Capital Problems

[alpaca]

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.

[alpaca]

A small addition: Corruption could be removed completely, too. This would strip us of a few possibilities for character development and make law a bit moot but I think the stupid way in which it's represented in the game doesn't give me much of a choice.

[Tsarsies]

IS merchant trade based on its distance to the capital?

Does setting up a merchant in another region (your own or other) increase trade income for that region or open up new trade lanes for one of your regions???

as u can tell im not totally sure how the merchants work in MEII. but i would think, if its not hard coded and you were able to change the workings of merchants and trade in general, then that would help in deciding how to treat the capital???

although i think that a trade resource is worth the same no matter where it is (its only dependant on merchant skill and the presence of roads).

Regardless of how merchants and trade effect the capital i like your idea for disabling the 'move capital' option. it is currently to easy to establish a 'base' of regions (as it were) then move your capital into its centre. ofcourse, it would be nice if it were possible to build certain specific 'government' buildings that could give 'capital-like' effects.

[bovi]

Merchant trade is a set income for a merchant standing on a resource. It does not affect overall trade across regions.

Income amount is determined by
*The distance to the capital of the closest resource of that type. For instance, if your capital or its neighbouring region has fish, you'd get very little for going across the map to get other fish. If your capital is in England and you send a merchant across the map for spices, he will make quite a lot.

*Stance of the territory owner. Own territories and those who you have a trade agreement yield the most. Friendly without agreement next, then enemies yield the least (although it should really be next to nothing).

*Merchant skill (duh)

Possibly other factors which I haven't caught yet.

[alpaca]

Merchant trade is a set income for a merchant standing on a resource. It does not affect overall trade across regions.

Income amount is determined by
*The distance to the capital of the closest resource of that type. For instance, if your capital or its neighbouring region has fish, you'd get very little for going across the map to get other fish. If your capital is in England and you send a merchant across the map for spices, he will make quite a lot.

*Stance of the territory owner. Own territories and those who you have a trade agreement yield the most. Friendly without agreement next, then enemies yield the least (although it should really be next to nothing).

*Merchant skill (duh)

Possibly other factors which I haven't caught yet.

There's also a 100% bonus for having a monopoly.

Tsarsies: I'm not quite sure about merchants. I'm currently playing with the idea of removing them, but there's some nice stuff I could do with them, such as enabling manufactures, high-level smiths, etc. only if you trade that resource.
OTOH that would require a huge lot of micro-management so it might not be all that attractive at any rate.
In addition there's the problem of how the AI uses its merchants (i.e. it just seems to move them about most of the time) so as I said I'm not quite sure.

[skuzzy]

Could you trigger an event that when an AI merchant comes across their first resource it's captured and logged and a trait is established to them giving them -100% movement? (sorry, I am no TW scripter) That would clear up them wandering aimlessly like monkeys for bananas

[bovi]

Interesting idea, it should definitely be possible to make. How does the AI behave, does it sit on local goods at all (so we'd make them useless once we halt them), does it go straight for the other merchants, or will it move to exotic markets for the hunt?