BattleMaster Community
BattleMaster => Development => Topic started by: Buffalkill on August 25, 2013, 08:34:28 PM
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No tax gold for rural regions. The only way for rural regions to get gold is by selling their food. As it stands, there's an imbalance of power between the sellers and the buyers, because buyers need to trade for their survival, but sellers don't. That's why there are more buy orders than sell orders.
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(http://static1.fjcdn.com/comments/HE+KNOWS+I+VE+BEEN+ON+HIS+COMPUTER+_9c34dbb69d61d8773572f371d17fcb3c.jpg)
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Dammit! Gimme more gold, ^ban^!
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(http://omegaforums.net/attachments/goldmember-jpeg.4777/)
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No tax gold for rural regions. The only way for rural regions to get gold is by selling their food. As it stands, there's an imbalance of power between the sellers and the buyers, because buyers need to trade for their survival, but sellers don't. That's why there are more buy orders than sell orders.
Well, I would say this imbalance is compensated by the other imbalance between buyers and sellers, namely that buyers are typically Dukes while the sellers are 'only' rural Lords.
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So there's no imbalance?
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I actually proposed this once. Regions that produce a lot of food also produce a lot of gold.
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It's not perfectly balanced, but then again, it doesn't need to be. And rural lords will most of the time be at a disadvantage, since even if they are crazy or ballsy enough to sit on their food while cities starve, they'll get scolded and/or punished for it.
Removing all tax income from rurals would shaft the lords to no extent in most realms. To give you an example, my region on BT is the third biggest food producer in Riombara, with a daily net of 31 bushels per day, so 217 bushels per week. Riombara produces a surplus of food, so prices aren't terribly high. If I was forced to sell my food at 30g per 100 I'd get a total income of... drum roll please... 65 gold per week. And I'd have to sell ALL my excess food. At those prices are higher than what they are right now.
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I think it's so crazy it might work. Why not try it on one island on an experimental basis?
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I think it's so crazy it might work. Why not try it on one island on an experimental basis?
Because, as Sacha points out, selling all the excess food you can for the prices people are paying won't pay for a decent unit, let alone any knights.
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Because, as Sacha points out, selling all the excess food you can for the prices people are paying won't pay for a decent unit, let alone any knights.
Prices can be adjusted to ensure the proper balance is struck.
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Prices can be adjusted to ensure the proper balance is struck.
Prices are set by players, not devs.
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Minimum and maximum prices are built in.
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Minimum and maximum prices are built in.
Should get rid of the maximum price limit. The game is controlling the market! ;)
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They should also remove the minimum limit! I want to get food and gold :D!
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Yeah, I think you could do away with min/max pricing. As long there's a good balance between gold and food, let the free market set the price.
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That's not going to solve the issue. Basically, you'd have to take all the current gold values of food producing regions, and then go up to the Dukes and say "Here, now you have to come up with this cash, every week." Nobody's going to pay 100+ gold for 100 bushels all of a sudden.
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That's not going to solve the issue. Basically, you'd have to take all the current gold values of food producing regions, and then go up to the Dukes and say "Here, now you have to come up with this cash, every week." Nobody's going to pay 100+ gold for 100 bushels all of a sudden.
Such negativity. Of course they'll pay, or see their regions will starve. The actual price is not that important as long as there's an appropriate balance between food and gold.
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Such negativity. Of course they'll pay, or see their regions will starve. The actual price is not that important as long as there's an appropriate balance between food and gold.
A smart margrave who had no way of getting food except through the rural lords demanding 100+ gold per 100 bushels would starve his region. I am rather sure that for most regions atm anything beyond like 70 gold per 100 bushels isn't worth it as it costs more to maintain then it does produce for the lord.
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A smart margrave who had no way of getting food except through the rural lords demanding 100+ gold per 100 bushels would starve his region. I am rather sure that for most regions atm anything beyond like 70 gold per 100 bushels isn't worth it as it costs more to maintain then it does produce for the lord.
That won't happen if there's an appropriate balance because the buyers want to buy and the sellers want to sell, so they will naturally converge on a mutually agreeable price.
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A smart margrave who had no way of getting food except through the rural lords demanding 100+ gold per 100 bushels would starve his region. I am rather sure that for most regions atm anything beyond like 70 gold per 100 bushels isn't worth it as it costs more to maintain then it does produce for the lord.
Yes, the food price kinda low at the moment. 10 gold, 15 gold, 20 gold. It is hard to sell food for even profit. Your realm margrave will demand realm Judge to punish you should you let the city starve. Unless you happen to hold Judge and rural region lordship at same time ;D
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It depends on where you are though, D'haran dukes usually offer around 50 gold. But i think high food prices is just unique to Dwilight thought
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All you'll get is people playing chicken with city starvation.
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All you'll get is people playing chicken with city starvation.
Awful as it is, this is demonstrably the truth.
How do I know this? Because people have already been doing this, even with 50 gold per hundred bushels as the maximum price for food.
Increase the amount they can potentially make, remove the ability of rural Lords to make gold by any other means, and all you'll end up with is hundreds of !@#$%^&s doing their level best to make as much profit as possible off the cities, regardless of what's good for the cities or the realm as a whole.
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Couldn't we allow the realms themselves to pass laws such as min/max prices or other restrictions and stuff on the economy? You would have some realms with very strict government regulated economies and some realms where the economy is completely free.
Would be interesting to see.
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Couldn't we allow the realms themselves to pass laws such as min/max prices or other restrictions and stuff on the economy? You would have some realms with very strict government regulated economies and some realms where the economy is completely free.
Would be interesting to see.
Nothing stopping people from doing that. In fact, Luria Nova already does. (I suspect other realms do, too, that's just the only one I have direct knowledge of.)
Enforcement is, of course, up to the players.
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Increase the amount they can potentially make, remove the ability of rural Lords to make gold by any other means, and all you'll end up with is hundreds of !@#$%^&s doing their level best to make as much profit as possible off the cities, regardless of what's good for the cities or the realm as a whole.
I understand how it can be a deliberate design decision to avoid this. However, given that it is, then what is the point of having a region-based food trading system at all?
If the point of the food system is to check the growth of realms and force heavy-rich realms to trade for food, then it would be easier to make food a pure realm-wide statistics. The only reason to make it a region-based system is to create a dynamic between rural and city Lords. If those who try to use this dynamic in a power struggle are preemptively called '!@#$%^&s' on the forum, then I don't see the point of having food at all.
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I understand how it can be a deliberate design decision to avoid this. However, given that it is, then what is the point of having a region-based food trading system at all?
If the point of the food system is to check the growth of realms and force heavy-rich realms to trade for food, then it would be easier to make food a pure realm-wide statistics. The only reason to make it a region-based system is to create a dynamic between rural and city Lords. If those who try to use this dynamic in a power struggle are preemptively called '!@#$%^&s' on the forum, then I don't see the point of having food at all.
I'm not using it of the ones who try to use the dynamic. I'm using it of the ones who try to abuse it. Which, as I have seen firsthand with the existing system, can be a quite high percentage.
I should note, the dev team is considering raising the maximum limit, and has been for some time. But not removing gold from rurals.
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But not removing gold from rurals.
I'm not actually advocating that, it would be a little too extreme and unbalancing. I'm only saying that seeing a city starve due to deliberate withholding of food once in a while, if done for good IC reasons, would be perfectly legitimate.
I'm also trying to reduce the number of people who get the impression that they're being name-called when reading the forum.... even if that wasn't your intention it can appear that way.
the dev team is considering raising the maximum limit, and has been for some time.
Thanks, I think that would be a good thing. It won't change anything to those places where the price is lower, and will allow those places who have reached the limit to use the system correctly.
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Awful as it is, this is demonstrably the truth.
How do I know this? Because people have already been doing this, even with 50 gold per hundred bushels as the maximum price for food.
Increase the amount they can potentially make, remove the ability of rural Lords to make gold by any other means, and all you'll end up with is hundreds of !@#$%^&s doing their level best to make as much profit as possible off the cities, regardless of what's good for the cities or the realm as a whole.
This would not be the case if the rural region's survival was equally dependant on trade as the cities are. The reason there's an imbalance is that rural regions don't need trade for their survival but cities do. If rural regions could starve for lack of gold then rural lords would have to sell to cities. And if one rural lord is demanding exorbitant prices, another rural lord can easily undercut him. If they get into a stale mate, as you predict, then they both starve, their realm becomes unstable and another realm comes in and takes over. It couldn't be more poetic than a realm destroyed by its own greed. Of course, if a region is starving and the lord isn't doing anything to stabilize it, they should be relieved of their duties and replaced with someone more competent.
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This would not be the case if the rural region's survival was equally dependant on trade as the cities are. The reason there's an imbalance is that rural regions don't need trade for their survival but cities do. If rural regions could starve for lack of gold then rural lords would have to sell to cities. And if one rural lord is demanding exorbitant prices, another rural lord can easily undercut him. If they get into a stale mate, as you predict, then they both starve, their realm becomes unstable and another realm comes in and takes over. It couldn't be more poetic than a realm destroyed by its own greed. Of course, if a region is starving and the lord isn't doing anything to stabilize it, they should be relieved of their duties and replaced with someone more competent.
While I'm extremely hesitant to suggest anything along the lines of new economic goods after the last attempted implementation, I do think there may be a point about rural lords not needing to trade for the survival of the region like cities do. Perhaps to sustain food production, non-city regions need to buy some form of good from cities? Fertilizer? Irrigation specialists? Sickles? Blacksmiths? All of these seem silly though. If the region *doesn't* get this good from cities, then their food production doesn't go higher than what is sufficient for the region to feed itself, meaning a city will starve if it doesn't sell enough of these goods to their surrounding regions.
Again, I'm very hesitant on this suggestion, but it seems a far more useful discussion than removing all gold production from non-city regions.
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While I'm extremely hesitant to suggest anything along the lines of new economic goods after the last attempted implementation, I do think there may be a point about rural lords not needing to trade for the survival of the region like cities do. Perhaps to sustain food production, non-city regions need to buy some form of good from cities? Fertilizer? Irrigation specialists? Sickles? Blacksmiths? All of these seem silly though. If the region *doesn't* get this good from cities, then their food production doesn't go higher than what is sufficient for the region to feed itself, meaning a city will starve if it doesn't sell enough of these goods to their surrounding regions.
Again, I'm very hesitant on this suggestion, but it seems a far more useful discussion than removing all gold production from non-city regions.
Adding to your thoughts about not wanting to introduce new goods, you could also just tie production in the region to how much trading it does, i.e. more trade leads to increased production. The rural lord needn't actually purchase fertilizer and such, as it could just be implied. Maybe the lord needs to decide how much of his gold to "re-invest" in the region, and it would just be understood that the investment is for tools, seeds, labour, etc.
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I would love to see a Margrave starve a city because they refuse to buy food for whatever the market rate is. It creates conflict.
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Economic warfare!
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While I'm extremely hesitant to suggest anything along the lines of new economic goods after the last attempted implementation, I do think there may be a point about rural lords not needing to trade for the survival of the region like cities do. Perhaps to sustain food production, non-city regions need to buy some form of good from cities? Fertilizer? Irrigation specialists? Sickles? Blacksmiths? All of these seem silly though. If the region *doesn't* get this good from cities, then their food production doesn't go higher than what is sufficient for the region to feed itself, meaning a city will starve if it doesn't sell enough of these goods to their surrounding regions.
I have had similar thoughts in the past. If the rural isn't selling food, then why is it producing food? Who's going to grow 10,000 bushels of food that just sit and rot in the warehouse, and then get burned because they're spoiled?
But let's say you do implement something where you have a feedback mechanism from the city to the rural that the rural needs to keep food production high. So, the rural stops selling food to the city, so the city stops selling widgets to the rural. So what? Why does the rural lord care? He's not selling the food to the city, so he doesn't need to still grow it. His region is fed, and he gets gold from taxes, so why does he need the food that he's not selling anyway?
There is an imbalance in the food system. The city needs what the rural has, but the rural doesn't need what the city has. The only way the city can force the rural to give up the goods is by getting the realm leadership on their side. And the realm council has to be willing to stand up for the margraves, and tighten the screws on the lords refusing to sell. That's the only real power the margrave has to enforce the food sales on the lords.
There really is no mechanism I can see that allows us to give a strong need for the rurals to sell food to the cities, if the rural lord decides that he doesn't need the extra gold. The only way I can see that enforcement coming down is via IG enforcement by the characters in the realm.
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Here's another alternative: if a region is starving, peasant militias form and steal food from surplus regions, causing morale and productivity to drop and, in extreme cases, the region goes rogue. This would create impetus for rural lords to sell to the cities or suffer the consequences.
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There is an imbalance in the food system. The city needs what the rural has, but the rural doesn't need what the city has.
Absolutely. Real-life farmers need to sell their food to live, that's why it works: willing buyer, willing seller. In BM, there are no natural consequences if a rural lord refuses to sell. In the real world he would starve.
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I never really had problems with Rural Lords not selling food. They get some extra money, and usually that Margrave and/or Duke on top is in that position because he holds a certain amount of power within the Realm that he can use to take care of any Rural Lords that just sit on their food for no reason. Especially when other Margraves / Dukes are afraid it might happen to them too. If anything, it's the Cities that hold more power over the Rural Lords instead of the other way around. If a Realm needs food, that Rural Lord will sell or else.
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Absolutely. Real-life farmers need to sell their food to live, that's why it works: willing buyer, willing seller. In BM, there are no natural consequences if a rural lord refuses to sell. In the real world he would starve.
Except rural lords aren't farmers. They're the huge agricultural companies that squeeze out the peasant farmers and rake in all the profit. And why would he starve if he's got all the food?
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Except rural lords aren't farmers. They're the huge agricultural companies that squeeze out the peasant farmers and rake in all the profit. And why would he starve if he's got all the food?
Because it's peasant food! Noble lords don't eat that !@#$...he needs gold to buy caviar and wine, and jewelry for his 12 mistresses. :)
My point is--draw whatever parallels your like, peasant farmers and huge ag companies and small ag companies and oil companies and internet companies--they all need to sell their product to survive.
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I have a radical solution to the problem of rural lords selling food--charge lords (both rural and city) gold for the disposal of rotted food. Tack it on as a tax charge.
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:P yeah, I thought about that one. I'm glad someone else mentioned it. It's an interesting idea, since it does have to be disposed of to make room. You have to pay the workers to haul it out and burn it. Then lords would really have some incentive to get rid of it. Get way too much, and you could bankrupt yourself paying the disposal fees. :D
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If the point of the food system is to check the growth of realms and force heavy-rich realms to trade for food, then it would be easier to make food a pure realm-wide statistics.
I would support this. I don't know anyone who honestly likes to leave (wherever your army is) every week to set up trades.
I would love to see a Margrave starve a city because they refuse to buy food for whatever the market rate is. It creates conflict.
Trust me you don't. Intra realm conflict has to be carefully regulated. More than a very small amount is a massive turn off for people who don't play that much and don't have the time to investigate who is right or wrong.
I never really had problems with Rural Lords not selling food. They get some extra money, and usually that Margrave and/or Duke on top is in that position because he holds a certain amount of power within the Realm that he can use to take care of any Rural Lords that just sit on their food for no reason. Especially when other Margraves / Dukes are afraid it might happen to them too. If anything, it's the Cities that hold more power over the Rural Lords instead of the other way around. If a Realm needs food, that Rural Lord will sell or else.
Then you haven't seen the rural lords who feign bad harvest or semi-incompetence with 99% plausible deniability and think this makes them Machiavelli. Once I saw someone brag about how they got someone else kicked out by not selling food. Would be legitimate if there was an actual way to investigate from the demand side, but as it is there is no interaction, just one sided refusals possible.
I have a radical solution to the problem of rural lords selling food--charge lords (both rural and city) gold for the disposal of rotted food. Tack it on as a tax charge.
People will play chicken with food rot to buy at bottom price. I don't see how this can work.
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You guys are all failing because you are trying to think of "the sale of food" all on one level. The first level is peasants selling food for their necessities of life and tools and stuff. This is the reason why people need to sell food. The second level is all this "disposable" food that can be played around with by the region lord. This can be traded for gold which is then used to buy armies. But the problem is that there is no "disposable" food. All food is eaten, but no food is ever traded for necessities of life. In contrast, all gold is genuinely "disposable" (true excess). This is the main inequality which makes BM food economy so difficult to work out.
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Correct. This is the fundamental flaw in the trade system. That the buyers need to engage in trade for their survival but the sellers don't. If the sellers' survival depended on making sales, trade would become a lot more interesting, and more people would choose the trader class (I would). We can debate different ways to address this imbalance, but this is the fundamental problem.
If eliminating tax gold from rural regions is too radical, you could reduce the amount of tax gold they get to something below what they need to survive. So they'll still get some gold, but not enough to survive and they'll have to sell food to make up the shortfall. I also like the idea of somehow requiring rural lords to re-invest some of their gold into the region to keep production going.
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So...we need to get other commodities that rurals need that cities produce. For this to be effective, the rurals must NEED the commodity. It can't just be a minor benefit.
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In the long term, you can make each region desire different stuff to be happy.
Obviously food should always be there for all regions but making rural regions consume goods that cannot be produced in those regions. Also, maybe adding trade between goods wouldn't be too bad I think. 100 bushels of food for 20 widgets?
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Brief Gripe:
Sure, if you take tax income away from rurals and expect the Margraves to pay enough for food to compensate you have a net loss. If, however, you take the gold away from the rurals and give it to the Margraves tthey will be able to pay the higher food prices without suffering a loss. A decrese, if desired, simply has to be matched by an increase. I am not saying that decreasing or removing rural taxes is the best option but I do not think that it is as horrible as some make it sound.
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Brief Gripe:
Sure, if you take tax income away from rurals and expect the Margraves to pay enough for food to compensate you have a net loss. If, however, you take the gold away from the rurals and give it to the Margraves tthey will be able to pay the higher food prices without suffering a loss. A decrese, if desired, simply has to be matched by an increase. I am not saying that decreasing or removing rural taxes is the best option but I do not think that it is as horrible as some make it sound.
Dukes are already allowed to tax their Lord's income up to 50%. Nothing prevents them from taking half their Lord's money, funnel it to the Margrave (often themselves), and then require redistribution through high food prices.
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Very True!
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In the long term, you can make each region desire different stuff to be happy.
Obviously food should always be there for all regions but making rural regions consume goods that cannot be produced in those regions. Also, maybe adding trade between goods wouldn't be too bad I think. 100 bushels of food for 20 widgets?
I'd be down with that, but it's not necessary for the purpose of increasing trade. At the moment we have 2 commodities (gold and food) which IMO would work swimmingly if there was a better balance in bargaining power between the cities (who have gold but need food to survive) and the rurals (who already have plenty of food and gold). In short, the rurals have something the cities need, but the rurals don't need anything from the cities because they have enough gold to survive already. Make it so that the rurals need to trade in order to survive and you will immediately see a spike in trading.
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TO be fair, the cities *do* have something the rurals need, but it's not simulated very well: protection. Protection against monsters, protection against undead, protection against foreign invaders...
The players don't really have the mindset to enforce this, though. What realm is really going to allow the enemy/monsters/undead to destroy the region because the lord wants to sell his food for 45/100 instead of 25/100? And besides, what's the consequence for the lord if the monsters do come after his region? He loses some food, loses some peasants, then the monsters wander off to go ravage someone else's region.
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TO be fair, the cities *do* have something the rurals need, but it's not simulated very well: protection. Protection against monsters, protection against undead, protection against foreign invaders...
The players don't really have the mindset to enforce this, though. What realm is really going to allow the enemy/monsters/undead to destroy the region because the lord wants to sell his food for 45/100 instead of 25/100? And besides, what's the consequence for the lord if the monsters do come after his region? He loses some food, loses some peasants, then the monsters wander off to go ravage someone else's region.
I like your idea too, Indirik. It would make things more interesting at the duke and lord level. If dukes could place protection units in other regions, but also be able to remove them whenever they choose, they could enter agreements such as 'the duke agrees to maintain a unit of 100 soldiers with at least 500 CS in the region for as long as the rural lord keeps selling the duke food for 30 gold per hundred.' It would add an interesting dynamic to the game because the rural lords could pit competing dukes against each other, but dukes could also pit the rural lords against each other, since if the duke is not happy, he can simply send his troops to a different rural region and get a more favourable deal. And if the rural lord is unhappy, he can enter an arrangement with a different duke.
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so you are asking for something like a button that dukes can push that will let them pay for the militia in the rural region of their duchies? Regardless, I dont see how paying for militia is any different from directly paying for food.
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...Which brings us back to the idea of Duchy Infrastructure :D
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I think what Indirik was trying to convey was that dukes/margraves are usually responsible for being army sponsors, financing realm treasuries, and generally supporting the military/realm with their superior wealth. Thus, they protect the weaker regions around them. Unfortunately, because people want to help the realm, they think in a modern nationalist sense of stopping all threats to the realm instead of a feudal 'screw the guy who has 2200 bushels of food rotting in his region while my city teeters on the brink of starvation; i'm going to make sure the army ignores those monsters/enemy looters in his region' sense. Usually if someone is pissed about something they'll plot to remove the lord himself, not harm the region.
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Usually if someone is pissed about something they'll plot to remove the lord himself, not harm the region.
Historically these went hand-in-hand. The BM metaphor for this would be a Duke with a big unit looting a region until the Lord is kicked out, so that he can name a new Lord instead. Because you can't loot your own realm this is currently impossible.
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As Vita says, my point was more along the lines of the Dukes/Margraves control/sponsor the armies, and provide the financial backing the realm needs to survive. Your neighbors doesn't hold back from invading you because a few rural lords each have 1,000CS of militia. They hold back because your Margrave sponsors a 10,000 CS mobile army.
The modern nationalistic viewpoint (and I admit that I tend to think this way IG, too) promotes an all-for-one mentality. This is the realm-as-team viewpoint that I really think is necessary for the overall health of the game. But it does lead to the inability of a realm to, for the most part, withhold their protection as a method of dealing with a recalcitrant lord. How many nobles of Keplerstan would turn their back and pretend not to notice as Evilstani loots and burns Lord GreedyPocket's region to ground?
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We're over-thinking a simple problem that has a very simple solution.
- All regions need 2 countervailing things to survive: gold and food.
- For cities, acquiring food from rurals is an existential necessity, and there's also an element of urgency.
- There should be an opposite and equally powerful need for the rurals to acquire gold in order to survive.
It's that simple. You don't need anything more complicated than that to get regions trading. Yes, the rurals may get some non-quantifiable benefit from the cities' armies, but they don't have the same urgency compelling them to trade like the cities do. If all trading stops, the cities will suffer immediately, while the rurals can carry on indefinitely. Make it so that rurals don't have enough tax gold to survive, and you will see an immediate spike in sell offers and they'll be more competitively priced.
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- All regions need 2 countervailing things to survive: gold and food.
Nope. All regions need food to survive, period.
Gold just makes the Lord's life happier. A Lord who's determined to screw the realm over can survive quite well indefinitely without gold, as long as he doesn't keep a unit or anything else he needs to pay for on a regular basis.
Furthermore, removing all gold from rural regions would require both further increasing city gold—quite dramatically, I think—and jacking up food prices astronomically from what they've been. That's not something that players would readily accept.
And finally, the "problem" of lords withholding food from cities, or demanding prices higher than the city lord is willing to pay, is one that is so uncommon in practice that I really don't think it's worth expending any significant effort on.
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And finally, the "problem" of lords withholding food from cities, or demanding prices higher than the city lord is willing to pay, is one that is so uncommon in practice that I really don't think it's worth expending any significant effort on.
On the other hand, convincing the rural lord of a realm other than your own that they should sell you their food, is hard to do.
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Nope. All regions need food to survive, period.
Replace the word 'survive' with the word 'thrive' if it makes you feel better.
Furthermore, removing all gold from rural regions would require both further increasing city gold—quite dramatically, I think—
Try to see the forest and not just the trees, Anaris. It's about balancing the relative bargaining power of the different regions. As I said earlier, it's not necessary to remove all gold from rurals. That would be the most extreme version of this, but you could simply reduce it to a level where the necessity to trade is roughly equal. You could even introduce it gradually by, say, reducing rural regions' tax gold by 5% this week (or some other arbitrary number), another 5% next week until you see parity between buy and sell orders.
and jacking up food prices astronomically from what they've been. That's not something that players would readily accept.
As you pointed earlier, players set the prices. That's what the markets are for.
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Try to see the forest and not just the trees, Anaris.
Try to be more condescending, Buffakill. :P
It's about balancing the relative bargaining power of the different regions. As I said earlier, it's not necessary to remove all gold from rurals. That would be the most extreme version of this, but you could simply reduce it to a level where the necessity to trade is roughly equal.
In order to reduce the amount of gold produced by rural regions enough to make selling their food a necessity, rather than simply helpful, the amount of gold that would have to be removed from their production would have to be (in aggregate) quite significant. In order to keep the amount of gold in the game more or less balanced, a comparable amount would have to be added to the cities' (and other non-rural regions') production. It doesn't matter whether it's all of it or just a lot.
You could even introduce it gradually by, say, reducing rural regions' tax gold by 5% this week (or some other arbitrary number), another 5% next week until you see parity between buy and sell orders.
No...no, we really, really couldn't. The code that governs regional gold production just isn't anywhere near that simple.
The type of changes you're asking for would require one of two things: Either we sit down and calculate exactly what all the gold changes gamewide would need to be, and apply them all at once, or spend months working out a system that could gradually ramp down gold production in rurals and simultaneously ramp it up in cities, with a kill switch so that we could stop it when we saw that it seemed balanced, and then more months testing it to make sure it produced sane numbers.
As you pointed earlier, players set the prices. That's what the markets are for.
Yes, but a) right now, food prices are capped at 50 gold/100 bushels, so the most a region producing 200 bushels a week could possibly hope to make is 100 gold, and b) players' perceptions of what is "fair" don't necessarily change along with changes to the structure of the system, so it could be months or more before city lords were willing to pay more than 30 gold/100 bushels on average.
In general, Buffakill, your analysis of this situation is not completely off the mark, but the solution you propose both overly simplifies the problem, and would not have nearly the panacea effect that you are trying to make out, both due to the nature of the system and due to the nature of our players.
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Try to be more condescending, Buffakill. :P
I'm trying! I'm trying! ;)
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And finally, the "problem" of lords withholding food from cities, or demanding prices higher than the city lord is willing to pay, is one that is so uncommon in practice that I really don't think it's worth expending any significant effort on.
That may change once you uncap food prices. Right now, just about any city lord is willing to toss up orders in the 45-50/100 range simply as the price of feeding your city. Once it becomes possible for rural lords to start selling for 1/1, then you may see some ambitious lords realizing that they could make a LOT more money... And that's when we're going to start running into problems.
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In order to keep the amount of gold in the game more or less balanced, a comparable amount would have to be added to the cities' (and other non-rural regions') production.
The gold supply isn't balanced. There's way too much of it, so reducing it would be helpful.
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In order to reduce the amount of gold produced by rural regions enough to make selling their food a necessity, rather than simply helpful, the amount of gold that would have to be removed from their production would have to be (in aggregate) quite significant. In order to keep the amount of gold in the game more or less balanced, a comparable amount would have to be added to the cities' (and other non-rural regions') production. It doesn't matter whether it's all of it or just a lot.
Incidentally, this is the theory behind my rebalance.
The gold supply isn't balanced. There's way too much of it, so reducing it would be helpful.
The game currently has too much gold for how available food is.
However, it doesn't have enough gold to fund rural regions if they are to rely on grain. Which is why the rebalance is increasing gold across the game.
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Incidentally, this is the theory behind my rebalance.
The game currently has too much gold for how available food is.
However, it doesn't have enough gold to fund rural regions if they are to rely on grain. Which is why the rebalance is increasing gold across the game.
So... because there's too much gold, we're going to increase the gold supply? I don't follow.
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So... because there's too much gold, we're going to increase the gold supply? I don't follow.
Read what I said once more and try again. I described a paradigm shift.
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However, it doesn't have enough gold to fund rural regions if they are to rely on grain.
So, your idea is to shift some gold from the rurals to the city (relatively speaking), so that the rurals will be forced to sell their food to reach a comparable revenue, and the cities will have sufficient gold to buy it. Fair enough.
Which is why the rebalance is increasing gold across the game.
However, you seem to want to do it with an overall increase of available gold. This is ok from the point of view of food, however I think most people will agree that there is already too much gold.
I think the disconnect is that when you say:
The game currently has too much gold for how available food is.
You think of buying food as spending. However, in reality it is not: the gold that one character spends to buy food goes into another character's pockets. If you increase the price and movement of food, that will not affect at all the overall amount of gold available in a realm.
If you increased the price of troop pay, on the other hand, it would create a real gold sink. Food will never sink gold the way it is currently set up. If you add gold in the system, whichever paradigm change occurs the amount of gold available will increase.
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snip
Everything you've said is correct, and is also designed intentionally.
The rebalance is not and will not be a stand-alone thing: it is part of an overarching project taken by the entire dev team to make the game as a whole more enjoyable.
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The rebalance is not and will not be a stand-alone thing: it is part of an overarching project taken by the entire dev team to make the game as a whole more enjoyable.
Ok, fair enough, I'll wait and see!