Taking new regions becoming historically harder

[Stue (DC)]

This is the wrong mentality to be enforcing - we should be reenforcing the desired effects by providing positive things when you have knights and war.   Taking over regions becomes extremely difficult because the negatives applied to them due to the inability to get food, knights, lords, and a duchy given to them.  Much like holding onto any region - it becomes a fight just to manage the region with police work and courtier work.

To make this easier - and to encourage more war and expansion (along with smaller realms being viable again) we need to place positive benefits to having Lords, Knights, Duchies etc applied to a region - rather than negatives (which are what happen when you lack them, and most Realms do).

(...)

Regardless - the idea here is that too many of the in game mechanics punish - reducing the enjoyability of the game and making players focus on meeting game mechanic requirements (which is tedious and boring), rather than focus on other players and the enjoyability of the game.

over many practical details mentioned in thread, i agree that this is at core of problems as i feel it myself too.

usual state in bm should be some gray average state, and things that apply should provide bonuses.

currently, we work very hard just to hold what i call average gray state - stable regions. this apparently gives no push to things to go on.

sometimes i suceeed to do something myself that will move quite large number of players to get involved. and i feel pleasure, but all the time awareness exists that it is very hard to keep story going, as almost everything works as obstacle, and as you play light-weight give too often you think to just give up from any motivating endeavor, as you are exhausted, so, many things in game mechanics scream: "give up from actions, join "avoid all troubles" club.

so:

- estate troubles prevents expansions and warring
- religious upkeep slowed most of religion game down
- improved wounding gave lot of frustration and slowing down through so frequent wounds worsening, while light wounding is hardly felt as some positive experience because it is fetl to mostly give benefit to younger nobles who are healthier anyhow
- even new diplomacy system with all these announcements mostly show that lot of work will be needed just to keep things at level they are on now, when no particular work is neede (all that documents that will be necessary to sign just to walk through you allies' lands, and so...)

it looks like it comes from some sub-conscious level, but punishment is felt from many sides: "today things are as they are; tomorrow, when we apply new feature X, you will have to work a lot just to bring things to the level where they are now... incentive? you will not be punished if you work good"

that is simply not incentive. i do not feel myself impatient to work on things for longer period of time, to have some outcome, but feel very much that there are only two options for many things: being punished or being at flat-stable level, which is not particularly funny for most of us.

[Indirik]

usual state in bm should be some gray average state, and things that apply should provide bonuses.

Currently, we work very hard just to hold what i call average gray state - stable regions. this apparently gives no push to things to go on.

Personally, I think you're pretty close with this. Things should be able to run on their own, without any attention. They just won't run at 100%, or as efficiently as possible. But they should still be self-sustaining. It should then take additional effort to improve them beyond that. Right now, it can take continual effort just to keep things going, unless you have a surplus of nobles to fill out estates to  >100%.

Although, an important point to keep in mind is the typical gamer mentality: "If it's not 100%, then something is wrong, and you must fix it!"

I suppose we could always try to play mind games with the players. Set the normal steady-state, non-attention-provided values to 100%, and allow good estate coverage and attention to raise it to 200%. That way people can be happy with the old 50% that we just renamed to 100%. That should work, right? (And really, I'm only half joking with that...)

- estate troubles prevents expansions and warring

This is being worked on now.

- religious upkeep slowed most of religion game down

This is mostly true in smaller, budding religions. Once you get your religion established past a certain point,  "maintenance preaching" should be mostly non-existent. Unless, of course, you're the typical gamer who has to have everything at "100%".

- improved wounding gave lot of frustration and slowing down through so frequent wounds worsening, while light wounding is hardly felt as some positive experience because it is fetl to mostly give benefit to younger nobles who are healthier anyhow

I'm not sure what you're saying here. You seem to be saying being lightly wounded is a good thing for young nobles? Can you maybe try to restate your point a bit?

- even new diplomacy system with all these announcements mostly show that lot of work will be needed just to keep things at level they are on now, when no particular work is neede (all that documents that will be necessary to sign just to walk through you allies' lands, and so...)

I tend to agree on the treaty friction issue. I like the different treaty types. But the friction mechanic will definitely be adjusted before it goes live.

[fodder]

.... except it doesn't work for food production... unless you are halving food consumption.

[Indirik]

.... you really want everything, don't you?

[Phellan]

I think one of the issues with dropping production values to mid-low levels as "normal" is that the game play already established relies on regions being able to provide the 100% levels for food / gold production.

This again falls under the punishment idea - it doesn't matter if you reduce the normal gold output or not.   You're fundamentally altering the game play because of the changes to food and gold incomes from regions and cities.

I still think there should be a variety of estate types and that these should provide minimal bonuses to the regions in different areas - production, maximum tax level, travel speed, loyalty, food output, cost to repair, cost to train (effectiveness of training), or religious conversion / happiness.   There could be all sorts of secondary bonuses for fielding different combinations of estates as well.   It provides a larger set of "options" for players, can make each region unique (a city with say estates that boosts training effectiveness for a unit type and decreased repair costs would make for a more military oriented city, then one which had estates that provided a small bonus to tax collection unhappiness levels and production facilities and focused on making money.

Small, beneficial effects to the region that provide incentive to have estates - INCENTIVES.

None of this "well just take stuff away and make it normalized".   That's the same idea that was running around when estates first went into the game.    Put benefits in to estates - rather than taking away things and make estates readjust them to the way they were previously.   Its not a benefit if it just makes up for something we reduced that was there previously.

Sure - make 80% a normal - but maybe then there should be a 25% increase to gold and food productions for all regions?  THAT makes it equal and normalizes the game play - that way if you get to a 100% there actually is some positive effect on the net outcome as it stands now, rather than just having the net outcome of reducing all food and gold supplies by 20% as it stands proposed.

[J-Duds]

I think part of this issue is that there is maximum achievable production level at all.  You're at peace, you have enough knights/estate coverage, and everything goes to 100% but not a fraction more.  Then the realm is at peace for a while, and what was seen as a new region and a nice boost to realm income becomes thought of as the standard that must be maintained no matter what.  If war comes or a knight leaves and the region drops below 100% then everyone freaks because the region that used to provide them with a reasonable income now makes less and they feel they are getting shafted.  Simply put, if there is a reachable maximum level then everyone will want to be there all the time.  Take a look at your typical mmorpg's (WOW, etc) and you'll see a large number of players don't even consider the game started and their character fully created until they hit the level cap and have the best available gear. 

So here's my thoughts: 

1.  We remove hard caps on production (and possibly other region stats, I haven't thought those through completely).  A region that hasn't been looted and has only a lord's estate will be some baseline value.  (call it 50% production).  War and looting lowers the value, having knights and maintenance will help to increase it.  But instead of a hard cap, you just have strongly diminishing returns.  Having 1 knight might be able to increase production by 20%, but adding a second only increases it by 5%.  Do civil work for 12 hours and the production increases by 5%, but the next person can only boost it by 2% after twice the hours.  If it goes above the current 100% value, so be it, reward the additional effort but make sure that the opportunity cost increases drastically. 

2.  Rubber-band production.  I can't remember if this is one of the repeatedly asked/rejected things, so I'll appologize in advance.  Anyway, once the production values get outside a specified "average" range then the region is prone to minor fluctuations in production value that increases in magnitude the further away from the average value it gets.  So, if production is slightly above the average then it would decay by 1% a week, whereas being far above the center value could cause a 5% drop in 1 day.  The same would happen if production was below the average, but in the opposite direction.  (so a region at 0% production would repair much faster than one that was just roughed-up a little) 

I hope that makes sense to more than just me.  To sum up:  make it easy to maintain a modest production value and difficult (but still possible) to reach the extremes.

[Indirik]

I think part of this issue is that there is maximum achievable production level at all.

That is partly true. As I mentioned before, typical gamer attitude is that if there is a 100%, then anything less than 100% needs to be fixed to make it 100%. That's part of the reason why the region stats were changed to descriptions: To try and remove some of the pressure of "Gotta be 100%!" Overall I think that has worked. Mostly. It still bugs some people, like me. But I'm willing to deal with it because I think the net effect has been good for the game.

1.  We remove hard caps on production (and possibly other region stats, I haven't thought those through completely).  A region that hasn't been looted and has only a lord's estate will be some baseline value.  (call it 50% production).  War and looting lowers the value, having knights and maintenance will help to increase it.  But instead of a hard cap, you just have strongly diminishing returns.  Having 1 knight might be able to increase production by 20%, but adding a second only increases it by 5%.

This is something very similar to what is being considered currently for estates. Not quite so simple, though. But very similar.

[Bedwyr]

A few things:

1. Agreed that steady-state levels are what is required.  If you have 80% estate coverage on production, then your production should tend toward 80%.  If your authority is at 80%, it should tend toward Main.  I know the new estates system is going to change things a lot, but steady state is the desired end result.

2. What if we make taking a region more like starting a colony?  Instead of waiting to finish taking the region before assigning a lord and knights, what if as soon as the takeover begins the appointment/election process starts, and you can get "knights" and have them "set up estates" so that everything is set up properly by the time the TO is finished?  Then you have extra time to set everything up during the takeover, which is frankly what a takeover is supposed to be representing.

[Bluelake]

Small, beneficial effects to the region that provide incentive to have estates - INCENTIVES.

None of this "well just take stuff away and make it normalized".   That's the same idea that was running around when estates first went into the game.    Put benefits in to estates - rather than taking away things and make estates readjust them to the way they were previously.   Its not a benefit if it just makes up for something we reduced that was there previously.

Hey hey, hey there. Wait a minute.

I do agree with estates overhaul, reducing requirements to make stability possible. I also like the idea that came up centuries ago that the knight could make small investments in his estate that would give a tiny advantage to the region, but would give him (the knight) some extra stuff (gold, food ?).

But hey, wait up. Estates weren't made to be punishment. Estates were made the way they are now to give knights some power on the overall scheme of the realm. "A region shouldn't be able to survive without a knight" - that's what we thought then, because many people didn't bother with oaths at all, they preferred to keep their money to themselves.

Okay, nowadays we think "fine, then the region should be able to survive without a knight, but at non-optimum values, like 50%" Except maybe cities. Optimum values should take in regards the local population, and estate requirements. A city can't be able to function at 50% without any knights, it's still a fortune in a single person's hands.

[Kain]

Yes, there must still be a net benefit for the lord. If he gives away a share of maybe 60-80 gold a week for one knight, that knight must compensate that somehow (like now, but obiviously better in some fashion).

Not so easy to get all of these requirements together.

[Phellan]

But hey, wait up. Estates weren't made to be punishment. Estates were made the way they are now to give knights some power on the overall scheme of the realm. "A region shouldn't be able to survive without a knight" - that's what we thought then, because many people didn't bother with oaths at all, they preferred to keep their money to themselves.

Okay, nowadays we think "fine, then the region should be able to survive without a knight, but at non-optimum values, like 50%" Except maybe cities. Optimum values should take in regards the local population, and estate requirements. A city can't be able to function at 50% without any knights, it's still a fortune in a single person's hands.

Estates were the punishment for people not having knights (get knights or your regions will not work).   The work around before estates was having high-cross wide taxes that everyone received instead, however that was nixed with the "administration fee" - effectively making Realm taxes at above annoyance levels being useless except to maybe give the Council some gold.   Before a Realm could tax its cities fairly heavily, allowing for that gold to be redistributed to the rural, duchy, and unaligned knights easily.

Now if you want gold redistributed to rural knights:    City produces gold - offers to buy food - rural offers to sell food - gold is transfered to rural - knight receives small % of gold

It's all a very long process to get a low-gold producing region some extra funds at the end of the day.

I still want to see a middle ground - regions that can function properly without knights, but something extra added in that makes it worth while for knights and lords to have an Oath exchanged between them.   We're lacking that kind of positive incentive - all we have are "your regions don't work right" warnings and half-mangled realms as a result.

Estates have *so* much potential to be interesting, unique, and viable aspects of game play.    Right now they are just a gimmick to make Lords require knights.

   

[Indirik]

Estates have *so* much potential to be interesting, unique, and viable aspects of game play.

We're working on it.

[Bluelake]

I still want to see a middle ground - regions that can function properly without knights, but something extra added in that makes it worth while for knights and lords to have an Oath exchanged between them.   We're lacking that kind of positive incentive - all we have are "your regions don't work right" warnings and half-mangled realms as a result.

I agree we lack the positive incentive, but I think you have to reword that phrase: "regions that can function properly without knights" to "regions that can function poorly without knights" (but at least function at all, which doesn't happen today). And you know why? There were lots of lords around whom, even after estate requirements just showed up, didn't bother with hiring knights (or doing anything else about their regions, for that matter). Being a lord was just about getting a bit more gold a week than your regular knight. Surely, we don't have the problem of excess knights now, after Dwilight and all, but there will still be lords who'll ignore their regions if the game allows them to.

So, I'm totally in favor of offering the carrot, but for those horses who don't care about the carrot there must still be some sort of whip to push them from behind.

[Indirik]

... but there will still be lords who'll ignore their regions if the game allows them to.

In all fairness, once things are set up properly, a lord *should* be able to mostly ignore the region. It won't operate at 100%. But it should still be functional, not need constant attention, and provide a modest income to both the lord and his knights. This is why so much effort is being put into things like automated caravans.

At the same time, we need to allow for the people who *like* the micromanagement, or courtier aspect of the game. So those people can spend the extra time manage regions, micromanaging estates, holding court twice a day, etc., and still get something for their effort.

[Anaris]

In all fairness, once things are set up properly, a lord *should* be able to mostly ignore the region. It won't operate at 100%. But it should still be functional, not need constant attention, and provide a modest income to both the lord and his knights.

Yes—once it's set up properly.  I think Bluelake is referring to the type of lord who would be appointed, and then never visit his region again, just happily collecting the extra money.

Until it went rogue from neglect, of course.

At the same time, we need to allow for the people who *like* the micromanagement, or courtier aspect of the game. So those people can spend the extra time manage regions, micromanaging estates, holding court twice a day, etc., and still get something for their effort.

It's important to make sure that people who micromanage don't get too much for their effort.  If it's enough to confer a solid advantage, it will be seen as necessary.