Re: Province ownership and other subjects

Jay Luo (yaj@cc.gatech.edu)
Mon, 27 Jul 92 17:55:13 EDT

cedman quotes me:
> Jay Luo writes:
> > Again, I would rate the chances of rabble without leaders
> > against a lord and his soldiers holed up in his castle as
> > being close to nil.
>
> Thats right. Of how many successful peasant revolts do you know ?

My point in this particular case was that without leadership and an
armed cadre, the peasants would have no chance, and having no chance,
it would be pointless to make an automatic peasant attack. A revolt
purely of peasant rabble would not be much of a threat to any lord.
Perhaps this was cedman's point, but my point is that it should be
possible for a determined player to inspire revolutionaries and
lead the rebellion to victory.

cedman quotes me, then questions:
> > I think it would make more sense and
> > also be more fun to make revolts require a player or
> > controlled unit to deliberately start them.
>
> And if there are no players around because you kill anyone who comes
> with one region of your region ? Can you then tax infinitely ?

If there are no players around, you can definitely repress the peasants
if you want, but you can't tax infinitely any more than you can squeeze
milk out of a stone. The way I was envisioning it was that a very high
TAX would gradually increase the DISSENT, and the DISSENT rating of a
province would have a negative impact on the total tax collection of
the province in the future... (I recall some discussion on Laffer curves
and such on this list quite recently.) I did not mean to imply that peasant
revolt was the ONLY recourse to repression.

cedman comments:
> While I think that your proposal would probably be nicer, I don't
> really know if it would be bang for the buck or fun for the line of
> code, if you so wish.

I have to disagree with this. In my opinion, it would be simpler to
implement my (dare I say it) revolutionary (argh! he said it) proposal
(namely, a player may use an 'attack revolt' to overthrow the ruler)
than cedman's revolutionary proposal (peasants automatically launch an
attack on the ruler's castle every now and then).

The way I would suggest doing it is that a new commodity pool (analogous
to those for wild horses, etc) be formed, representing Rebels, and this pool is
incremented every month based on the DISSENT rating of the province.
When someone does an ATTACK REVOLT, a side effect which occurs before
the combat is that a new unit is FORM'd and men are added to it in a similar
manner to an IMPRESS command (only it is instantaneous and it draws from
the Rebel pool rather than the Men pool). The attack then proceeds against
the castle. After the combat, the rebel unit can either be disposed of
or can stick around as a member of the rebel player's faction (the Rebels
obviously couldn't go home after a failed revolt, and might want to be
part of the new regime after a successful one). This then primarily uses
already existing mechanisms (attack command, form command, impress command,
and commodity pools).

On the other hand cedman's proposal requires an independent peasant unit
to be created which has an agenda and a goal, recruiting troops and remembering
that it hates the castle lord so it attacks now and then. I am not sure
how much support there is for goal-driven independent units or whether this
would have to be a special case. If the Orc raiders are automated (are they?)
then some of that code could be used, but I have the impression the Orcs
are sort of attacking everyone in sight, whereas the rebels would only
attack one particular faction.


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