Let's begin with consumption.
Macris assumes 10k kcal per family/day or 2k kcal per capita. This's too much. He probably assumes modern American norm of 2.5k/male, 2k/female, 1.8k/kid and 3 kids.
Historically for England it was 1.4-1.6k kcal per capita. 7-8k kcal per family, including 2-2.4k/male, 1.8k/female, 4 kids at 1.2k (or 3 at 1.6k). There was a reason why average medieval peasant was only 1.5-1.6 meters tall and often lived on the verge of hunger.
Fat Yankees are fat!
That means that Macris's 2.65gp/month for food should be closer to 2.2 gp.
60% food, 40% nonfood are probably ok, at a first glance, so 1.5 gp monthly nonfood expenses are maybe ok. Dunno. Whatever.
So peasant family should have 3.7 gp monthly living expenses or 45 gp annual.
Macris ignores the cost of farming infrastructure: building and rebuilding houses (wooden houses had to be rebuild about every 20 years), roads and canals, spending on instruments, etc.
Average wooden hut in ACKS costs 50 gp. I'm too lazy to check whether it's a decent approximation, so let's just assume that it converts to 2.5 gp annually in amortization. It also means that a family has to save for dowry at about 50 gp house * 3 kids * 0.5 share of each kid / 20 years = 3.7 gp annually.
This brings us to ~50 gp annual family expenses.
Production
Farming
Macris assumes three-field system as default. In Europe before ~9-10 century two-field system was the norm. It leads to lower average population density (only the sweetest spots could be settled) and maybe 10-20% less average farming income.
He assumes 10 bushels/acre harvest and 30 acres average farm size. This is kinda maybe okay on average, but actually not. Because according to censuses, 45% peasants in England had less than 10 acres, 33% had 12-16 acres, 20% had 30 acres, 2% had more than 30 acres (I've checked and kinda the same was true for medieval France and Roman Republic). So average peasant family actually had 15 acres. And about 33% of arable land belonged to church and feudals.
Macris converts grain to bread directly, without allowing for losses from storage, transportation, milling, etc. (~20%).
So actually, if we convert his 80 gp farmland to more believable numbers, we'll get 80 gp * 0.5 (less area) * 0.8 (losses) = 32 gp from farming.
Animal husbandry
I think income is also overstated.
He assumes 32 sheep per average family. However, for England in 1300 (pre plague) it was ~23 mln sheep per ~5 mln pop or ~1 mln families or ~23 sheep per family.
The same is true for cows - it was ~1.5 cows/family, not 3.
Macris assumes 250 lb meat from slaughtered cow - this's ok for modern or early modern norms (18-19c England), but historically it was 20-25% less due to worse breeding, feeding, etc.
I'm too lazy to check other kinda of cattle, but let's assume that he overstates peasant husbandry income by two times. So we get 83 gp * 0.5 = 41 gp from husbandry (this, again, seems too much, because animal husbandry income should be comparable to farming, but let's ignore this for now).
Other income
32 gp from unskilled labor - seems believeable enough at a first glance. But to be more precise, we should base calculations not on assumed 500 days of labor (that was true for England in 1500-1800), but rather 300-400 (because the feudal state was less monetized and centralized than a rennaissance state, and could force its subjects to work much less, especially in winter). So we could decrease it to 120-220 days of labor or 12-22 gp of income. Let's say 22.
Total income 32+41+22=95. Let's decrease it by 10%, because previously we haven't accounted for output losses due to dry spells, wars, laziness and other volatility, and we get 86 gp annual income or 7 gp/month.
86 gp income, 50 expenses, 36 taxes. Taxation rate is 41%, including 10% to Church, and 31% to lord (in taxes, labor and other).
Now, this is much more believable than Macris's default 75% taxation rate. (ACKS Axioms 1-8, p. 112)
Like, seriously, 75%? What setting was he writing for, notRoman Empire or totalitarial machine god utopia?
And he was okay with it despite
This leads him to overstate lordly income.
7 gp/month per family should then be deducted by (ACKS Axioms 1-8, p. 65 or ACKS revised v120 p. 393) 6-8 gp/month for garrison, liturgies, tithes, etc. maintenance.
In this case families in outlands don't really produce anything to their lord and maybe even suck out all the profits if their living is maintained on the level of capitol populace. Seems more believable to me, than Macris's default "oh, they give only 5 gp instead of 7"!
The majority of medieval land was of middling quality and couldn't support sustained military or technological expansion. Now it's kinda supported by income numbers.
This also means that Macris' nobles are much richer than their historical counterparts. You can multiply all noble income by mod = your_peasant_family_income/12 (12 being Macris's base peasant monthly income) to get adjusted noble income for all noble stratas (ACKS Axioms 1-8, pp 66-68).
With my numbers armies become slightly more believable. Let's compare.
Vanilla prince (ACKS Axioms 1-8, pp 65-66) would get 11.9k * 4 gp tribute from 4 vassals at 50k families + 7500*7=52500 gp from personal domain or ~100k; he also would spend 27.7k gp on tithe to king; it leaves ~72k for personal expenses. There also will be 410k of spending on garrisons in vassal land (2gp per family) and 15k gp for garrison in his demesne; both go off-budget.
Suppose that army is light infantry at 72 gp/year and heavy infantry at 144 gp/year (Core, p. 52). All garrisons are light infantry, while army is 50% light, 50% heavy infantry. Also suppose that he spends 50% income on his standing army (36k gp).
This means that there're 5700 light infantry in vassal garrisons, 200 LI in demesne garrison, as well as 250 LI and 125 HI in standing army. That's 6.3k soldiers out of ~210k families. Assuming there's a single adult male per family, it's 3% adult males in military.
This is a lot. If we dumbly multiply it up to 5 million (historical England at 1300), it would give us an army of 150k people (including 7k standing army and >140k in garrisons). This is very militarized and decentralized society. Historically, 1% of population in army was more realistic. E.g. Roman Empire during its maximum militarization had about 250k legionnaires and 250k support troops out of a population of 50-80 mln people. And usually half of that, that is, 0.5% of male population.
England and France brought to Agincourt 8-15k military men each. In the Fourth crusade (everyone loves that one!) Latins had 12-15k troops that were gathered and funded by several states.
Back to ACKS. With 7 gp/family the calculation would be about as follows.
2 gp/family would be spent on liturgy and maintenance. Prince gets ~56k personal income, 8k tithe, pays 6k tithe to liege and gets 58k total income. Out of those he could've fielded 800 light infantry, mostly for garrison duty - about 0.4% of adult males (exchange 2 LI for 1 HI as needed). Financing better standing army would force him to get some monopoly, get himself into debts (a typical medieval ruler story) or promise something to those murderhobos.
Yep, seems much better to me!
Of course it means that those >10k gp henchmen monthly fees (Core, p. 51) are bogus. And they are bogus. No human male would endure sacrificing that many whores to dark gods, just because GM likes to throw thousands of gold coins around. The numbers should be redone.
