The economy system is totally hosed.

[nox]

It's clear that the coders who wrote F&S didn't understand how the income system worked in M&B.  Their income system is actually seperate from M&Bs and they broke the dialogue screen that shows your income.

That breaks a bunch of stuff, and indicates that they probably did some things wrong because they aren't using the existing (semibroken) systems.

If you remember the old income report, it would show you your taxes from holdings, wages, etc.  They've replaced it with a screen that only shows debts and investments. 

There were some major problems with the old economy system - the main one being that it calculated your army cost at week beginning hour 0, so if you had a tiny army at that moment you paid nothing for the week.  Very exploitable, and unfair.

This system though just seems to be moderately broken, and doesn't use the in-game income system. 

I also can't see how much I am paying for garrisoned troops, and worse the $*#($*@#$ popups on maintenance day are going to drive me nuts.

Anyhow, yeah so income has issues.  I have a fortress and town, and the net income from the fortress is about twice the cost of a stable weekly.  Include the upkeep of other things and I lose about 8k a week owning a fortress and a town. 

Granted, I can cheese the game by dropping a single velvet in a town where velvet sells for cheap, then run a caravan from that town to a town where velvet sells for a grand, but I might as well be using cheat codes to add cash for the realism and challenge that provides.

Caravans need to be reinvented.  They should be an investment that increases the trade revenue for a city, and be available per commodity and 'need' - but that's a whole other story.

 

[PANTERA.]

I agree.

I learned all of that the hard way.

I thought my 100K would last me a while, so I started my own kingdom(rebel), had two towns with about 1000 troops and my money was getting cleared out quick.

I started a new game, made 7 million thaler off of caravans(not using the inventory/store exploit), put it in the merchants guild, amassed over 10 million and I live off the interest now.

It says my weekly wages are 7K but when it comes around to pay day it's 15K.

This game is very expensive, that's why I love the merchants guild though.

But the caravan trading is way too easy, it took me 3 hours to amass 10 million thaler and now I never have to worry about money ever again.

I'm hoping they fix all this crap and balance the caravans out.

 

[zulu]

its becasue f&s was developed before warband and doesn't use anything from it.

 

[original]

In the first M&B, there was a native expansion module which didn't change the game, but merely adds fixes and balances stuff to preserve the native gameplay.

I'm willing to work on such a module if someone starts it. There are many things which can be fixed by modders. One of them of course being income balances.

 

[nox]

its becasue f&s was developed before warband and doesn't use anything from it.

Yeah that's spot on.

Remember, M&B's economy was even worse than this.  Warband's was nice.  I forgot about that.

That was something I modded into Bandit King, which I appreciated in Warband - centralized economy.

It's really not a hard fix.  What you do is just on econ day go through your list of expenses, tally them, then list of incomes, tally those and build the variables for the report page.

Also, one of the fixes is that every game hour you add the player's 'tab' for troop costs, rather than calculating it at the end of the week.  Saves you from the stupid problem where you grab all your expensive dudes to move them from one castle to another and then it calculates your weekly salaries and boom.  Likewise it prevents the exploit of putting troops in a castle just before midnight at the end of the week to avoid paying for them.

That centralized economic system allows you to tweak and adjust, and that way you can process economy for every npc, not just the player.

Once you start processing economy for the NPCs, you can adjust their troop replenishment rate based on their income.  It is still an abstraction, but it's an abstraction that makes some sense and plays out well.

With THAT, you can then make NPCs that have no land or money in a kingdom become less happy with their lot in general - not because you've coded speficially for that, but just because they are poor.  Any circumstance that makes them poor will make them unhappy so they become easier to recruit or tend to gravitate away to land rich kingdoms.

I find that general code that creates reasonable behaviour procedurally to be far superior to code that operates based on events and exceptions.