Suggestion: Units upkeep/maintenence

[raystuttgart]

... return to the King´s command as soon as you declare Independance, creating a hostile force in the middle of your colonies.

A bit of patience please, we need to do things step by step.
We are still a small team of modders that can only invest effort into the mod in their spare time.

Many features / overhauls / improvements simply do not yet exist because they have not been implemented yet.
Other things we might simply not implement because of other reasons (personal taste, technical issues, ...).

What you suggest in the quote above is e.g. part of the concept "Loyalty to the Motherland".
(Which is however not directly related to "Upkeep".)

 

[devolution]

I've been thinking about allowing the "treasury" i.e. gold to be negative. A deficit would be allowed for a certain period before any negative effects are felt. The player would not be allowed to spend any further gold while being in a "deficit" and the only option would be to generate a surplus. This would be a gentler alternative to outright declaring bankruptcy and\or letting units go on strike.
Obviously, there would be a limit to how long a deficit could be maintained before units would be sold by the creditors

As for the AI, it is on my list to introduce "AI gold budgeting" to make the AI smarter about its purchases and to allow it to save up for expensive units and\or emergencies.

 

[Raubwuerger]

Just my two cents to the upkeeping of troops. If the government can't afford the upkeep (gold, food,...) the units in field should suffer some damage.
If you have a lot of units only at 10% strength the war is over. But they are still alive ...

 

[OzzyKP]

Just my two cents to the upkeeping of troops. If the government can't afford the upkeep (gold, food,...) the units in field should suffer some damage.
If you have a lot of units only at 10% strength the war is over. But they are still alive ...

I like that. Health is more a measure of troop numbers than troop injuries. Each unit represents hundreds or thousands of individual people. If a brigade is supposed to have 2,000 men, if it only has 1,000 men it is at 50% health.

And if troops don't get paid or eat, they go home.

 

[raystuttgart]

Generally if Upkeep can not be paid this could simply lead to:

King attitude decrease + Tax rate increased + one of your Cities revoluting 2 turns
(because King will pay for you but want the money back and your citizens will be angry as well)

--> Performant
--> Little effort
--> Easy to hanlde for AI
--> Not as frustrating as loosing Units for players

 

[Razbo]

Ignoring how easy/difficult it might be to make any of these changes, since I don't know..... And, yes, definitely human player only!

I agree there should be an upkeep cost for military units.

Different units might have different costs; e.g., scouts and town guards are always free. Perhaps the first one or two additional military units fortified in a settlement are also free.

Except for scouts, units outside of cultural borders should have higher costs. One choice for the player might be to optionally front load those costs -- by paying with extra food/weapons/horses -- before moving a unit outside one's borders. Then for some number of turns that unit incurs no additional cost; the cost after that is in gold and/or health. Or you can choose not to pay the additional upfront cost, pay the per-turn cost while gallivanting, and take your chances on making your expedition pay for itself.

Now suppose your military expedition is successful and you conquer a settlement. Even after a couple turns of anarchy it seems reasonable there should be an extended period of both unhappiness and bad health, slowly getting back to "normal". (Maybe it already works that way; I haven't played enough to know.) If I recall correctly, in Civ4, if you didn't keep a strong military presence in a conquered city you could expect frequent revolts.

On the domestic front, I don't know if there has been any discussion about "paying" wages to colonists. Which is one way to think of the "2 food per colonist per turn" rule. This could be expanded to additional food per turn, and/or gold per turn, which would make the colonists happier, and increase immigration from Europe. This might also make the domestic economy more important, when you can no longer trade with Europe. The AI wouldn't have to actually cope with this mechanic, but we could pretend that they were doing so: e.g., an announcement saying wages in New France are going up, so your immigration rate is going down and unhappiness will increase unless you match them.

And this is getting even farther off topic (scope creep, don't you know) but,....

Since someone mentioned "Civics" as a possible future enhancement, it made me think of the mechanic called "Social Engineering" from SMAC, which I thought was great. The choices one made typically involved trade-offs. E.g., increasing industrial production creates more pollution which angers the natives, decreases food yields, and lowers health. There are lots of possibilities, and the opportunity to make interesting choices.

Anyway, it's food for thought and possible discussion. How realistic or doable anything might be, I have no clue. But I like planting seeds.

 

[raystuttgart]

Generally I am still planning to implement an Upkeep System using Gold (e.g. as described here in my concept).
Maybe I might also redesign the concept once I started deailling the technical concept and have put more thought into this.

I still plan to have Upkeep only for Military Units.
I simply feel that Upkeep for Civil Units is already covered by food.

Main Reason for this:

• I want to keep the efforts and risks for the implementation still reasonable.
• I do want to not overexagerate on complexity sothe feature is still interesting for our "hardcore fans" as well understandable for "beginners"
• In the current status of the concept it is still possible to teach the concept to AI instead of making it "Human only" - once it gets too heavy and complex that will be too difficult

One really important lessons I have learned over the years:
(Basically agile principles to work in smaller iterations and first collect feedback before you move on.)

• Start small and manageable
• Then step by step you can enhance and improve

The feature is currently not my top priority though because the concept is not yet fully clarified and agreed.

So if another team member or modder wants to create a new feature concept and implement it, I really do not mind.
(But if the feature is supposed to be integrated into WTP core mod, its concept should first be agreed on by the team.)

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Civics is a huge feature of its own and should not be mixed into this discussion too much.
It will simply be confusing everybody.

"Extended Unrest / Unhappiness / Bad Health" after a City is conquered is a completely new idea.
I personally do not feel that it will improve gameplay for myself personally but we could discuss this in a new thread.

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@Razbo:

We should really not mix too many different topics into one thread or even one posts.
Informations and discussions on a feature would get cluttered all around the different threads and nobody will understand the full concept anymore.

I know, new modders like you have thousand new ideas they want to share.
I fully understand. When I started modding I felt just the same.

But let us try to discuss ideas / features / topics one after the other.
Let us also try to discuss the features and topics in their specific threads or create new ones for completely new ideas.

Generally if you are interested in discussing new ideas, feel free to start new threads.
But as I said, try not to mix too many different new ideas / features into one discussion thread.

It is much easier for team members and community to follow the discussions if they are a bit structured.
If discussions are confusing and messy, the feedback will be confusing and messy as well.

 

[Hrvoje193]

I also like idea of units spending small number of resources per turn for upkeep.
What about ships requiring material for maintenance - wood, sailcloth, and also cannons and powder for military units?Of course bigger ships would require more per turn.Like 1 for carrack, 2 for merchantmen...
Same goes for land units.
Idea is to have dedicated storage slot(s) per units.It would be similar to cargo slots, but for maintenance only.
If units don't have enough resources they would loose some health, which would in turn limit unrestricted expansion, and help weaker players defense.

I believe this would solve midgame boredom, and would limit stronger players.Also it would open new strategic way of (risky) playing without spending resources for military, to catch up with more developed opponents.