Death and Taxes... well mostly taxes...

[johan osterman]

Raising taxes to 200 for one turn only results in 20 unrest. If you pillage with a large army you can generate unrest 10-20 times that as well as killing of most of the population. 200 tax is the amount of fiscal abuse you can subject province to without resorting to an outright pillage. You are assumed to have some adminstrative authorities in place in a province even when you do not have any commanders there, they are assumed to be able to threaten the populance enough to recieve the increased incomes. As I said unrest is an abstraction and I do not think that 20 in unrest represents to severe a penalty for increasing the tax to 200%. And as for the tactic being cheesy I think that realism should, if anything, dictate much more unrest in newly conquered provinces. If you wish you can consider the extra money spoils of war and the players abstaining from raising taxes to 200% as an uncommonly benevolent and disciplined conquering army.

In the early stages of dom 2 development there were some discussions of changing the way unrest works, so that there was a provincial unrest and one national happiness factor for the whole empire as well as a couple of other ideas, in the end it was decided that the current unrest model was sufficent and simpler to use and implement, there was also a slew of consistancy issues that arose from moving away from the current system to a more detailed one. The end result of these discussions were the pop killing effects of taxes in excess of 100%, and I think the system as is stands works well enough both from a gameplay and and realism perspective.

[johan osterman]

I won't argue the strategic effects of the current system with you since I think they are ok, and it boils down to a matter of taste.

Originally posted by RyanZA:

...
Again, on non-tactical terms, broken infrastructure or destroyed crops do not require that you kill a large amount of your population to fix. I fail to see how killing the farmers helps them plant their crops any faster.

Edit: One further thing,

quote:

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If you consider unrest as an abstraction unrest relative to players also make less sense. Unlike the inhabitants of Robin Hood movies people do not automatically and instantly switch from lawlessnes and banditry just because a tyrant is disposed, nor are roads and bridges repaired or crops replanted without effort.

Unrest of this type could not be removed by lowering taxes? Why would proper banditry (not revolting peasantry) be stopped by lowering taxes? They dont pay taxes already! They arent going to start plowing fields just because someone wont be asking for as much gold anymore.

---

You do not need to be so literal, reduced taxes can also represent distributing previously collected in natura taxes, providing seeds to farmers, hiring people to repair bridges, administrative measures to counter bandits (bounties, hiring additional constables or whatever) etc. Unrest represents general disorder in the province, patrolling represents a heavy handed way of dealing with this, lowering taxes a less heavy handed way. Dom 2 is not intended to be a realistic economic model unrest, resources, income, taxes and patrolling are all abstractions and they obviously fall short of modelling reality in many respects, but I do think they do what they are intended to do well enough and to me at least are believable enough not to upset my sensibilities.

[RyanZA]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
Raising taxes to 200 for one turn only results in 20 unrest. If you pillage with a large army you can generate unrest 10-20 times that as well as killing of most of the population. 200 tax is the amount of fiscal abuse you can subject province to without resorting to an outright pillage. You are assumed to have some adminstrative authorities in place in a province even when you do not have any commanders there, they are assumed to be able to threaten the populance enough to recieve the increased incomes. As I said unrest is an abstraction and I do not think that 20 in unrest represents to severe a penalty for increasing the tax to 200%. And as for the tactic being cheesy I think that realism should, if anything, dictate much more unrest in newly conquered provinces. If you wish you can consider the extra money spoils of war and the players abstaining from raising taxes to 200% as an uncommonly benevolent and disciplined conquering army.

In the early stages of dom 2 development there were some discussions of changing the way unrest works, so that there was a provincial unrest and one national happiness factor for the whole empire as well as a couple of other ideas, in the end it was decided that the current unrest model was sufficent and simpler to use and implement, there was also a slew of consistancy issues that arose from moving away from the current system to a more detailed one. The end result of these discussions were the pop killing effects of taxes in excess of 100%, and I think the system as is stands works well enough both from a gameplay and and realism perspective.

That is a 20 in addition to the extra unrest from having the province conquered twice, which takes it to almost half of the production for the province.

[RyanZA]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
I won't argue the strategic effects of the current system with you since I think they are ok, and it boils down to a matter of taste.

quote:

---

Originally posted by RyanZA:

...
Again, on non-tactical terms, broken infrastructure or destroyed crops do not require that you kill a large amount of your population to fix. I fail to see how killing the farmers helps them plant their crops any faster.

Edit: One further thing,

quote:

---

If you consider unrest as an abstraction unrest relative to players also make less sense. Unlike the inhabitants of Robin Hood movies people do not automatically and instantly switch from lawlessnes and banditry just because a tyrant is disposed, nor are roads and bridges repaired or crops replanted without effort.

Unrest of this type could not be removed by lowering taxes? Why would proper banditry (not revolting peasantry) be stopped by lowering taxes? They dont pay taxes already! They arent going to start plowing fields just because someone wont be asking for as much gold anymore.

---

You do not need to be so literal, reduced taxes can also represent distributing previously collected in natura taxes, providing seeds to farmers, hiring people to repair bridges, administrative measures to counter bandits (bounties, hiring additional constables or whatever) etc. Unrest represents general disorder in the province, patrolling represents a heavy handed way of dealing with this, lowering taxes a less heavy handed way. Dom 2 is not intended to be a realistic economic model unrest, resources, income, taxes and patrolling are all abstractions and they obviously fall short of modelling reality in many respects, but I do think they do what they are intended to do well enough and to me at least are believable enough not to upset my sensibilities.

---

These "heavy handed" methods should not be causing this level of death within the population then.

I am not asking for a total rewrite of the unrest code, only that when conquering a province with high unrest, it is lowered somewhat to stop people just 'buying unrest' for the oposing player, and to better fit in with an army arriving to liberate the province from the harsh taxes it has been facing from the enemy.

[Wendigo]

Looting & pillaging by mere citizens come with wars, nothing wrong with having some unrest mirror this when armies march around.

And to the peasant one foraging army is no different from another, whatever standard the army flies the peasant knows he's going to lose his sheep.

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by RyanZA:

...
These "heavy handed" methods should not be causing this level of death within the population then.

I am not asking for a total rewrite of the unrest code, only that when conquering a province with high unrest, it is lowered somewhat to stop people just 'buying unrest' for the oposing player, and to better fit in with an army arriving to liberate the province from the harsh taxes it has been facing from the enemy.

Why shouldn't they cause death? Unrest is an abstraction that is intended to represents civil unrest as well as other forms of disorer and lawlessness, so unrest means there are dissenters, agitators, bandits etc. people that your patroller discourage by a few (or more than a few) hangings. Unrest is intended to be a number of factors some of these your patrollers solve by killing people, some by just showing up and putting the fear fo God into your people and in some cases they might repair bridges, clear passes of brigands or do whatever else might be reqiured to restore order.

As for your Last point I remember being frustrated by opponents using similar tactics against me in VGA Planets, but now it doesn't bother me. What would bother me on the other hand would be the possibility of allied player switching provinces between each other to share the use of a province and lower the unrest present. At present they do at least get the small penalty of increased unrest, your suggestion would reward their behaviour.

[ January 03, 2004, 18:04: Message edited by: johan osterman ]

[alexti]

This discussion seem to raise few questions:
1) fixing unrest costs the population.
I haven't seen that. Taxing to 200% reduces population, but as soon as tax is set to less or equal than 100%, the population stops shrinking (unless death scale)
2) patrolling kills a lot of population. Does it? I've never seen more than dozen or two brigands killed during the patrolling, and this is quite rare, more typical numbers are below 10. It seems to be something like 0.1% of population.
3) realism of 200% taxes, unrest and population reduction. When the army marches through the province and battles there for a month (1 turn), foraging in the process, increased unrest sounds very reasonable. The army may choose how to do it.
Being kind to population and foraging carefully (tax=0%) will not cause populatin loss may even decrease an unrest, marching through pillaging quickly on the way (tax=200%) will get some part of population killed (2% ?) and certainly will cause unrest (because of taking away herds, seed, burning houses and infrastructure etc). Pillaging (as in "pillage") for an extra month would probably mean army going in various areas of the province and pillaging all their way through, instead of pillaging quickly on the passage. As expected it causes massive population loss and unrest. The middle way (tax=100%) implies that the army loots within a reason, without taking everything and does not do the damage for the sake of it. In this case there's a mild unrest and no population loss. And one should remember that nearly all those provinces were free only 1, 2 or 5 years ago, so probably different armies are all look as invaders to them. All this looks very sensible.
4) Hit, destroy and run tactic and how it impacts the balance. I wish experienced players would comment on it. The obvious impact is that there're may be 2 kind of wars: full fledged war, where everything goes and "border dispute" where military action are limited to the border provinces and the opponents are intent on annexing those provinces rather than damaging them. This may affect diplomatic relationship, sides in the border dispute may come to peace to make an united front against other enemy. Hit, destroy and run tactic will probably be not welcomed early in the game, because nobody would want to get into this kind of war ealy on. But of course, Ermor may welcome this tactics even if it's not involved directly