mile hexes
so each sub-vassal gets a realm of:
1503 peasant families
117 urban families
~6 hexes
with a personal domain of:
375 peasant families
30 family Hamlet
0.75 hex
We can make one more split, leaving each sub-sub vassal with a subhex domain consisting of 225 peasant families, and 20 urban families in a hamlet you wouldn’t notice if you walked through it.
At the default population density, let’s say they’re each around 3/4ths of a hex in size.
That 225 families is well within the Civilized hex starting family roll on page 127, and just a bit beyond the Borderlands row.
Now, let’s go back up the tree to eliminate rounding issues from division:
1 realm ruler = 5 hexes
5 vassals = 3 hexes == 15 hexes
25 subvassals = 1 hex == 25 hexes
125 subsubvassals = ~.75 hex == 94 hexes
Sums to 149 hexes, which is close enough!
125 subsubvassals = 225 & 20 families = 28,125 & 2,500
25 subvassals = 375 & 30 families = 9,375 & 750
5 vassals = 728 & 168 families = 3,640 & 840
1 realm ruler = 1330 & 961 families
That sums to 42,470 peasant families, and 5,051 urban families.
Compare that to our original numbers of 42,552 and 4,728, we’re OK.
In other observation:
So, the domains in the realms don’t have any requirement to be contiguous, though domains do, which is interesting; assuming all 156 domain rulers in this situation were PCs, I imagine that each would be spaced out to allow for maximum growth (hello, fellow Civilization players), and the amount of infighting, backstabbing, scheming, and other shenanigans going on as these domains shift and consume like amoebas, especially at the bottom of the tree, would be amazing.