On my model, the strongest individual people around are kings, but adding more kings doesn’t typically make civilization stronger
I don’t think this is true, at least when generalizing “King” to “manager”. One of the major ways societies develop is by getting better at coordination and resource management. Not every manager in e.g. Costco is a king, in the sense of having singular total authority, but they are all making decisions about the allocation of resources that are conveyed to those below them in the heirarchy, that adds together to a complex supply chain network that can achieve material prosperity that farmers alone couldn’t manage.
I don’t think this is true, at least when generalizing “King” to “manager”. One of the major ways societies develop is by getting better at coordination and resource management. Not every manager in e.g. Costco is a king, in the sense of having singular total authority, but they are all making decisions about the allocation of resources that are conveyed to those below them in the heirarchy, that adds together to a complex supply chain network that can achieve material prosperity that farmers alone couldn’t manage.
Gut instinct is that the number of kings needed to maximally coordinate a number of wizards is somewhere around logarithmic.