Town/Castle: Loyalty - Food - Rebellion death spiral

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We have the following mechanics:
- If food goes below zero, loyalty drops
- If loyalty is too low, rebellions can happen

Contributing problems:
- If owner is not same culture, there is a -3 to loyalty (partially mitigated by a same-culture governor)
- Donating tons of food does not make a city not starve. It simply adjusts one of the indicators upwards.
- When loyalty is low, nothing can be built and projects do not give bonus. Not even paying to boost production would do anything.
- Nobles do not at all support loyalty boosting policies

As it stands, the game does not give people any good way to dig themselves out of a town with low loyalty and food. The game mechanics go out of their way to kick you while you are down, which is frustrating and not good in terms of game design.

Recommendation:
- Allow food to be donated directly to city
- Give loyalty bonus for doing quests for town and villages as well as defending raids
- Give owner option to bribe loyalty.
 
- Donating tons of food does not make a city not starve. It simply adjusts one of the indicators upwards.
Keep it upwards for about a day and it will no longer starve.

- Nobles do not at all support loyalty boosting policies
Do it early if you can. If not, try draining other nobles out of influence first, or make friends with them. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I proposed a whole lot of policies for the Northern Empire during my mid-game. It took me a lot of influence to do. Nobody even liked me because I execute people, but only the faction leader opposed my proposal, and he alone wasn't enough to reject it.

- Give loyalty bonus for doing quests for town and villages as well as defending raids
This already exists, but in the form of security instead of loyalty directly.
 
Players can, with a dedicated effort of many tasks and making use of their actual presence in the settlement to stave off a rebellion, manage to recover the above situation. The problem is...
1 ) You don't get to play the "rest of the game" while spending the season needed to bring a completely wrecked settlement back into a semblance of stability.
and
2 ) The AI has absolutely -no- idea how to endure the first 10 days (or so) after the critical failure occurred, and only occasionally gets the combination of random outcomes to reverse the situation (less than 1% of the time, in my examination of it).

If you'd like advice about resolving such a situation in your game, user32167, I can try to provide assistance.
But by far and above, the game's Strategic AI needs far more cues and compulsions (to do quests; clear hideouts and village issues) and assigning Clan Lord war parties to do those tasks... or you will see many cases of "four rebellions in a year" once a settlement has been heavily warred over.
 
What you can do that will help the most is, when you create a kingdom pass the policies forgiveness of debts, trial by jury, tribunals and grazing rights. With these in place I was able to finish capturing the map (starting with just 1 fief at clan rank 4) without any rebellion due to normal issues/hideouts and such in my factions, I didn't do any of this stuff it was fine. There were a couple due to my AI vassals spending waaay too long sieging a fief, so when they finally captured it, the loyalty was zero, of course they quickly took it back from rebels and it was fine after that.

If you're a vassal, don't worry about it and keep progressing towards breaking off on your own.
If you are solo clan (not a kingdom) then you need to do some side work to keep fiefs in shape, but it should be okay since you can make peace and have time to do such.

I do agree though, AI needs to be made to do much more activates like issues and hideouts as if really taking care of thier lands and maintaining their finances and building up troops. It also seems like the whole loyalty/security is tuned to such that native faction can be okay while ignoring all the issues/hideouts in their native land. So basically the whole problem only exists for the player's faction or a faction they have helped extend into foreign areas. When the AI has a rebellion it's due to prolonged sieges and consistent raids.
 
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