I was lord of a region that made 230 gold, and required three knights for full estate coverage. Not exactly a lavish income for any of them. Of course that assumes you can actually find three people to be your knight.
The Riombaran experience is valuable here.
Riombara has an ongoing IC feud between advocates of redistribution via high realm/duchy taxes (25% of all income of regions is now pooled realm-wide) and advocates of redistribution via food sales.
I'm an economist by training. I've run equilibrium models many, many times on many realms trying to determine what price of food could promote equality of incomes between typically poor rural regions and typically wealthy urban (or, often even wealthier due to food self-sufficiency and lower estate needs, townsland) regions.
I have never found a realm where the "equilibrium" (or, rather, the "nearest to equilibrium") price that would even income was less than 50 gold per 100 bushels. And yet most realms (D'Hara excluded perhaps) pay 20-40 for their food in internal trades.
This means that gold is redistributed through realm-wide tax shares or through donations,
neither of which show up in oath-share estimations for knights. Moreover, this systematically impoverishes the (majority?) of players who hold rural oaths and positions.
I'll tell you what would make rural regions able to offer sizable oaths. If the game prohibited sales of food for less than 30 gold per 100 bushels.
Indirik, I bet your 230-gold producing region produced a surplus of food. I'll bet it wasn't an insignificant surplus. I'll bet that, given your need for 4 estates, your region ran a surplus of at least 200-400 bushels on a regular basis (only very large rural regions need 4 estates). If you could have been bringing in 100-200 gold in food sales, that might have changed things.
I will, however, say that I think this issue of wealth distribution should be split into a different thread. It is tangentially connected to retention, but hardly what I was talking about initially. Unless someone can demonstrate that the higher-retaining continents are more generous in distribution to poor knights....?
