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« on: July 26, 2018, 01:14:58 PM »
First up, horses eating food that humans eat is realistic, it's just abstracted. You can feed horses on pasture or hay (which is just dried pasture plants), but that pasture could also raise goats, sheep and cows. By feeding horses, you miss out on the raising of meat animals, or the planting of food crops - some food crops end up being used to feed animals too, when pasture is not sufficient. Keeping 100 horses means raising 100 less cows, or having 200 people's less worth of grain crops to eat directly.
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As for big projects, I'd say the best way would be to focus on a goal for the game and see how the current game doesn't meet those goals, then adjust or build systems that support that goal using a multi-pronged approach.
Firstly, consider the concept that this is primarily a strategy game. That suggests the goal should be conquest. But a pure conquest focus isn't really compatible with the "persistent world" focus. Most conquest-oriented games run multiple servers and/or have periodic resets. That's because conquest-oriented games are focused on a particular "time period" - the planning and execution of military plans. However, Might and Fealty is a persistent world, so it needs fun things to do, in both peace time and war time. It thus, cannot just focus on the military/strategy side of things. It has to have cool things that happen in the peacetime as well as the wartime.
"Persistent World" is the key thing about Might and Fealty. So, when you do "Thing A" the focus always has to be on "what happens next".Say, I've got a paid account, and i take over a whole nation of 15 provinces due to other players slumbering. Now tell me "what happens next?". The cool things include:
- building up a large city using food trade from the other towns
- developing the towns as a whole
- builidng up troops in the region
Ok, so say I did those things? Then what happens next? I can recruit new knights, however giving away land means losing the big city I spent time and effort buiding up. Or, I could fight wars with my neighbors, but the only point of that is to accumulate more towns. That just feeds into a bigger army, a bigger capital, but I have the same issues as before, except now it's a little less efficient and more time-consuming.
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Well, here's an idea on how to smooth over one or two of those issues - a trade system rework, that includes bi-lateral trade agreements and uses the system to implement taxation of resources by the new capitals system.
First idea is reciprocal trade routes. With that, you'd offer say "3 wood for 1 metal". The trade offer would go from one character to another, and could be altered and returned. As soon as both parties agree on the same terms, the trade agreement is established. Additionally, ever trade agreement (including unilateral ones) would have a "limit" on the amount of units. This would be specifiable either as a raw number, or a percentage, and would be separate from the actual agreement part. So in the wood for metal agreement, the wood side could independently decide "30 units of wood" as their limit, and the other side could say "10% of metal production" as their limit. However, both sides could view the limits the other had set - but for that percentages would be converted to a raw number.
Also, have trade links remember how much amount or percentage the player originally specified. It's a bit silly that if there's one bad harvest due to a population crash that the trade transport never recovers. The settlement should remember the actual orders you gave. Sure, there could a temporary reduction, but trade links should gradually recover to the original amounts if and when there's surplus production, so you'd need to store the current level and "goal" levels separately. Having to go back and remind the settlement leaders of your original orders isn't a good gameplay feature.
The second idea is Taxation. Say realm capitals can specify a taxation level of each resource towards the capital. And this taxation replaces the existing bonus-production built into the Local Seat building and the like. The taxation would be implemented as a set of automatically-generated trade links, so those paying the tax could view the details via the Trade screen. The goal of doing this would be to streamline management of realms/subrealm resource coordination, but also to make it more beneficial to have vassals. Those vassal lands will automatically generate some resources for the capital, meaning the Lord no longer needs to hoard so many settlements themself, but can still build a reasonable capital.
Similar to the reciprocal trade links above, a vassal knight could use the Trade screen to lower the % amount of some tax they're willing to pay to the capital. this would effectively be cheating on your taxes, and there could be a method for the Lord to work this out. However, the "tax cheat" amount should be adjusted along with the capital's tax rate. So, if the tax rate is 10%, then a knight could cheat and lower their payment to say, 6%. This is one reason the other party only sees 'amount' and not what % you set. If the tax was later raised to 12%, then the 6% should be raised proportionally to 7.2%, to allay suspicions of being a tax cheat (allow trade limits to have an option to be a "linked" amount that automatically changes proportionally to the other side's limit, and you turn this feature on for taxation). The Lord could in fact work it out if they arrive with a Prospector and work out that the local production levels don't match what's being paid in taxes.
A last idea would be that capital Seats store surplus wealth in them (they act as a treasury). This wealth would be used for a few of things: use wealth to pay transportation costs for different resources, give more use for wealth-generation buildings, and make it easier to collect wealth when needed.
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A final idea, which is more of an additional possibility is that in the rework, leave open the possibility that manufactured resources can be traded. Then later, you do a rework on manufactured goods / town inventory/armory etc. e.g instead of the blacksmith making some generic "blacksmith stuff" you need to actually choose what it's making, and can possible say "make nothing" to minimize resource use. Then, axes, spears etc can be imported, exported, traded for, etc. This could lead to far higher levels of settlement-specialization, customization and flavor, while also setting up a player-driven market system. Another possibility would to have individual building upgrades/tiers, in such a way that it encourages towns to be more specialized.