Flooby Badoop said
That's actually pretty clever. You eliminate the minimum troop number, but still keep true to only being able to get half the pop. number's wealth.That said, it would be odd, since if a fief can only be raided once, all anyone would have to do to protect their own fiefs would be to 'pillage' with one soldier.I think your idea is a good, but there should also be a minimum of 100 soldiers.EDIT: Perhaps whatever is looted is simply reduced from that annum's tax, instead of the pop. not being able to pay taxes that year?
So, just a lurky comment, but if you only have to pay upkeep on soldiers that are actively engaged in combat, and each soldier can only take a maximum of two bullis per pillage per season it would actually make pillaging cost you money. For instance, say my one hundred basic spearmen with an upkeep of three bullis each pillage So Boerd's lands for a season. I've now spent three hundred bullis to make two hundred (not including the fact that I may possibly be losing out on crop production depending on the season, and could actually lose soldiers in the attempt presumably, soldiers who require manpower and bullis to replace). I'd suggest you instead allow soldiers to pillage up to twice the expense of their upkeep per season, giving people a reason to risk losing soldiers over taking from their neighbors, and giving, say, knights (who possess a horse, barding, plate armor, and multiple melee weapons) and other similarly armed units more reason than being heavily outfitted for flavor text and a possible advantage in combat with another player to actually pay for their extravagant equipment. I mean, even if you allowed up to two bullis to be taken per season and threw in the price of the pillaging unit's upkeep for free it would still give one hundred spearmen a distinct advantage when pillaging over one hundred knights. It would actually take more than eight times as many pillages for a knight to pay for himself than it would take a spearman, meaning in the time a knight could effectively pay for another knight to be purchased with his earnings a spearman would have paid for eight himself, the first he paid for would have paid for seven, the third for six, and so on eventually coming out to thirty seven spearmen if I'm not mistaken, obviously assuming none of them died in the doing.
EDIT:
Also, what's with the lack of extended family options in the Royal Family section? Every Lord an orphaned only child in this game? ^^ I mean, of course extended family in the context of royalty carries with it a degree of danger (nothing like getting murdered by your cousin for your title or locked away in a tower by your vizer uncle) so it'd make perfect sense to make uncles and nieces and such cost less than legitimate children, but they're still more useful then courtiers by simple merit of being able to inherit your title. Plus I've never heard of someone making a marriage alliance with another Lord by marrying off their commoner advisors.
And, super props to Fiendish Fox over there for actually having scrublands and infertile fiefdoms in a part of the country which I think I've lurked around enough to know is actually supposed to be a wasteland bordering a frozen desert which, presumably, has little in the way of, "Fair," farmland. <3
