Estate Improvements

[Anderfhstim]

Ah, I see.

Well, automatically taking up an estate is pretty much a no-go. There's no guarantee there will even be an estate available, and if there is, the Lord might want to pick between the estates (or even change them!) rather than just being dumped into one.

I think we could probably remove the day-long block on taking up a new estate after you step down, though. That's there to prevent some kinds of abuse involving vacating and picking up estates many times in a turn, if I recall correctly.

I agree with removing that restriction. If someone is abusing it make people report it so that person can be punished. That restriction is so annoying when you forget to leave your estate before picking up a new one.

[Antonine]

• Smithy - Get your blacksmith to repair 10% of equipment damage for free (can only be used once per week) - using this shouldn't be the equivalent of having a full blown repair workshop, it should only give you a limited benefit

--Now this is a useless feature. 10% a week? That is pathetic. Why bother going back when you can just repair your equipment cheaply. I'd rather take 100% once a week over this.

• Chapel - Hold prayers at the chapel to restore unit morale to 100% for free (takes a large number of hours) - you can already do something similar by visiting a temple of your faith but knights shouldn't be able to build temples

--Honestly, I don't see the merit of this. It is so easy to keep your morale at 100% in this game this feature is pointless.

• Training Ground - Train your sword/jousting skill for free (equivalent to free training sessions with a Normal academy trainer) - this would only be for martial skills rather than anything else as it's not the same as a full blown academy with a wide range of tutors

-This has to be expensive unless we are planning on making all characters start off at 40% which I do not mind actually so people can't just go around bullying others after spending weeks training.

• Hunting Chase (rural/woodland/mountain regions only) - Allows you to recruit one of your huntsmen as a scout (can only be used once per week)
• Craftsman (townsland/city/stronghold regions only) - Allows you to get them to make two free banners for your unit (can only be used once per week)
• Mill/Workshop - Gives your estate +15% efficiency, this means you get an extra income which your liege can tax, but it gets negated by the existing mechanics if the estate is vacated

-Pretty sure efficiency never got implemented. Unless you are going to finish it I don't see any merit of this feature.

• Guardhouse - Daily cost of your unit is halved while you're in the same region as your estate due to being able to quarter your unit in it - if you then choose to spend your hours doing police work or whatever then that's up to you

-Kinda useless unless you have an estate in a city and has a huge unit.

Smithy: 10% per week means you can't use it as a substitute for going to a city but you can use it as a FREE way to repair some equipment damage. Though perhaps instead it could just be restricted to being 5% damage repaired and only able to be used once per day instead.

Chapel: Sure, keeping morale high is easy. But this is basically the equivalent of a free entertainment option and building a chapel should be quite cheap. So if players really want to build one (and a chapel is the kind of building you'd expect to have on an estate) then they'd be able to do so - equally, if they think it's a waste of money then they don't have to build one. That being said though, perhaps it might be better to have the Chapel give a smaller morale boost but also give a cohesion boost, that might be more useful.

Training Ground: Let's say it costs 120 gold to build a training ground on your estate. That's a lot compared to the cost of a few training sessions at the academy. So the only way you'd be able to both build this and get the benefit of it is if you've got plenty of time to sit around on your estate training. And, let's be honest, how often exactly do nobles have the free time to just go back to their estates and spend weeks there? Not very often at all and never in wartime. So it's nonsense to say this would basically mean that every char started off with 40% ability. Besides, how could chars bully others just because they've got a higher skill level? It's not like you're OBLIGED to accept duel challenges or anything...

Mill/Workshop: If efficiency never got implemented then I'd aim to implement it as part of this feature. The alternative is to go back to the idea of this improvement giving a tax income boost of X gold per week.

Guardhouse: How is it useless exactly? It'd mean a big saving in unit costs (even 25 gold per week is a significant difference for the average knight) and I'm not sure why you seem to think that people would only want to hang around in cities if they've got time to spare...

[Anderfhstim]

Smithy: 10% per week means you can't use it as a substitute for going to a city but you can use it as a FREE way to repair some equipment damage. Though perhaps instead it could just be restricted to being 5% damage repaired and only able to be used once per day instead.

--If you want it to be 5% daily, it has to be automatic. So as long as you have your unit in your region, they should automatically repair equipment. Otherwise it will be better to just pay gold to fix equipment. You are underestimating the value of time in this game. It is a turn based game and when your general orders you to refit, you can't really go back to your region and sit there to save few gold when you can just ask any council to send you gold to get your equipment fixed. This feels like a feature for peace time at most.

Chapel: Sure, keeping morale high is easy. But this is basically the equivalent of a free entertainment option and building a chapel should be quite cheap. So if players really want to build one (and a chapel is the kind of building you'd expect to have on an estate) then they'd be able to do so - equally, if they think it's a waste of money then they don't have to build one. That being said though, perhaps it might be better to have the Chapel give a smaller morale boost but also give a cohesion boost, that might be more useful.

--Wouldn't mind Chapel raising cohesion but the morale part is useless.

Training Ground: Let's say it costs 120 gold to build a training ground on your estate. That's a lot compared to the cost of a few training sessions at the academy. So the only way you'd be able to both build this and get the benefit of it is if you've got plenty of time to sit around on your estate training. And, let's be honest, how often exactly do nobles have the free time to just go back to their estates and spend weeks there? Not very often at all and never in wartime. So it's nonsense to say this would basically mean that every char started off with 40% ability. Besides, how could chars bully others just because they've got a higher skill level? It's not like you're OBLIGED to accept duel challenges or anything...

--Hope training ground also slowly trains your men and raise their training. As for 120 gold for 40%, no it is incredibly cheap compare to the amount of gold you need to spend to get both swordfighting and jousting up to 40%. It costs you 16 gold per day for more than 10 days. Hack you probably need to spend at least a month raising your skill to reach 40% for both skills. That is 960 gold if you spend a month training swordfighting + jousting with a normal tutor for a month straight.

Mill/Workshop: If efficiency never got implemented then I'd aim to implement it as part of this feature. The alternative is to go back to the idea of this improvement giving a tax income boost of X gold per week.

--Hopefully this will allow some poor knights to produce more gold by going over 100% efficiency. Maybe later on we can add something like 'manage estate' to increase the efficiency even further by being in your region working on your estate. I think efficiency has a lot of potential.

Guardhouse: How is it useless exactly? It'd mean a big saving in unit costs (even 25 gold per week is a significant difference for the average knight) and I'm not sure why you seem to think that people would only want to hang around in cities if they've got time to spare...
[/quote]

--Don't know about you but I never cared about gold to be honest. If you lack gold, you simply need to ask for more. This game doesn't give people enough gold to be self-sufficient. Gold is funneled to the top so you always need to ask for gold. Thought the current system was supposed to solve this problem we had with the old system but it failed miserably. Maybe because the system is incomplete but I also think it was just poorly thought out from the designing phase. Maybe the taxation system isn't the thing that is broken. Maybe it is region stats which were arbitrary decided by Tom.

[Vita`]

I agree with removing that restriction. If someone is abusing it make people report it so that person can be punished. That restriction is so annoying when you forget to leave your estate before picking up a new one.

Suggestion was only to remove restriction when you've been appointed to a lordship, not to completely remove it.

[Vita`]

One thing I've noticed is that some buildings result in active bonuses (you must do an action) while others are passive (must merely be present). I don't know how conscious/intentional you were about it originally, but it might be worth being more intentional what works best for each building. For instance, chapels could go either way, in my opinion, either spending large hours for a larger boost, or receiving a smaller boost for just being present.

[Antonine]

--If you want it to be 5% daily, it has to be automatic. So as long as you have your unit in your region, they should automatically repair equipment. Otherwise it will be better to just pay gold to fix equipment. You are underestimating the value of time in this game. It is a turn based game and when your general orders you to refit, you can't really go back to your region and sit there to save few gold when you can just ask any council to send you gold to get your equipment fixed. This feels like a feature for peace time at most.

You're completely missing the point. If you're at war then you should be heading back to the capital to refit anyway. If estate improvements meant you didn't need to do that then it would destroy game balance.

What should be the case is that, when a war's over, you can go back to your estate and save yourself some gold by repairing equipment gradually for free. Or it should be so that in wartime it's worth making a detour to your region while you're on the way to the capital so that you can get 10% of repairs for free before you have to spend gold on the rest at the capital.

--Wouldn't mind Chapel raising cohesion but the morale part is useless.

If morale is "useless" then so are all the current entertainment options and 'get priests to bless your men' options. But the fact is that a) morale isn't completely useless and b) it might get more useful in future. Either way though, none of these improvements should be essential. They should all, at best, be nice to haves. So if you don't give a flying monkey's about your men's morale then you don't build one, but if you care about your IG religion or if you plan on doing a lot of civil work you can spend the money to build one. Not all of these are meant to be equally useful but there should be a range of broadly realistic improvements and accompanying perks available.

--Hope training ground also slowly trains your men and raise their training. As for 120 gold for 40%, no it is incredibly cheap compare to the amount of gold you need to spend to get both swordfighting and jousting up to 40%. It costs you 16 gold per day for more than 10 days. Hack you probably need to spend at least a month raising your skill to reach 40% for both skills. That is 960 gold if you spend a month training swordfighting + jousting with a normal tutor for a month straight.

Training your unit could be another option then - perhaps this improvement could be used for unit cohesion boosting instead...

But this wouldn't mean you'd automatically improve your skill every time you trained at your estate so it'd still be a very time consuming process - and, unlike an academy, your estate generally won't be in a central location which means you're unlikely to be able to spend even a couple of weeks sitting there and training. I suppose the skill limit could be set to 30% or something though to make it more limited than an academy. And perhaps the build cost could be bumped up slightly - maybe 180 gold.

--Don't know about you but I never cared about gold to be honest. If you lack gold, you simply need to ask for more. This game doesn't give people enough gold to be self-sufficient. Gold is funneled to the top so you always need to ask for gold. Thought the current system was supposed to solve this problem we had with the old system but it failed miserably. Maybe because the system is incomplete but I also think it was just poorly thought out from the designing phase. Maybe the taxation system isn't the thing that is broken. Maybe it is region stats which were arbitrary decided by Tom.

If you've never cared about gold then don't build one on your estate. But not all realms are active in redistributing gold and if you're a knight of a poorer region you might well decide to build one as an investment in order to get paid back for the investment in the long run and to avoid having to constantly ask for gold. And those are the kind of knights who'd make use of this particular option.

You seem to be missing the point that not EVERY knight will want to build EVERY possible estate improvement. The whole point of the suggestions I've come up with is to offer a broad selection of options so that players have to pick and choose which ones to bother with and whether it's in-keeping with their character to build particular ones.

For instance, if you're a courtier then you won't have a big unit and won't really care about keeping unit costs low so a Guardhouse won't interest you. On the other hand you might be using your unit for civil work a lot and your character might be very religious so you'd decide to build a chapel - and you'd also probably build a mill to improve your estate efficiency. And if you were planning on entering a tournament then you'd probably want to build a training ground/yard for the sake of some free jousting training.

But mainly, the key point is that all of these together would give players some goals in the knight game. Okay, maybe there aren't any lordship vacancies and maybe the realm is at peace so there's not much to do - but at least you can set yourself the goal of saving up gold to improve your estate and, once you've made an improvement, maybe that'd make you decide to start a roleplay where you invite other nobles to come visit your estate.

As I keep saying, none of this should be about massively altering gameplay or balance. All it should be about is giving knights something more to do and giving them a reason to become emotionally invested in their estate.

[Antonine]

One thing I've noticed is that some buildings result in active bonuses (you must do an action) while others are passive (must merely be present). I don't know how conscious/intentional you were about it originally, but it might be worth being more intentional what works best for each building. For instance, chapels could go either way, in my opinion, either spending large hours for a larger boost, or receiving a smaller boost for just being present.

Good point, that's probably worth having a think about - when I came up with the list I was just basically jotting down ideas as they came into my head.

[Anderfhstim]

Well if you are aiming to give knights more things to spend gold on and help them with RP stuff, I think these are nice. That explains why bonuses are so weak. They will certainly provide more stuff to RP about.

Hopefully we will be able to see which estate has what.

As for training ground, lets bring the cost down to 100. I don't know why I was against having a cheap academy. I must be crazy. Let's not limit the option to just swordfighting and jousting.

[Vita`]

Let's not limit the option to just swordfighting and jousting.

I disagree. Let us limit.

[Ketchum]

Ah, I see.

Well, automatically taking up an estate is pretty much a no-go. There's no guarantee there will even be an estate available, and if there is, the Lord might want to pick between the estates (or even change them!) rather than just being dumped into one.

I think we could probably remove the day-long block on taking up a new estate after you step down, though. That's there to prevent some kinds of abuse involving vacating and picking up estates many times in a turn, if I recall correctly.

I agree with removing that restriction. If someone is abusing it make people report it so that person can be punished. That restriction is so annoying when you forget to leave your estate before picking up a new one.

Suggestion was only to remove restriction when you've been appointed to a lordship, not to completely remove it.

Yes, that's the thing, the pause duration between taking estate. Sorry for not making it clear.

About the potential abuse. If someone can take and leave estate many times in 1 turn, they have minimum 8 hours a turn or 12 hours if they save hours from previous turn. So if they want abuse this, if we remember correctly 3 hours to pack up your things from your estate and also the same 3 hours for move to new estate. It looks to me they can change estate 2 times at most given the hours gain limitation by the character.

[Chenier]

I'm a little confused. What's the gain in switching estates a bunch of times? Where's the abuse?