Urban investment

By spending more gold pieces on roads, aqueducts, sewers, marketplaces, walls, and other infrastructure, the adventurer can increase the maximum population size of the urban settlement. In addition to increasing the maximum population, urban investment also attracts new residents. For every 1,000gp spent on investments in a month, the settlement will attract 1d10 new urban families.” - ACKS 133

The bold sentence bothers me.

For a domain, maximum population is determined by the number of hexes secured, which is in turn determined by stronghold value. You can also make agricultural investments to increase population growth, but they are separate. If you want to increase both maximum population and population growth, you need to make two separate investments, one in building up your stronghold and the other to get an extra 1d10 families.

For a town, maximum population is determined by the total investment in the town and, according to the bold sentence above, any urban investment will both improve maximum population (when certain breakpoints are hit) and add 1d10 families with the same investment.

This seems inconsistent to me and the high degree of internal consistency is one of the things I really like about ACKS.

So I have to ask… What’s the reasoning behind this (apparent?) inconsistency?

No inconsistency!

Average profit, after expenses, from urban families is approximately 1/2 the average profit, after expenses, of peasant families. Therefore the cost of investment needs to be less in order for the return on investment to be approximately equal.

Yeah, thinking about it after posting, I suspected that you may have opted for consistent ROI rather than consistent mechanism. Thanks for clarifying!