- "With the advance of feudalism came the growth of iron armor, until, at last, a fighting-man resembled an armadillo."
– John Boyle O'Reilly
- "In democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism it's your count that votes."
– Mogens Jallberg
Adjacency Bonuses Clarification
The in-game description doesn't describe exactly how the adjacency bonuses work for Feudalism. There are a few more apparent rules to it, described below under 'Theory', but first a caveat:
Caveat
Note the following theory is work in progress and though it's been included to provide some clarification it is definitely not complete and possibly not accurate, so please if you know more then edit the theory accordingly.
This caveat should probably be left here regardless of edits until the developers have provided clarification that's then been confirmed, as it appears that it doesn't work as intended.
Theory
- Every farm without a resource gets at most one bonus food (from adjacency due to Feudalism).
- A farm won't receive an adjacency bonus from a tile controlled by a different city unless the two tiles have the same resource. A farmed tile controlled by a different city will trigger the bonus so a third tile can provide a bonus. A farm might still not receive an adjacency bonus if any of the two required adjacent farms are in another city — Clearly there's something else at work here, possibly an illogical bug that will defy analysis without a look at the code.
- Farms on different resources don't provide the bonus but do trigger it. E.g. Rice Wheat Wheat in a string, all farmed – The middle wheat gets a single bonus food, but not two.
- To receive any bonuses a farm must have two farm tiles next to it – it's not enough that there's a farm next to a farm next to it. Hence a triangle of farms affects all three, but three in a 'string' only affect the middle one.
Strategy
Triangles of farms are the way to go for maximum benefit. Beware the limitations described above. Don't rely on it or the 'rules' above, as it's still unclear exactly how it works.
Historical Context
Although decentralization of the Carolingian Empire was the impetus, the feudal system came into focus during the 8th Century AD. (“Feudalism” is simply a term historians invented around the 17th Century to label a social structure they otherwise couldn’t define in one word.) To promote the expansion of his holdings, Charlemagne began granting his nobles certain rights over tracts of land to yield the income necessary for them to provide soldiers for his adventures. In return for this largess, each noble swore an oath of loyalty to the crown. In time, this social, economic, political and judicial control of the allocated lands became hereditary, with these lords now giving fiefs to their own favored underlings who swore oaths of fealty … hence, feudalism.
The classic version of feudalism was a mish-mash of reciprocal legal and military obligations among a warrior nobility, revolving around the concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs. (There were, of course, peasants tied to the land, but lords and vassals didn’t concern themselves with such much.) For the next 500 years, power and wealth passed about between the favored few as if in a vast game; the rules were complex, often mysterious, in which the Catholic Pope had special privileges and powers as God’s representative on Earth. Not only did aristocrats partake of feudalism, but so too did bishops and abbots (bishops at times could be found on the battlefields, hacking away with the best of secular lords).
Feudalism, with the rise of nationalism and absolute monarchy, decayed and effectively disappeared in most of Europe by about 1500. It lingered on in Central and Eastern Europe as late as the 1850s; a form did survive in Japan until that benighted kingdom was forced open to the West. And Russia finally abolished serfdom in 1861.