Civilizations Part 3: Re-re-resource

Nirrum's Civilization's main export is Magic Items and Magic Services

I, on the other hand, live in a country that focuses on Oil and Cars

When considering why your people decided to settle where they did, you might just want to look up on Wikipedia what sort of resources they'd be able to find, but you might run into a bit of trouble when looking at some of our own civilizations and trying to figure out what resource they could possibly find there. It is worth noting that the historicity of this list isn't exactly...Linear. Skilled came before ground-based, manufacture was simultaneous with ground-base in its tier but also ubiquitous throughout history. 

Resource Tech Tier Tree Trial.

So the five general tiers of economy might be described something like this

• Ground-based economy. Things such as Mining, Sustenance farming, or gathering. These tend to be the poorest for the average person
• Skilled cultivation based economy. Management of resources begins to matter. Industrial farming, herding, and the beginnings of mass food production.
• Skilled manufacture based economy. This is where people get Professions that range from habberdasher and whitesmith to smelter and tanner. The steps between material and product are where the vast majority of the workers will find themselves.
• Service-based economy. This is the place where getting things done is where most people will make their money.Suddenly, making sure that other economies have what they need and maintaining those needs comes to the front. This is one of the signs of a healthy global economy
• Information-based economy. With just about everything being done, usually automated, the biggest currency is information. Not tremendously dissimilar from a ground-based economy in the disparity between the rich and everyone else, 

Each one of these tiers represents increasing levels of technological and economic prowess. Hypothetically, there exist tiers beyond, and economists, economical historians, sociologists, and other anthropological fields might be able to add more or add more complexity to these. For our purposes, this will do.

In considering what resources a town or a civilization exists on, you set a valuable anchor for what people travelling through here are going to encounter in the form of

• Available equipment
• Education
• Governmental structure
• Social Infrastructure
• General living conditions
• Phyiscal infrastructure
• Impact of Destruction as a function of work-hours to replace

In most cases, the higher up the tier list, the greater the value of each of these topics. In an information-based economy, a minimum of resources are needed to ensure a maximum of productivity, but a maximum number of people are needed to be productive. In a ground-based economy, a few able bodies are enough to get by and there's no need for most safety nets.

Ground-Based.

Mining does not take much skill. There are those who can do it exceptionally well and those who can prevent it from failing catastrophically better than others, but for the average worker, an able body is all that is really required. In the presence of automation, those workers can even be replaced and this would mean that the people here live in squalor. A particularly foward-thinking government would not rely exclusively on this source of income, but all governments require it. When planning your civilization, make sure you know where they get their raw materials from and know what the quality of life is like for those people. If a Civilization maxes out as a Ground-based economy, then you will likely encounter:

• Minimum available equipment, only local or extremely cheaply imported clothing, 
• Largely ignorant local populous
• Singularly powerful individual governments or small councils at best. If the fruits of other economies are available then the powerful alone will be able to access those goods and services, while exploiting the lesser citizens for their labor. This disparity increases depending on the difference between the two civilizations. A civilization with minimum contact and nothing to export might show next to no disparity between its leaders and its constituent citizens
• Minimum if any social infrastructure, though, in the particular case of humans, there will always be central meeting areas without exception. In my eyes this speaks to our socially oriented nature, and is a good indicator of our intent to find benefit in others. 
• Poor conditions, often to a minimum of livable. A single technological boon of any kind will often increase the livelihood of everyone in this civilization until it fails. A single windmill, a single tractor, A single glass bottle might change their lives, often for the better.
• Next to no physical infrastructure. A dam to form a reservoir, communal nets, and frequently a garbage dump are all these towns need to have, though other improvements are not hard to make and the older a village is, the more likely they are to have big upgrades such as a mill, sawmill, aqueduct, or a church, which we'll go into further down
• Repairs for most things might only be measured in days, so long as they are not compared to larger infrastructure, which really depends on how clever these citizens are

Skilled Cultivation-based

Farming, as old of a tradtion as it is,  is still fairly easy to screw up. through millenia of selective breeding has eased that burden. Farmers of diffferent types will end up with expertise in that type. In this tier you begin to see specialization facilitated by trade, which is why farming is on a higher tier than Mining, despite mining being a historically later development. This will be explained in depth later.

• Minimum Available equipment, There is always a smith
• Largely ignorant population with expertise in certain aspect that the other citizens do not have
• Small organizational structure, mostly just powerful individuals or exclusive councils that extort people lower on the power hierarchy
• Some social infrastructure, Festivals are guaranteed
• Minimum livable conditions unless on open land, in which case it is up to the people living in an area to improve their own structures
• Mills and water-distribution are more likely to be available by necessity. This means the populace will have some access to easy labor.
• Destruction of a large piece of infrastructure is likely going to take weeks to repair, but the people should be able to live without it.

Skilled manufacture-based economy

Instead of needing to farm, people have the time to specialize into a single form of tool use, Not just the local blacksmith or mason, but now professional weavers, ropers, painters and charcoal-burners! People save huge amounts of time because they no longer need to make their own nails, cloth, bread, really, they only need to do the job that other people need from them!

• Myriad general equipment becomes available. The specificity of the work done in the past has allowed the citizens here to spread into more markets, ensuring more productivity. 
• Trades apprentices suddenly become abundant. Education becomes a normalized part of life, record-keeping becomes more important, reading isn't an essential skill but it is beneficial
• Established governments are bound to avoid uprisings, as with the ability to manufacture, power can easily transfer to the people if not handled correctly.
• Laws! Enforcement! Unemployable beggars whose families oversaturate their trade! Bandits! Taxes!
• Conditions begin to become a bit more comfortable as advanced goods are readily available, like shoe lasts, langets, and paint!
• Jails! Walls! Trade Caravans! Maybe even basic plumbing!
• Destruction of property can take weeks to months depending on the labor that went into

Service-based economy

Skilled Manufacture was obviously the right idea, All you need to do to live is get the right things to the right people. Trade and trades are where all of the best money is. Do the one thing, fix the one thing for people and they'll pay you for the one job they don't have the time to do. This marks the downhill for a lot of civilizations. Time, instead of being the space whence you do things, has now become money. Traders who trade faster, people who fix more, translators who translate more, Anyone who can work longer can get more. Happiness begins to decline even though access to comfort has never been higher. Much of our modern world depends on a service-based economy.

• Almost all equipment in the world is available, and depending on how long the civilization has been around, it's progressively more ubiquitous
• Education becomes progressively more ubiquitous as well, Industrialization is the tipping point that forces people to become educated, both out of necessity for being able to work in those factories and plants, as well as to find other jobs if they can't
• Complex political alliances are now needed to be maintained, Social well-being becomes more important as the productivity of the citizens becomes tied to tax revenue, Governments that diversify their keys to power will see less power but a more successful country, 
• Healthcare matters, Taxes are heavily enforced, roads are maintained, most of the things people use, they will contribute to indirectly. Libraries are cherished, Universities are invested in.
• Depending on the level of technology, Living conditions could barely be more comfortable. Plumbing is almost certain at this stage.
• Paved roads, Government buildings, Plumbing (oh god, sweet plumbing), Marketplaces! 
• Impact of Destruction as a function of work-hours to replace

Information-based Economy

Only recently a factor in todays society, I'll be honest, I'm not quite smart enough or educated enough to fully comprehend this tier. It represents a return-to-form in that there's a brand new crop being made. Data and Discovery are the two prime products of this bracket. This is where you find the most complex politics, the most inefficient changes, and the most grueling grind. Despite this, comfort is as high as it can be, hypothetically, Even the poor see kickbacks from the wealth of the powerful, provided a sufficient tax system. 

• If it exists on the planet, it is available for the right price with a decent amount of surety
• Government mandated education to start, Highly encouraged education beyond that. Living without education almost guarantees a place in a menial job if one hasn't been automated, or if any exist.
• Complex bureaucracy headed by a thin veneer of actual political agency, The enacting of legislation and the proposal of new policy can take years, corruption dependant, before being put into place. 
• Likely well-filled social infrastructure. Soup kitchens for the poor, welfare, healthcare, roads, utilities, well-maintained taxes and law. Large gathering places, entertainment venues, services generated specifically to navigate the infrastructure available
• Even the poor seem rich because if any one of them becomes productive, they begin paying their own weight, and if they advance past that, they begin paying the weight of others.
• Post-industrial services become so ubiquitous that no one really needs much outside of roads and utility available to the public.
• The impact of destruction on an information-based society is strange. Destruction of anything becomes hard as redundancy and protections are built around the facilitation of an idea that any one of its citizens can carry. For the Physical though, The destruction of a dam may take years to rebuild, some buildings will take months, and in many cases, it might be not worth the effort to repair, but instead, a replacement might be made.

Changing from tier to tier is hard. Old cultures die rapidly in the presence of the uselessness of their traditions and the presence of new technology. Cultural vestiges last longer depending on the size of the population. Change is like a hot cup of water. The stuff touching the edges will cool the fastest but will be kept warm by the stuff further in. Eventually, the whole cup cools, or, if the cup is big enough, the room is warmer, as sometimes, customs survive and even flourish in new tiers. In our setting, our winter-season holiday has survived in one form of another for millennia through all of these tiers

Mix'n'Match:Multi-tier civilization

Anyone who lives in a civilization and is reading this (without the use of magic) is living in a tiered Civilization! This means you live in a world that has tremendous economic disparity, and possibly the ever looming threat of automation! Robots can do just about anything that a human can do provided it's any bit repetitive! Lawyering, Doctoring, Mining, weaving, farming, smithing, jewelling, you name it, robots can probably do it and probably more accurate than humans can! For now, humans hold on as a slightly more economic source of labor and prudence than robots. The people who stand at the top of their local economy get to breeze by as best as one can in life, not having to worry about such things. But not everyone gets to experience the wealth of their labors, nor do most people actually encounter anything outside their tier. 

These basic, oversimplified tiers all exist beside each other. Masters of countries that might only export as a Ground-based or Cultivation-based society might still live as though they were just as rich in an information-based one while their people live on the minimum they need to for their tier.

Often, Civilizations will remain separate so that the masters of lower tiers are the only point that higher tiers need to deal with. Despots of mining and Landlords of farming, Bossess and CEOs of Manufacture and service

What this means for your Civs

This isn't even a guideline, it's things to consider when making your Civilization, because there are exceptions at every step and that's where you can make passive narrative tension. Why do the miners have access to AI? Why are the Scientists harvesting their own food? Why are the dragonborns of Danzuishan living so well when their primary export is treasure extracted from their extremely dangerous magical maze? What's a shoe last? What's important that no matter what tier your civ is, it touches the tiers below it. Your Jewellers get Jewels from miners. Your Clothiers get fibre from farmers of sheep, cotton, flax or rarely, silk-producers. 

The descriptions of your civilizations, in describing their successes, should describe where they get the goods for those successes, the services they depend on, and their relationship with the purveyor of those goods and services. You don't need to go into much more, provided the answer for the question exists. 

Pinralysraha ra'u'lo  mishliatalo

-Nirrum