Building Your Feudum From the Ground Up

You have bought your own kingdom with the blood of your army, its tiles united together to make a feudum.  The people of the land are looking to you for leadership.  What do you do next?

According to psychologist Abraham Maslow and his famous works on the hierarchy of human needs, food, shelter and safety, the most basic of needs, must be met before moving forward with anything else.  The Feudums game world is no different.  

Your first step in Feudums, is to gather your people into a newly formed village.  Your small population can survive on what they can gather and hunt in the meantime.  Settlements can be raised on the same types of tiles that also make good farmland - grassland, plains, and hills.  Settlements can grow over time by making further tile improvements.  There are six levels of settlements ranging from the smallest - a village - to the largest - a big city with a stone wall.

Once shelter is in place, getting a growing and stable food supply is the next step.

Without proper food supplies, your population will starve and die off, if not from starvation itself, then from disease as people weaken.  A player’s second goal must be to make sure his or her population can be fed.  That means converting your grassland, plains, or hill tiles into viable farmland. You’ll need some gold, lumber, and a few game-turn ticks to raise a farm, but once built, it will help put your pantry in order.  

Once fed and housed properly, settlements will grow and prosper.  Thriving settlements will probably account for most of a player’s income as the population is taxed and the money used for further growth or to build up resource gathering options.

But beware.  As in real life, medieval times could be unpleasant.  Both farms and settlements can be raided by enemies and pillaged.  What can be done to keep a player’s budding population safe?

At some point, everyone who plays Feudums will want or need to build a castle.  Castles are considered guardian or authority improvements and have five levels ranging from a simple Wooden Palisade to a Fortress.  Because castles provide a safe garrison for military troops, they will probably be built near strategic points on the map like mountain passes or near important resources like a gold or iron mine. They can be built near farms and settlements to help protect them and provide an increased morale for the general population.  Castles also act as a possible source of professional soldiers - mercenaries and sellswords - and high-tier lances - levy troops led by knights - who can use the tile as training grounds.

You can also build some basic military unit types in a settlement - but then you won’t have the extra benefits of a castle nor access to anything but the basic units.

Once food, shelter, and safety are at acceptable levels, players will need to turn their workers towards building up their resources.  Resources come in many forms, from the lumber gathered in forests, to developing mines for iron, or wealth extraction (silver and gold adding to your coins) or quarries to provide stone.  Mines and quarries must be built on either hill or mountain tiles.

Another possible tile improvement - Ecclesiastical Fiefs - do not supply a player with tangible resources.  However, these pastoral fiefs are still important as they provide a morale boost for the locals as well as some extra virtue for the lord, and even capable of unlocking a few specific troop types.

As all tile improvements cost not only gold coins, but a specific amount of resources as well, a player must find the correct balance of resource gathering and food production.  Finding that balance while fending off attacks from rivals all the while working to gain the throne for yourself will make Feudums an exciting game to play and an even harder game to master.