alpaca
10-09-2007, 18:20
I'm wondering what to do with the capital. The way it's represented in the game is pretty much completely random.
A lot of the time in the real middle ages, the "capital" would be wherever the king was at the moment instead of in a fixed location. There would of course often be important cities where the king was crowned or had a palace where he spent most of the year but calling it a capital is maybe a bit far-fetched. Being able to move them freely is even more far-fetched because you can move it right to the other end of the map.
The general notion of a capital works better for the city states but then again moving it is desastrous because, well, you're a city state!
In addition to these historical problems, the system is highly exploitable in order to reduce maintenance and increase public order or to bolster merchant trade. The problem is there's no cost involved so you can just do with it whatever you want.
So, what is the way to go for II? I'm currently thinking about altogether removing the distance penalty on public order and income, but I fear there may be some hardcoded components to the increased corruption and the merchant distance bonus is probably completely out of bounds. Therefore I'd like to disable the move capital button to prevent the player from exploiting the feature by e.g. moving the capital from Venice to Korfu.
Does anybody have other ideas or opinions?
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In other news today: Solo and I started brainstorming buildings a bit. One idea that cropped up was to again force the player into decisions by only allowing him certain mutually exclusive government options for each city. We'd also like to add more faction- or region-specific buildings which should for example make it more interesting for Venice to expand over the water rather than building a transalpine empire (e.g. by bolstering sea trade or by gaining more influence for it). Once we have some more presentable ideas, we'll start discussing things here, it's just that very basic posts didn't get a lot of comment from the community lately so we might as well do it via MSN where it's easier to communicate.
A lot of the time in the real middle ages, the "capital" would be wherever the king was at the moment instead of in a fixed location. There would of course often be important cities where the king was crowned or had a palace where he spent most of the year but calling it a capital is maybe a bit far-fetched. Being able to move them freely is even more far-fetched because you can move it right to the other end of the map.
The general notion of a capital works better for the city states but then again moving it is desastrous because, well, you're a city state!
In addition to these historical problems, the system is highly exploitable in order to reduce maintenance and increase public order or to bolster merchant trade. The problem is there's no cost involved so you can just do with it whatever you want.
So, what is the way to go for II? I'm currently thinking about altogether removing the distance penalty on public order and income, but I fear there may be some hardcoded components to the increased corruption and the merchant distance bonus is probably completely out of bounds. Therefore I'd like to disable the move capital button to prevent the player from exploiting the feature by e.g. moving the capital from Venice to Korfu.
Does anybody have other ideas or opinions?
-------------------------
In other news today: Solo and I started brainstorming buildings a bit. One idea that cropped up was to again force the player into decisions by only allowing him certain mutually exclusive government options for each city. We'd also like to add more faction- or region-specific buildings which should for example make it more interesting for Venice to expand over the water rather than building a transalpine empire (e.g. by bolstering sea trade or by gaining more influence for it). Once we have some more presentable ideas, we'll start discussing things here, it's just that very basic posts didn't get a lot of comment from the community lately so we might as well do it via MSN where it's easier to communicate.