Government and public order

[V.T. Marvin]

That's good news. I recall, though, that upkeep wasn't implemented in EBI for balancing reasons. What changed for EBII?

First we find out that as factions grow larger the snowballing effect is way too high and they become overly rich. Building upkeep helps to mitigate this problem.

Second, the "upkeep" is not static value (say 200 mnai, etc.) but rather a reduction of boni provided by other buildings (e.g. trade_base_income_bonus bonus -1)

And have you considered food supply? Perhaps a script that penalizes public order in cities with a "poor harvest."

Whether the harvest is poor or rich is a random factor, calculated separately per each province, hardcoded in the engine and impossible to track by other scripts as such. A workaround would be to stick our own random cycle over it, except this one would have to be world-wide, and would have modified both the income and the order derived from farming. However I am not a fan of such approach. It seems to me more as a somewhat arbitrary harassment of the player than as an addition to the gameplay experience.