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

[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:

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Originally posted by RyanZA:

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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

[licker]

Originally posted by johan osterman:

quote:

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Originally posted by RyanZA:

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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.

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I'm not so sure they would be rewarded if the unrest reset to 100 assuming it was higher to begin with... anyway that's all completely beside the point.

The point being that this strategy, no matter how you wish to abstract unrest, has zero consequence for the agressor, in fact he ultimately benefits from the 1 or 2 turns of additional income due to his 200% tax rate.

I don't think that my origional suggestion of capping the level that you can raise taxes in one turn is overly disruptive, and yet it would 'fix' this problem. A better solution would be to track province ownership, have supply lines mean something for tax collection (similar to supporting troops), or change the system completely. However, I recognize that those latter solutions are more work for perhaps little actual gain.

Now while the concepts of pillageing, scortched earth, and general problems from battles being fought on your farm lands are certainly valid, the failing as I see it is that 200% tax shouldn't cause as much disruption as quickly as it does. Personally I think that if you want to wreck a province you had better use your military to do it, or spend more than a few turns screwing up the tax to do it.

Again, its not a big deal to me in SP, I chose not to abuse this aspect, I just think that for MP it should be looked at and hopefully improved for all aspects of game play, as since the AI doesn't seem able to deal with this tactic (it doesn't do it itself that I've seen) it is definately cheese to use it in SP.

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by RyanZA:
The idea of an army passing through a perfectly happy province, and going along with an insane tax rate with no sign of the enemy is a bit far fetched.

The english in the 100 years war made a practice of moving rapidly through french terrotories pillaging as they went (no stopping to pillage) simply to ruin the local economy. The french would react with much larger forces and chase the english home but the damage is done. This is a very, very, close parallel to the Dom tactic you hate and yes the French hated it because it was damn hard for them to counter.

It is not a cheesy tactic at all - even a little bit. It is very historical. War was brutal far beyond what many seem to imagine. As for the idea that the local people have a community of interest with either empire fighting over them this was seldom the case in history .

"When Kings make war, poor little men must tremble"

Cheers

Keir

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
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,

I'm very glad you stuck with the current model. Nationalism/Nations may seem the sort of thing thats been around for ever but the standard view in history is that it arose with the rise of the bourgeoise/capitalist state. A French peasant in the middle ages suffered most at the hands of the french rulers - the community of interest many suppose didn't exist on the whole. The emergence of free cities and the conflicts between the nobles and the merchants that this entailed is another example of how disparate interest were in these times.

I think most of the criticisms of the tax system are on the level of "this doesn't feel right." This is not particularily helpful as what feels wrong to a modern person may feel quite right for a feudal lord. Could the critics respond more to the historical details being used against them and rely less on commen sense as it is no guide whatsoever when you leave behind the commen.

Cheers

Keir

Cheers

Keir

[ January 03, 2004, 20:17: Message edited by: Keir Maxwell ]