Taxation and Events...

[Edi]

Looks like the pretender gods really tax the **** out of their population. Just took a look at the events list at Sunray's site, and all gold amounts are listed in pounds! Extra txes to the amount of 500 pounds of gold from a single province is just staggering, given how rare gold actually is.

Or are talking about pounds in the same sense as the sterling pound, a unit of money, instead of a unit of weight? As this is going to cause a lot of raised eyebrows if people stop to think about it at all.

Edi

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Edi:
Looks like the pretender gods really tax the **** out of their population. Just took a look at the events list at Sunray's site, and all gold amounts are listed in pounds! Extra txes to the amount of 500 pounds of gold from a single province is just staggering, given how rare gold actually is.

Or are talking about pounds in the same sense as the sterling pound, a unit of money, instead of a unit of weight? As this is going to cause a lot of raised eyebrows if people stop to think about it at all.

Edi

Actually, the pound sterling was originally a unit of money based on a unit of weight - it was a pound of sterling silver (sterling silver is at least 90% silver, IIRC).

It surprised me a bit when a mercenary commander who commands 30 men demanded 120 pounds of gold for employment. I always thought 1 gold represented 1 gold coin, like a doubloon or the Roman solidus aureus. A mercenary demanding 120 solidi for a month is pretty steep, but not totally ridiculous.

[Saber Cherry]

Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny too... a pound of gold would make a person wealthy, back in feudal times. Let alone 4 pounds of gold per soldier. Not much incentive to stay in the merc biz after the first contract, with that kind of money...

"Gold coins" (say, 1 ounce or .5oz) sounds so much more appropriate to me than "pounds of gold".

[licker]

Sigh, once again the realists have to try to inject some form of 'our world's reality' into a fantasy game...


Maybe gold in Dom is as common as dirt... who's to say, who's to say...

Certainly there were civilizations in our world that didn't value gold as highly as the europeans, mostly because of its availabililty...

Heh, when will you all learn that trying to impose your standards on a work of fiction will only result in lost sleep and probably lost hair

[PvK]

There's a good example of how the anti-realism camp would rather have their game worlds be completely silly than use a reasonable unit of measurement, even when it has zero effect of gameplay.

PvK

[Johan K]

Hmmm... let me guess what the Proportions mod in your sig does. It desillyfies Space Empires without affecting the game play.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Johan K:
Hmmm... let me guess what the Proportions mod in your sig does. It desillyfies Space Empires without affecting the game play.

Actually, it desillifies SEIV, but has rather deep and profound effects on gameplay. Don't let him mod Dominions; he'll take the magic system out

[licker]

Originally posted by PvK:
There's a good example of how the anti-realism camp would rather have their game worlds be completely silly than use a reasonable unit of measurement, even when it has zero effect of gameplay.

PvK

Ahh yes, that's the entire point isn't it? The anti-realism camp (though that's a bit of a misnomer, but I'll stick with it for the sake of this discussion) doesn't give two #@$@s what the monatary unit is called. We (assuming I'm speaking for anyone besides me) also don't care what the names of the units are, or how 'accurately' modeled the weapon system is, or a variety of other things that, as you say, don't have a great (or any) impact on gameplay.

I like to think that we are simply more imaginative than the realism crowd, you know the guys who will spend a week debating the impact of a broad sword on a watermelon or whatever inanities they prefer

[PvK]

No, I think you are saying you don't care about realism, but actually you seem to be against realism, even when there is no gameplay or balance reason to be against realism.

The PvK Balance Mod for SEIV is the one that fixes the (empire design) game balance issues without complicating the game at all, simply by changing starting point costs.

Proportions Mod, as Saber Cherry says, turns gameplay on its head by half-correcting the proportions of many aspects of play. It turned out to be much more popular than I expected.

I actually think the Dominions games do an exceptionally good job of getting cause, effect, and even proportion pretty close to realistic or at least resembling the real-world (with magic, of course), which is a big part of why I like the games so much.

Gameplay and reasonable game balance are important to me too, but I find that there's rarely a need to make things totally unrealistic in the name of gameplay or balance. Unfortunately, there are those who mistakenly think that realism is incompatible by nature with gameplay or game balance, or who simply make zero effort to make game mechanics make any sense. Then you get games that pretend they are about a subject but get so much wrong that they'd be better if they just admitted they were about a completely imaginary situation where any similarity to the real universe is pure coincidence.

PvK

[licker]

Originally posted by PvK:
No, I think you are saying you don't care about realism, but actually you seem to be against realism, even when there is no gameplay or balance reason to be against realism.

The PvK Balance Mod for SEIV is the one that fixes the (empire design) game balance issues without complicating the game at all, simply by changing starting point costs.

Proportions Mod, as Saber Cherry says, turns gameplay on its head by half-correcting the proportions of many aspects of play. It turned out to be much more popular than I expected.

I actually think the Dominions games do an exceptionally good job of getting cause, effect, and even proportion pretty close to realistic or at least resembling the real-world (with magic, of course), which is a big part of why I like the games so much.

Gameplay and reasonable game balance are important to me too, but I find that there's rarely a need to make things totally unrealistic in the name of gameplay or balance. Unfortunately, there are those who mistakenly think that realism is incompatible by nature with gameplay or game balance, or who simply make zero effort to make game mechanics make any sense. Then you get games that pretend they are about a subject but get so much wrong that they'd be better if they just admitted they were about a completely imaginary situation where any similarity to the real universe is pure coincidence.

PvK

Woah, lets be careful what we assume here ok.

I never said I was against realism per se, I said I didn't care what the name of the monatary unit was, I didn't care how accurately modeled the combat system was. I did not say that I *wanted* more random and rediculose nonsense in the game (not that there is alot of it to begin with).

I will agree with this sentement though, when a game mechanic is wrong it needs to be fixed, and fixing it in a 'realistic' way is better than just 'making it work'. However, for those game elements which are just fluff (like the name of a monatary unit) it really doesn't make all that much difference *to me*. Why? Well becuase I can see the abstraction and accept it, I don't need to have every little detail put in perspective, or in the right place to work with the system as its provided.

I can't comment on your mod to SEIV as I've never used it, but I do know that it is well respected, and from that I assume that you have done a good job of making game mechanics or elements work in a better way, that you also followed a more 'realistic' formula is moot to me, if the game is more fun, more challenging, better in general, I don't care if you call phasors 'pink ray spewers' or torpedos 'jiggly puffs'.

But again, that's not really the point, the point is that trying to impose individual perceptions of reality into fantasy themed games is usually doomed to some sort of failure, as the game mechanics wind up being so incredibly complex that the enjoyment of the game is lost. Now I'm not saying that changing pounds of gold to gold coins will ruin anything, what I am saying is that as soon as you get too worked up about the 'reality' in the game you start down a very slippery slope where you are moddleing supply, upkeep, weapon reach, moral, in more complex ways than is needed to keep the game entertaining. Well to each their own, whats fun for one isn't fun for another, I recognize that, but pissing over the little things surely isn't worth the time when there are bigger things to fix.

Besides my 's apparently went unheaded in my first post