Resource Balance & Yield Calculator

Winter is the cruelest season in Mandate Order. Farmland fertility drops to zero, crop yields halt entirely, and every laborer in your settlement starts burning fuel at 2.5× the normal rate. A city that enters winter with a thin grain reserve or an empty firewood pile will see morale collapse within a few turns — and low morale triggers population flight, rebellion, and the slow death of your campaign.

The Resource Balance calculator above lets you dial in your building counts, laborer population, season, and faction to project net yields per resource per turn. The Winter Warning flag turns red when your current reserves cannot sustain three or more winter turns — the threshold below which recovery becomes mathematically impossible without external supply.

The standard playbook: by mid-autumn, over-build granaries and firewood stockpiles, idle your military production to free laborers for fuel gathering, and pre-position trade posts with grain-rich neighbors. A 20-turn grain buffer and a 15-turn firewood buffer are the minimum safe margins on standard difficulty.

Mandate Order's economy is a directed graph, not a flat list. When upstream raw materials run short, every downstream consumer halts in cascade. A logging camp shortage stops the sawmill (no mortise wood frames), which stops the weapon smith (no handles), which stops your conscription pipeline. The calculator surfaces these chokepoints by showing negative net yields in red — a single red row often points to the one building you forgot to expand.

The most common early-game bottleneck is clay: it feeds both brick (construction) and salt (trade/population), and a single clay pit cannot keep both chains saturated. The second is iron, which gates military equipment. Use this calculator to stress-test your economy before you commit laborers to a new district.

Season multipliers (M_season) are not symmetric. Spring grants +20% crop yield, summer normal, autumn +10% but harvest-finite, winter zero. Faction bonuses stack multiplicatively — an agricultural faction with +30% farmland output effectively cancels one season of winter penalty via surplus stockpile, while a mining faction should lean on trade rather than food self-sufficiency.