Progress report as of July 12

Users who are viewing this thread

Well, I've got some ideas for the mod that I've been playing around with, to give your character plenty to do in the "off-season" when there's no campaigning. Some of these borrow heavily from the Paradox game CK, but it would be so worth it to include them!

Claims/Titles:
The faction leader gives your character a fief, represented by a custom item (in the inventory: a piece of paper with description "Title for <fief name>"). This is proof that you own the castle/village and you need to show it to the steward/village elder before they let you do anything else. You can sell this for money, if captured, buy your life/freedom with it, gift it to another NPC or can have it taken from you after an unsuccessful battle. You can carry them in your inventory or give them to the librarian in the castle for safe-keeping (but if the castle falls, so do your titles, to the enemy!). At the same time, you can lay claim to other fiefs by having the librarian (acting in the capacity of the historian) 'discover' some ancient claim, which you can then take to the other NPC and demand he hand over your rightful property to you. Likewise, every once in a while, an NPC lord will come to you with his 'claim' and demand one of your fiefs. These could be used to represent the civil war/in-fighting aspect within factions at this time, since obviously going up to a lord and telling him to pack his bags won't make you friends.

Factional Infighting:
Once relations between 2 lords of the same faction drop below a certain number, one (decided by you, if you are the faction leader, otherwise by some other mechanism) is automatically, with all his fiefs, attached to the 'Rebels' faction. Obviously, the faction leader will first call both lords in and tell them to sort out their differences, and then whichever one doesn't, will become the rebel. This would also open the potential for entire civil wars rather than smallish affairs between two lords, since the faction leader also will need to maintain good relations with everyone or else have to fight them.

Espionage/Assassination:
Have a spymaster (borrowed directly from CK  :smile: ) who can find out information for you. What is the garrison and supply situation of particular fiefs, where is a certain character, etc. Assassination could be included by allowing the death of NPC lords (since there are always new ones, this won't be a problem) and by a special system for the player. Since the player cannot die, they are assumed to be essentially clubbed over the head, everything stolen and dumped in the middle of nowhere for a few months. Much like the "night-time robbery" in the vanilla game, very rarely when entering one of your faction's locations (town, village, castle), depending on the renown, relations and honor of the character, a bunch of guys will appear to try and kill you. If they succeed, then you are considered to have been kidnapped for such a period that everyone gave you up for dead and forgot about you, so all you have is your old skills (renown, inventory, party all reset to nothing, like at game start).

Villages:
-As mentioned, use the peasant mod for some ideas on improvement
-Act as judge for village disputes (affecting relations?)


Castles:
-Have an NPC steward at every castle you own. You have to pay the garrison, manage supplies, handle prisoners, repair and upgrade the walls and such, through him.
-Able to hold tournaments or hunts (inviting X NPC's of your faction)
-Ability to hold a feast for X NPC's (increases relations with invited, decreases with uninvited, costs money and food from castle stores, problems may arise during feast that affect relations)
-Ability to call in villagers from surrounding villages into the castle. The villages attached to the castle or just nearby in your control, all spawn a villager group while the village prosperity/economy is reduced to almost nothing. The villagers attempt to head to your castle, once they reach it, the castle's prosperity/economy increases. The enemy doesn't gain nearly as much from looting/burning an empty village, but if they take the villagers en-route or if they take the castle, they get the full reward. The idea is, the villagers have carted away themselves and everything of value that they could from the village, so if the villager group is caught or if the castle with villagers falls, the entire area will be devestated. On the other hand, if it doesn't, the villages won't be as messed up as often as they are now. Obviously, there would need to be some mechanism for telling the villagers to return, and to make sure that the villages are in no way productive while they are gone, but it would add an interesting atmosphere (coming across an abandoned village) and would make sense for areas which are often on the receiving end of raids or are the target of a large campaign.
-Have some knights or such around who you can send out as parties (ie, "Take x <unit type in castle garrison> and go to <village/castle/town>")
-Add a chapel with bishop (for Normans, for example) who handles your religious affairs, keeps track of relics, gives you quests and advises you on religious problems of the surroundings (ie, if the castle is surrounded by villages owned by Byzantines at the start, there should be periodic problems for you if you as a Norman Catholic go in and take them)
-Add a library with librarian (can keep a book collection there, can act as patron to the arts, can spend time 'learning' to improve skills, for the cost of the tutor's wages, can act as your historian to keep track of your titles, claims, history, etc)
-Add a smithy with a blacksmith (creates weapons and armor for you if you give him resources and money, can repair existing weapons and armor, which should suffer from wear and tear much more than in the vanilla game)

Religious:
Add in monastaries/mosques all over the island. They should be fairly wealthy, and lootable. Anyone can loot them, but lords which share the same faith receive a very large honor penalty (and bad relations with religious lords?). Essentially, the pious lord will want to protect the religious locations of their faith against both the impious (and cash-grabbing...) lords of their own faction and the lords of the enemy factions, who can loot without penalty. As an added bonus, they can contain relics which could be looted and taken to your castle/town chapel, they can be involved in pilgrimage quests, and whatever else you can think of.
 
About the villagers to castle idea, if the village is attacked empty it should also loose less wealth than if it is attacked full. Peasants would take some values with them.

Edited
 
nijis said:
Adding complexity to fief management is part of the plan.

I haven't come to any conclusions about this, but ideas that came to mind would be...

1) Internal conflicts in the fief that have to be resolved
2) External conflicts with neighboring villages
3) Projects, including religious buildings, charitable endowments, defenses, economic additions (like mills), and probably most importantly, land reclamation and irrigation. If anyone knows much about medieval irrigation, or farming in mountainous areas, input would be very welcome! Also, if anyone can think of ways to make project building more interesting and complex than simply allocate money/see results, I'd be quite interested.

I've had the idea of using entry points on the scene and transforming a building hidden underground to have it so when a building/upgrade is built, it is visible in the scene.  I haven't gotten  around to trying it out yet though.
 
Actually, I think the mod Peasants 1.0 broke new ground on that concept.  You might want to ask Cartread how he did it.  He still jumps around on the forum from time to time. 
 
Cheers all. Sorry that I have not had a chance to respond to the interesting ideas in this thread. I've been quite busy recently, but should be able to post my thoughts shortly.
 
I have a little bit of spare time right now, so here are some thoughts on fief improvement.

Firstly, I want to restrict player activity to the kind of thing that would have historically been the responsibility of the lord. This would include...

1) Dispute resolution. The Lombard Leagues has the makings of a really good system, where each dispute can raise your status with one group, and lower it with another. Crusader Kings' random events are also a good model -- each decision has a trade-off, and over time the player's reaction to random events shapes the nature of his or her domain.

Parties to a dispute could include:
The peasantry of a fief
The soldiery of a fief
The lord's household
Neighboring fiefs
Traveling merchants
Local merchants
Local religious institutions


2) Building major projects. This would include defenses, some economic projects (like a mill or irrigation), land reclamation, and some religious charitable projects like a church, mosque, or hospice.

Major religious projects, like monasteries, would probably have an entire fief of their own as an endowment. At the time of the game, most endowments on the island will obviously be Muslim. I would expect most of them to be in the cities, although there might be a coastal rabat or two under the control of a militant preacher or Sufi brotherhood.

The lord probably would not be responsible for the micomanagement of a project. Rather, you could set aside cash for it, and leave it to manager to run. The lord's role would most likely be to oversee it, to look into cost or time overruns, and see if the manager's excuses are reasonable -- the supply of tools dried up, we were attacked by raiders, etc. The lord might then decide to hand over more money, or fire the overseer and get a new one. I'm not sure how complicated I would want to make this, however -- I don't particularly want to script an auditing simulator.


Things with which a lord would probably not involve himself would include:

1) Specifically tasking peasants to do various jobs. It's not really a command economy. As I understand it, peasants had access to certain resources (like land), and would be expected to meet specific obligations (like taxes in cash or kind). I suppose that they also had obligations of labor to the lord, but this would probably vary from society to society. For the sake of simplicity, I was going to treat most peasants as cash-paying tenants, whose labor could be bought with cash if needed. This not be completely appropriate, but it is a lot easier to script then worrying about multiple obligations, payment of taxes in kind, etc.

2) Building small economic installations, like smithies or craftsmen's workshops, etc. The fief's residents I'm assuming would set these up themselves.
 
DOUBLE-POSTING!!!. Kill the SPAMMER :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:  :lol: Just kidding, Very nice work, i especially like the disputes idea! Keep it up, nijis  :grin:
 
Hot stuff, nijis! I've got my fingers crossed that you applied this same sort of brilliance to your work on 1.0. I tell ya, nothing made me happier than when Native came out with all the lords and villages and other Battle for Sicily fingerprints on it. :grin:
 
Back
Top Bottom