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

[licker]

Originally posted by johan osterman:

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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.