On Sacking...

[Kobal2fr]

Following complaints that "blitzing is too easy - sacking gives more cash than economy !", I set out to figure out how sacking worked exactly. My initial assumption was that the game took the overall population of the captured city, substracted the dead, and gave the rest as florins, plus a bonus for buildings damaged/destroyed in the sack and/or settlement type.

I was wrong. Again.

Research Protocol

I used York as my testbed, because it's always captured by Rufus' army with autocalc. First I captured it on vanilla settings. Then I put a great_market in it and took it. Then I gave it walls and took it. Then I set it back to an empty village, gradually increased population and took, took, took it. All of those are in new campaigns each time obviously.

Results

Money gained from sacking is the same wether York is an empty village, a village with great_market, or an empty Town (with wooden walls). The Great_Market is destroyed each time.

Population-dependant results are a bit more complicated. Here's the data for sacks :

Population	Sack money	Pop. killed	%money/pop	%killed
800	240	168	30%	21%
1.500	800	315	53,3%	21%
3.000	2.000	630	66,6%	21%
5.000	3.600	1.050	72%	21%
10.000	7.600	2.100	76%	21%
15.000	11.600	3.150	77,3%	21%
20.000	15.600	4.200	78%	21%
30.000	23.600	6.300	78,6%	21%
60.000	47.600	12.600	79,3%	21%
100.000	79.600	21.000	79,6%	21%

and here's the date for exterminations :

Population	Cash made	Pop. Killed	%money/pop	%popkilled
800	120	300	15%	37.5%
1.500	400	1.000	26.6%	66.7%
3.000	1.000	2.250	33.3%	75%
5.000	1.800	3.750	36%	75%
10.000	3.800	7.500	38%	75%
15.000	5.800	11.250	38.7%	75%
20.000	7.800	15.000	39%	75%
30.000	11.800	22.500	39.3%	75%
60.000	23.800	45.000	39.7%	75%
100.000	39.800	75.000	39.8%	75%

From this, we learn 4 things :
- Extermination money is exactly half sack money, for 3.5 times the citizen killed
- killed citizen are linearish (the turning point is probably 2k)
- cash made by killing them isn't linear at all. Sacking converges towards 80%, Extermination towards 40%.
- thus, there's no relation between the two.

Further tweaking

As I said in another post, I just found out about two variables in the descr_campaign_db.xml, sack_money_modifier and exterminate_money_modifier. sack_money is set to 0.4 by default, exterminate_money is 0.5

I set sack_money to 0.8, and redid the test.
As expected, sacking now made twice as much cash, for all pop values. As not-expected-at-all, so did extermination.

I set it back to 0.4, set extermination_money to 1.0, redid the test.
This time, sack money was back to normal, and extermination money doubled, effectively making it on par with sacking.

In neither tests did the amount of dead people rise.

So despite their similar names, sack_money_modifier deals with how much money is made when taking a city, and extermination_money_modifier is in fact applied afterwards in the specific case of genocide. There doesn't seem to be a separate one for occupy, as is occupying gives the same amount genocide does.

But, and this is the important point here : it's perfectly doable to make blitzkrieg less viable financially, by tweaking a single variable. Setting it to 0.1 should be about adequate, I think. That said, I've been playing LTC for a long time now, and I don't really recall the population and pop.growth figures of the vanilla game, so 0.1 may be a bit extreme ?

Discuss.

EDIT : I just realized that cash for sacking is about equal to 2*population*sack_money_modifier. The difference must come from the same reason trade and taxes numbers don't exactly add up, i.e. lotsa rounding.
But this formula makes figuring out the right modifier easier.

[Askthepizzaguy]

Excellent post. Good info!

Note on exterminations:

The oddity in your percentages could be explained because there is a limit to how many citizens you can exterminate. Once you reach minimum, you cannot exterminate anyone! There will always be citizens in a province, in other words.

[FactionHeir]

Minimum is 400, as in RTW.

[SadCat]

From this, I learned 6 things:
- Extermination money is exactly half sack money, for 3.5 times the citizen killed.
- There is .5 relationship between sack and extermination.
- killed citizen are linearish (the turning point is probably 2k)
- cash made by killing them isn't linear at all. Sacking converges towards 80%, Extermination towards 40%.
- Occupying gives the same amount genocide does. Yes I had missed this.
- You do great work!

Discuss?
sack_money is set to 0.3 should be 60% and Extermination/occupation 30%
sack_money is set to 0.2 should be 40% and Extermination/occupation 20%
sack_money is set to 0.1 should be 20% and Extermination/occupation 10%

I spend my life short of cash so vote for Sack_money no lower than .2

You would receive next to nothing for taking a small to mid size city.

So please move exterminate_money to say 0.75?

That way Sacking would give only 25% more than extermination/occupation.

Yet would move occupation up to 30% for Sack_money of .2?

SadCat

[sapi]

Nice work

[Kadagar_AV]

Not much to discuss...

Helps a lot, thanks mate

[Silverhawk]

By looking at the numbers you posted, the formulae for cash appear to be linear (pop*exterminate_money_variable)-200 = cash gained from extermination and (pop*sack_money_variable)-400 = cash gained from sacking.

You could theorize that the - variable is dependant upon the money_variable as well, as the limited data shows it correlates to an increase in the variable in a linear fashion. If the value were set at 1.0 I'd suspect the value would be -500.

Thoughts?

[alpaca]

A bit more number crunching:
There's a perfect linear fit for a formula for sacking money of:

m = s + (p-40000)/100 = p/100 + s - 400 = p/100 + p*0.79 -400 = p*0.80 - 400

where s is the surviving population and p is the starting population.

However I wonder where the modifier kicks in... You said you got twice as much for a modifier of twice the initial value. Could you post your data for that or even better a modifier of 1.3 or so?
Did you only make twice as much money or were twice as many people killed, too?

Theoretising, the formula could be m = p*modifier*2 - modifier*1000 or m = p*modifier*2 - 400

[Kobal2fr]

Exactly twice as much money, exactly the same amount of people killed, in all cases.

Did only three of those tests before figuring the pattern was verified : 480fl at 800, 1600fl at 1500 and 23.200 for a pop of 15.000

23.200 = 15.000*2*0.8 - 800, or m=p*2*var-1000*var

My current modifier is set to 0.15, sacking York (800 souls) nets me 90fl, or 2*800*0.15-150. Fits.

So OK, sacking really is linear. But in a fiendishly cunning way.

[alpaca]

Exactly twice as much money, exactly the same amount of people killed, in all cases.

Did only three of those tests before figuring the pattern was verified : 480fl at 800, 1600fl at 1500 and 23.200 for a pop of 15.000

23.200 = 15.000*2*0.8 - 800, or m=p*2*var-1000*var

My current modifier is set to 0.15, sacking York (800 souls) nets me 90fl, or 2*800*0.15-150. Fits.

So OK, sacking really is linear. But in a fiendishly cunning way.

Fiendishly cunning? Never seen a matrix didya? They are linear, too...

[Kobal2fr]

I was being ironic . I merely realized I sucked at basic math even worse than I thought for not figuring it out

Then again, it's been a while since i've stared a first degree equation in the face, nevermind a matrix. So I'm allowed to suck.