Razing, Border Friction, and Taxation

[Hobb]

So i am as a big as a strategus fan as you could ever find. In strat 4 I have already spent hours an hours "strategizing."

Reading the other threads it is obvious the next step is to hinder alliance blocs in favor of smaller "fairer" wars between all the clans.

Doing this without proper changes is just going to give equal problems

-One thing you have to take into account when you do this is the current difficulty in fighting wars. What I mean is being on the offensive in a war is much harder than defending your land. The biggest problem is the amount of members you need to coordinate wars is often overlooked, and with the s4 mechanics that require many active members for your economy, without allies its going to be impossible to sustain wars. The result is stagnation which imo is worse then carebearing.

- The second problem is with risk/reward. Currently because of the limitations on "officer" members in a faction, the use of expansion is most beneficial if you give the land to clans in exchange for loyalty. Even with s4 mechanics theres a limit to the land a faction can use. If you take away alliances why are we going to fight? To me reward/winning is fun

What im proposing is mechanical components that will compliment ally nerfs designed to allow single-factions to do everything a large power bloc can, without carebearing

1) Movement Mechanics: you have to make moving on strat easier. We need to be able to curve lines. Make this aspect as user friendly as possible because small factions are going to have to use members that just wont have time to get on strat 5 times a day to do things for them.

2) Taxation: every faction has a capital and gets monthly taxes from every fief based on population and how much prosperity they create. The idea behind this is to make factions self sustaining, give population a better use, give more reasons to take land.

3) Border Friction: every fief that is 2 close to a non faction fief gets a 1/2 pop growth and 1/2 prosperity.

4) City Razing: there has to be a way to defeat factions without controlling there land/ giving it to vassels. You need to be able pillage and burn fiefs, wipe them back to 0pp/ give forever negative bonuses. Razing should also give lots of spoils to the attacker. This not only wipes/disgraces factions, it helps move the map to endgame where one faction can own what they can, but raze the rest of the map = win

5) faction armies: so to help with the loss of manpower while at war, fief owners need to be able to send garrissoned troops from fief to fief. The armies get to hold equipment, gold but not goods. What this means is you can be campaigning against a faction and after you take a fief a fief owner can send troops from a home fief to the new fief. Now you can have more small armies running around and less supply trains/ reinforcement player controlled armies.    NOTE: unmanned armies that are intercepted in the field should get negative bonuses like you can only hire 80% of the usual mercs etc.

TLDR: i like turtles

[Tydeus]

1) Movement Mechanics: you have to make moving on strat easier. We need to be able to curve lines. Make this aspect as user friendly as possible because small factions are going to have to use members that just wont have time to get on strat 5 times a day to do things for them.

2) Taxation: every faction has a capital and gets monthly taxes from every fief based on population and how much prosperity they create. The idea behind this is to make factions self sustaining, give population a better use, give more reasons to take land.

3) Border Friction: every fief that is 2 close to a non faction fief gets a 1/2 pop growth and 1/2 prosperity.

4) City Razing: there has to be a way to defeat factions without controlling there land/ giving it to vassels. You need to be able pillage and burn fiefs, wipe them back to 0pp/ give forever negative bonuses. Razing should also give lots of spoils to the attacker. This not only wipes/disgraces factions, it helps move the map to endgame where one faction can own what they can, but raze the rest of the map = win

5) faction armies: so to help with the loss of manpower while at war, fief owners need to be able to send garrissoned troops from fief to fief. The armies get to hold equipment, gold but not goods. What this means is you can be campaigning against a faction and after you take a fief a fief owner can send troops from a home fief to the new fief. Now you can have more small armies running around and less supply trains/ reinforcement player controlled armies.    NOTE: unmanned armies that are intercepted in the field should get negative bonuses like you can only hire 80% of the usual mercs etc.

Some cool stuff here. Sadly though, two through four benefit large factions far more than smaller ones. In fact, they can be entirely negative for small clans. #3 specifically is a direct hindrance for small clans, in that it will be almost assured that their few fiefs will be close to non faction fiefs.

#4City razing, aside from causing factions to do nothing but turtle so that they can ensure proper defense for their fiefs, will simply harm smaller clans where those first few fiefs for a clan are what help them sustain themselves. Clans that are large or especially those that already have a foothold somewhere will be much less affected as expansion and the idea of more fiefs is less beneficial, you could say this could have an extremely negative affect on new clans as well. This allows clans that already have a foothold, to simply go about razing all of their opponents fiefs under the concept that the only way their enemy can regain what they lost, is to go on the offensive at one of your home fiefs, which is much, much more difficult than simply recapturing a lost fief.

#2 Really only benefits turtling. Sit in your fiefs and convert troops to population as an investment, that's what this amounts to. Not only that, but I can only think that a faction that owns several fiefs would receive much larger benefits from this than any others. Not only do you get a tax for people selling/buying at your fiefs(which, having more fiefs means you control more of the options that others have when choosing where to buy/sell, not that this is a bad thing), but you get a tax on every fief you own as well. The words "on each" and "per" as well as anything that doesn't suffer from diminishing returns, tends to benefit larger factions far more than smaller ones.

[Hobb]

Well I mean this under the assumption that big factions will be the same as small factions like chadz said he wanted to do. And im terrible with numberd so taxes and reduction % is really just concept only

[Lt_Anders]

I got a better Idea Hobb, but it builds off of yours.

Instead of razing the fief to be useless, you can instead do it like this: Make it so that if you are within 1000m of a village(maybe a little more) you can "Raze the Country side". What this would do is Lock your character down for 5 hours while they perform the action. If you are attacked during this time window, then the devastation gets canceled and it turns into a field battle.

Now for the specifics, you should be able to raze 2 things, prosperity and population(growth?). If you decide to impact prosperity, any amount of troops would work, but for every 1 point of prosperity to be reduced, you need 2 soldier(this may need some tweaking and it might need to be 3 or higher if really needed). The time that this is lost should be between 4-7 days, though i think 5 days would be most suitable.

If you decide to kill of population you need at MINIMUM 1/3 of fief population. the amount of soldiers needed would be double that of the prosperity reduction. Does not affect army of fief.

Make this able to be done to your own fiefs as well, but at no penalty, Kinda like a scorched earth policy. If the enemy is going to take your lands, destroy your prosperity before they take it making it USELESS to them in the immediate term. Also make the prosperity reduction done to same faction fiefs last 7-8 days versus the 5 done to enemy fiefs.

Make the devastation cancel able at any point in the first 2.5 hours of doing it.

So for example:
I see a 300 Population village, 50 army and 250 S&D. I decide to Raze the country side with 100 soldiers. I choose to impact S&D. Provided I don't get attacked, the village will loose 50 S&D for 5 days meaning it would only have 200 S&D for the 5 day duration.

Using Same example above, I go for Population killing. With my 100 troops, and(in this example) 4 troops per 1 population death, I would kill 20 population. Of course the population WILL regrow and within 5 hours most likely be back to 300, but this way you can lower population before an assault to make it easier to take.

Final Example, I own a village and I realize the enemy is coming. My village has 200 prosperity and 300 pop. So with my 250 man army, I decide to raze the prosperity. Because it is MY fief the fief goes NEGATIVE prosperity(-50), thereby meaning S&D is LOST and the enemy knows that I or my faction will counter attack. If the war was over trade rights, I have effectively removed the enemies(and everyone else's) ability to trade there for 7 days.