Selected Table

Moving on.  The Selected table refers to selecting the data which determines prices for a market city.  The City distances and the Source table totals are put together here to come up with the distribution for the desired market city.

The first tab, called 'Selection,' determines the shortest distance to market zones that have more than one market city.  For example, you can see that the Archangel zone (zones listed across the top) has two markets in it, "Archangel" and "Sudborough."  Now I must admit this table is a hang-over from before I discovered the MIN function in excel, and I haven't updated this since last year.  Again, I will update it after working out the market city distances, which should be after Christmas.

In the meantime, if a given city - Astrakhan, say - is closer to Sudborough than to Archangel, than the Sudborough distance is used for determining distribution out of that zone.  It's really pretty simple, so I'll move on.

The 'Market Provinces' tab, then, shows the distances that will be used.  Take note that distances are shown on this table to Africa, America and so on - these are average distances to these places, which serves somewhat to smooth out the results for the present, until these areas are properly divided out.  If a city is equi-distant to everything in China, then the distinctness is lost.  There's nothing I can really do about this - until I can map China, it is either consider it all one portion, or discount it from the table altogether.  Neither is very desireable.  I could subdivide China now, but that's a lot of trouble and I suppose I feel I need to save work where I can.

Note also that Italy is still listed as a single unit on this table.  The upgraded version will divide Italy ... and probably the Low Countries and India also, since I can get those separated and made ready for this table through December.

Very well.  As an experiment, lets get ready to highlight a line and copy it.  I'll highlight Astrakhan, line 5, so you can follow along with me.  Don't highlight the whole line, just the numbers between column C and column ND.  At present, that's 351 zones.  There will be many more when the new zones are added.

Move to the next table, 'Input Distance.'  Paste the data as a 'VALUE' ... but the only thing that will happen if you paste normally is that the highlighting will change.

You can look over this sheet but there is nothing you need do.  You can see that the Sources table data has been copied here, and that the products are listed down the side.  If you move to the 'Collect Index' tab, the distances that you have entered from Astrakhan have been divided into the Sources data, and that collected in a series of numbers running down column B next to the products in column A.  If you've done it right, you should see a population of 2,152,088.1 and a Total References of 404.5.

At this point you will want to open the Prices Template table.  On that table you will see that the first tab reads 'Input Data.'  (ignore the gobbledy gook on the 'Jewellery' tab ... that's just leftover from when I was trying to solve this problem.

You will see on the Input Data table a similar list to the one on the Selected table.  They line up perfectly, so all you need do is copy the data from the 'Collect Index' on the Selected (column B, lines 4 to 907) and paste them AS VALUES to the 'Input Data' page on the Prices Template.  Get it lined up, or you'll have problems.

There you go, you have just created all the prices for everything for the market of Astrakhan.  It takes less than 30 seconds to create a price list for any city - you just copy and paste twice.  This is the goal for all the work I do otherwise.

A bit more here and then I'll move on to the Prices Table next.  And that will be a long, long post (or possibly two or three).

You'll note two tabs marked 'Birth Process' and 'Sheet2.'  This is a half-done effort I have put down for the time being that determines the birth location for a new character depending on what market zone the character is generated in (you've just learned how to change the data for a market zone).  I've been sort of juggling the numbers, not being happy with them, so I've left off making this table properly.  but you can see from 'Sheet2' a list of zones and what dominant race of humanoid controls that zone.  Thus, it is unlikely that a human character will be from a zone where the population is made up of gnolls.  You can wander through the other bits of tables there - it should be evident what I was trying to do.  Eventually I'll get around to fixing all this and making it pretty, but for the time being it isn't a priority.