Hello there,
I've seen a lot of different posts concerning how the amount of money the player can currently make in this game is apparently a problem, when by all means it's not. We're playing early medieval nobles here, and should by all means be swimming in cash. The real issue is rather that there isn't all that much to do with our money, and that is where I want this thread to come in. Money should be a means to an end, and we have far too little ends: How about we compile our ideas for where, when and what magnitude of money we should be able to throw at things ?
Video related:
I'll start:
-Wages: Armies are currently ridiculously cheap. What I mean by that is that soldiers' wages are often extremely low in comparison to what the items they have equipped cost on the market. I can understand that the normal troops from the normal troop tree should be somewhat affordable, but It's frankly disturbing that I can employ a Vlandian champion -who is by all means part of the lower nobility himself- for the low price of 13 Denars per day.Even more shocking is that the cost for all of his new equipment when he becomes a banner knight apparently amounts to only 100 Denars, when the same equipment for myself would cost at least 50 times as much. And that's by no means an exaggeration. While wages for normal troops are mostly fine, though they could use an increase by a factor of 2 for lower levels and a factor of 3 for the highest level of common soldiers, Employing noble troops should be at least 5 times as expensive as it is now, with wages for the highest level nobles probably still being appropriate if they were 7-10 times as high.
Furthermore, upgrading troops should across the board work like upgrading horsemen, I.e. require you to have the appropriate Equipment on hand. This of course doesn't mean an exact match, but upgrading vlandian swordsmen into seargents should require a polearm, a helmet over 20, a body armor over 30, a shield, etc., you get my gist. Alternatively, it should be possible to always upgrade troops while staying in a city without consuming anything from the players' inventory, but instead paying full price for all items according to how much they're currently being sold for at the market, but regardless of their availability to prevent troops from not being upgrade-able if their specific equipment isn't available.
This would not only provide a nice way of using your money, but also differentiate noble troops from commoners to a far greater degree. Those are high born people, and they should not accept becoming your retainers for a mere mercenary's pay. Companions too should require higher wages, scaling with their level and what kind of equipment you give them.
-Fief Upkeep: It should plainly cost money to keep all the fief upgrades from deteriorating, the higher their rank the more needs to be invested.
-Fief Staff: Aside from the governor who manages overall governing stuff and could for example be part of an expanded tournament system I'll elaborate on further down, Fiefs should have people like a captain of the guard who trains your soldiers faster and helps defending the thing, a treasurer that manages the monetary things, and a few other people, all of which need to be paid. Some warband mods like gekokujo gave you a full staff of of people to interact with at your castle, and something like this should be in this game too.
-Tournaments: The current tournaments are fine as, let's say, "commoner tournaments". There should however also be noble tournaments.Those noble tournaments should be big events in the spirit of Warband tournaments with only one happening at a time per faction, and acces being restricted exclusively to high ranking nobles, I.e. the clan members. These tournaments should award expensive items, have higher betting prices and payouts and include a feast at their end. The player, and any other character that isn't a noble, should only qualify for them by either winning 5 common tournaments, or actually becoming clan level 3 and being a proper noble himself. Watching it should still be possible if they player can't yet participate though.
Inviting people to the tournament should perhaps work like inviting people to an army or something along those lines, and they should be truly epic events. Winning a tournament for the player should give Access to high society, and do much of the same tournaments in Warband did.
While reading this, you probably asked yourself where the money sink comes in, right ? Well, here we go: After getting their first own City, the player should become illegible to host their own tournaments, for which they should entirely pay out of their own pocket. This should be initiated by talking to your governor and asking them to prepare everything in accordance with your choices. But not only the price money and item(s) should be provided by the player, but also accommodations for all participating lords, decorations, food for the subsequent feast, food for the commoners so that they have something to celebrate as well, etc. and the best of it: there have to be sliders or multiple options on all of this, determining the quality of all of the services, goods and stuff in general that will be part of the event. Also,there should be decisions concerning bribing the gangster notables in the city to not rob anyone during the Tournament, contracting one or more of the merchant notables to provide their goods or a catering service, hiring a musician etc. In accordance with that, the amount of money offered to the notables should determine the likelyhood of something going wrong, the goods being low quality, etc.
Aside of this being an opportunity to throw loads of cash out of the window, these events should have the primary function of raising clan renown, influence and relations as follows: in general, the amount of money spent on all of these steps by itself should give a flat boost to clan renown and influence due to just how rich you are. This should scale directly with the money spent on the last comparable event organized by another clan, with spending more money netting a higher increase while spending significantly less money may even lower renown and influence. After that, events like the quality of the goods delivered by contractors, whether or not someone was robbed during the celebrations accompanying the tournament, etc. should determine increases and decreases to both values.
Influence should furthermore be dependent on how many clans actually participate.
the Relations increase on the other hand should mainly be interesting in terms of notables, as bribing them for compliance and paying for their services should increase how much they like their lord proportionally. Though one should be careful to provide all notables with a job if possible, as the ones that feel left out may not find that too cool. Of course, relations should also increase with lords based mainly on things happening at the feast, though high quality food and wine should do the trick here.
To give all of that a roleplay atmosphere, all npcs involved should actively talk to the player and give feedback, like congratulating them on their choice of catering, thanking them for choosing their services, thanking them for the bribes, or making their grievances heard. Townspeople should talk about it, and lords should reminisce .There could still be more, like feuds intensifying or being ignited over who beat who at the tournament, or the clan you just outspent with your tournament that was twice as expensive as theirs could start to hate you, but that would be too much of a digression to discuss right now.
TL/DR: Spending big should give big social rewards.
-Further Social Events: Much like tournaments, there should be things like town fairs, wedding celebrations, etc. that should work very similar to the tournaments as far as spending money for them and getting social rewards goes. Town fairs should furthermore increase prosperity and raise notable relations across the board, while wedding celebrations should mainly do that for nobles. There's quite frankly tons of things that could be done here, even introducing your children to the realm or far more outlandish things like this.
-Gambling: Win big or loose big. This, in addition to the already present mini games, should be a part of some of the social events where it would serve to increase or decrease relations with nobles while presenting a good opportunity to throw tons of denars at the futile hope that you may make it big. This should also be a thing at taverns, though with lower stakes.
-Bribery and Gifts: It should be possible to send expensive gifts to lords or directly barter with notables and lords for increased relations. They more they hate you, the more you ought to pay to make them pretend that they like you. Especially notables should be bribeable into offering you all their recruits if you just give them enough money, and slowly lose relations again if you don't bribe them oftenly enough. Everyone has a price, after all.
-Further social money sinks: Here goes the small stuff: How about paying the musicians in taverns to write and play songs about your great deeds for a small price and a small renown increase ? How about buying everyone at the tavern a drink to increase relations with the town ? how about giving the street urchins or beggars some coin ? How about simply buying the thugs instead of fighting them for control of the criminal underworld ? Well, the list goes on.
I've seen a lot of different posts concerning how the amount of money the player can currently make in this game is apparently a problem, when by all means it's not. We're playing early medieval nobles here, and should by all means be swimming in cash. The real issue is rather that there isn't all that much to do with our money, and that is where I want this thread to come in. Money should be a means to an end, and we have far too little ends: How about we compile our ideas for where, when and what magnitude of money we should be able to throw at things ?
Video related:
I'll start:
-Wages: Armies are currently ridiculously cheap. What I mean by that is that soldiers' wages are often extremely low in comparison to what the items they have equipped cost on the market. I can understand that the normal troops from the normal troop tree should be somewhat affordable, but It's frankly disturbing that I can employ a Vlandian champion -who is by all means part of the lower nobility himself- for the low price of 13 Denars per day.Even more shocking is that the cost for all of his new equipment when he becomes a banner knight apparently amounts to only 100 Denars, when the same equipment for myself would cost at least 50 times as much. And that's by no means an exaggeration. While wages for normal troops are mostly fine, though they could use an increase by a factor of 2 for lower levels and a factor of 3 for the highest level of common soldiers, Employing noble troops should be at least 5 times as expensive as it is now, with wages for the highest level nobles probably still being appropriate if they were 7-10 times as high.
Furthermore, upgrading troops should across the board work like upgrading horsemen, I.e. require you to have the appropriate Equipment on hand. This of course doesn't mean an exact match, but upgrading vlandian swordsmen into seargents should require a polearm, a helmet over 20, a body armor over 30, a shield, etc., you get my gist. Alternatively, it should be possible to always upgrade troops while staying in a city without consuming anything from the players' inventory, but instead paying full price for all items according to how much they're currently being sold for at the market, but regardless of their availability to prevent troops from not being upgrade-able if their specific equipment isn't available.
This would not only provide a nice way of using your money, but also differentiate noble troops from commoners to a far greater degree. Those are high born people, and they should not accept becoming your retainers for a mere mercenary's pay. Companions too should require higher wages, scaling with their level and what kind of equipment you give them.
-Fief Upkeep: It should plainly cost money to keep all the fief upgrades from deteriorating, the higher their rank the more needs to be invested.
-Fief Staff: Aside from the governor who manages overall governing stuff and could for example be part of an expanded tournament system I'll elaborate on further down, Fiefs should have people like a captain of the guard who trains your soldiers faster and helps defending the thing, a treasurer that manages the monetary things, and a few other people, all of which need to be paid. Some warband mods like gekokujo gave you a full staff of of people to interact with at your castle, and something like this should be in this game too.
-Tournaments: The current tournaments are fine as, let's say, "commoner tournaments". There should however also be noble tournaments.Those noble tournaments should be big events in the spirit of Warband tournaments with only one happening at a time per faction, and acces being restricted exclusively to high ranking nobles, I.e. the clan members. These tournaments should award expensive items, have higher betting prices and payouts and include a feast at their end. The player, and any other character that isn't a noble, should only qualify for them by either winning 5 common tournaments, or actually becoming clan level 3 and being a proper noble himself. Watching it should still be possible if they player can't yet participate though.
Inviting people to the tournament should perhaps work like inviting people to an army or something along those lines, and they should be truly epic events. Winning a tournament for the player should give Access to high society, and do much of the same tournaments in Warband did.
While reading this, you probably asked yourself where the money sink comes in, right ? Well, here we go: After getting their first own City, the player should become illegible to host their own tournaments, for which they should entirely pay out of their own pocket. This should be initiated by talking to your governor and asking them to prepare everything in accordance with your choices. But not only the price money and item(s) should be provided by the player, but also accommodations for all participating lords, decorations, food for the subsequent feast, food for the commoners so that they have something to celebrate as well, etc. and the best of it: there have to be sliders or multiple options on all of this, determining the quality of all of the services, goods and stuff in general that will be part of the event. Also,there should be decisions concerning bribing the gangster notables in the city to not rob anyone during the Tournament, contracting one or more of the merchant notables to provide their goods or a catering service, hiring a musician etc. In accordance with that, the amount of money offered to the notables should determine the likelyhood of something going wrong, the goods being low quality, etc.
Aside of this being an opportunity to throw loads of cash out of the window, these events should have the primary function of raising clan renown, influence and relations as follows: in general, the amount of money spent on all of these steps by itself should give a flat boost to clan renown and influence due to just how rich you are. This should scale directly with the money spent on the last comparable event organized by another clan, with spending more money netting a higher increase while spending significantly less money may even lower renown and influence. After that, events like the quality of the goods delivered by contractors, whether or not someone was robbed during the celebrations accompanying the tournament, etc. should determine increases and decreases to both values.
Influence should furthermore be dependent on how many clans actually participate.
the Relations increase on the other hand should mainly be interesting in terms of notables, as bribing them for compliance and paying for their services should increase how much they like their lord proportionally. Though one should be careful to provide all notables with a job if possible, as the ones that feel left out may not find that too cool. Of course, relations should also increase with lords based mainly on things happening at the feast, though high quality food and wine should do the trick here.
To give all of that a roleplay atmosphere, all npcs involved should actively talk to the player and give feedback, like congratulating them on their choice of catering, thanking them for choosing their services, thanking them for the bribes, or making their grievances heard. Townspeople should talk about it, and lords should reminisce .There could still be more, like feuds intensifying or being ignited over who beat who at the tournament, or the clan you just outspent with your tournament that was twice as expensive as theirs could start to hate you, but that would be too much of a digression to discuss right now.
TL/DR: Spending big should give big social rewards.
-Further Social Events: Much like tournaments, there should be things like town fairs, wedding celebrations, etc. that should work very similar to the tournaments as far as spending money for them and getting social rewards goes. Town fairs should furthermore increase prosperity and raise notable relations across the board, while wedding celebrations should mainly do that for nobles. There's quite frankly tons of things that could be done here, even introducing your children to the realm or far more outlandish things like this.
-Gambling: Win big or loose big. This, in addition to the already present mini games, should be a part of some of the social events where it would serve to increase or decrease relations with nobles while presenting a good opportunity to throw tons of denars at the futile hope that you may make it big. This should also be a thing at taverns, though with lower stakes.
-Bribery and Gifts: It should be possible to send expensive gifts to lords or directly barter with notables and lords for increased relations. They more they hate you, the more you ought to pay to make them pretend that they like you. Especially notables should be bribeable into offering you all their recruits if you just give them enough money, and slowly lose relations again if you don't bribe them oftenly enough. Everyone has a price, after all.
-Further social money sinks: Here goes the small stuff: How about paying the musicians in taverns to write and play songs about your great deeds for a small price and a small renown increase ? How about buying everyone at the tavern a drink to increase relations with the town ? how about giving the street urchins or beggars some coin ? How about simply buying the thugs instead of fighting them for control of the criminal underworld ? Well, the list goes on.
But these are just my Ideas, and as you'll doubtlessly have noticed by now, I'm mainly concerned with how money should be the social leverage it also is in real life. I'm looking forward to reading your ideas, and hope that we can give Taleworlds something they may actually consider as a valuable addition to their great game.
(Also, all recruits should have shields)
(Also, all recruits should have shields)
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