in which occasion will you raise taxes

[PvK]

I can see heavy mercenaries being more expensive than light, and they generally are in the game.

With a fantasy/god-mage medieval economy, though, I don't quite see why better equipped men would necessarily be more expensive to maintain. I suppose you might tend to need a little more "amorer time" to do occasional maintenance. Maybe you'd need more beasts of burden to carry their gear around when on the march. Better trained men might cost more (or take more time...) to produce.

I find it interesting (in a good way) playing Ulm and having extremely heavy infantry available for the same gold cost as other infantry, but a high resource cost. The high resource cost means that it takes a long time to build up a large army of them, during which you need to avoid casualties. In my long stalemated game against the AI, I built up a lot of good men, and then something with a gas attack (or soul vortex, etc) would come along and severely deplete my ranks, and I would be overrun if I didn't have a province with super-low-resource tribal militia to recruit quickly.

I think my suggestion would be perhaps to tweak down the resource costs of some militia, and to add (if not already in Doms II) a "disband" command. This would mean that large armies of militia could be even more easily raised (like you can with tribal militia in Doms I), but also gotten rid of later without sending them on suicide missions. That would be rather more like real ancient/medieval warfare, too; usually there were only a few trained and well-equipped men in a standing army, and then mobs of peasants would be pressed into service to fight major battles, and released afterwards.

I assume too (haven't tried to test) that there are already other factors too such as:

* Raising troops should reduce the province population
* The more men on patrol in a province, the greater the chance of catching spies and scouts

It would be interesting if when men were disbanded, the program remembered some of them, and gave them a chance to show up as part of an independant army, mercenary band, or independant uprising in the future. Or, they might even be available for re-hire later by the same player.

PvK

[ October 29, 2003, 18:52: Message edited by: PvK ]