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> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction
by larsiusprime 5y ago
> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction of mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord. Tithes, taxes and rents! Instead of merely abstracting the taxes into an income modifier or letting the player be the extractor himself, we could be shown the tax collector visiting the village, counting the sheaves by the side of the road, selecting the calves and chickens. This way, the experiences of our medieval forebears are visualized and may help to educate the public about medieval village life.
This is the part that's most interesting to me. I always feel tax policy & land use is very rarely explored in games; in most of these games if you can set tax rates at all it always seems to be a straight tax on productivity so you just have to pick the amount of deadweight loss you're willing to accept to generate the revenue you need to run your government. There's also very rarely any distinction between government spending and private spending, and how government spending on public goods influences the asset values of private interests. You could make an entire game about just that subject.
EDIT: As a follow-up, I found this history of land & tax policy in Denmark going back to the middle ages to be quite fascinating and might be a useful point of contact for this sort of thing: https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experience-with-land-taxation-in-denmark https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc...
- Macha 5y agoThe closest to modelling this skimming comes from Tropico, where the player's offshore bank account is effectively the player's "score", but the process of skimming off money to the bank account causes problems for your settlement.
- mrVentures2 5y agoSee the the Caesar franchise (Caesar IV, 2006). You have to hire tax collectors, set taxes, and yes you also have a separate income as a governor. It does all of this.
- larsiusprime 5y agoThat's cool! Does it say what exactly you are taxing (labor, land, capital, income, wealth)?, or is that left abstract?
- rebuilder 5y agoThere were times that the Romans auctioned off the right to tax a region. So you’d pay the state some sum and then have the right to extract whatever you can from the population. I’m sure the whole story is much more nuanced than that outline.
- bserge 5y agoAnd I thought debt collection agencies are shit. We really do live in the best times so far.
- jhbadger 5y agoEven 18th century pre-revolutionary France did this sort of thing. The great chemist Lavoisier was executed by revolutionaries, not because he was a chemist, but because he was also an administrator of the ferme générale, the privatized tax system of the time.
- depaya 5y agoThis is how parking enforcement works in some major cities (e.g. Chicago).
- mrVentures2 5y agoYou said taxes for the different markets (such as luxury goods, Granary, and imports) all of the citizen shop at, and then you set separate real estate taxes for the patricians which are the wealthiest class in the society. And you can see the little dude walk around and get the taxes. The game really holds up, it's my fav =)
- unbalancedevh 5y ago> You could make an entire game about just that subject. Which is probably why it's abstracted away in most games. If I want to play a game of growth and conquest, I don't really want to have to micro-manage too many details of peasant life.
- mcphage 5y ago> mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord In these games you play as the feudal lord: you control all of the money, and dictate what can be built, where. Units in the game have no agency outside what you tell them to do, and they have no resources outside what you give to them to build, and they give to you from production.
- throw0101a 5y agoEuropa Universalis IV has a bunch of tax stuff: * https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Tax https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Tax There are entire Youtube tutorials on it.
- shakezula 5y agoMakes sense that they also developed Stellaris. Looks like I have a new game to buy and play.
- gspr 5y agoConsider yourself warned: all Paradox games are highly addictive drugs. What you must have experienced with Stellaris is representative of most their games. EU IV is indeed a good choice if you liked Stellaris (I usually explain Stellaris to people as EU in spaaaaace).
- mmcdermott 5y agoI've been meaning to revisit Paradox games for a minute. Crusader Kings II hooked me the most. I never really delved into EU. The big problem I had with Stellaris is that I usually lose interest in the mid-game. I love the exploration, the building and even the initial diplomacy, but I just lose interest when everything levels out. I understand from AARs and the like that there are late game effects to disrupt the status quo, I've just never had the patience to wait for them.
- semperdark 5y agoYou should adjust the "mid-game start year" and "late-game start year" sliders at game setup. Note that those are just the earliest possible start times, and the chance starts rolling yearly. Definitely frustrating that you have to try to predict the game trajectory in advance. A game going well is almost a bad thing - you end up ahead of the curve and sit around doing nothing.
- 5y ago
- Arnavion 5y agoI believe Pharaoh (mentioned in the previous paragraph) did actually have taxmen that would go out and collect taxes, and could be ambushed and killed by the people if they were sufficiently upset by the living conditions.
- jonshariat 5y agoI learned so much from that game as a kid: Taxes, real estate values, city planning issues, money management, so many more
- tomwojcik 5y agoPharaoh, Cleopatra, Zeus, Poseidon, Stronghold, Tzar: The burden of the crown, Theocracy, Settlers, SimCity, Cossacks, AoE2, HoMM3... There were many great city builders/strategy games back when we were kids :) and I owe them a lot as well. I'm glad we havent been raised in an era of battle royals.
- cellis 5y agoCaesar III was one of my favorite games, but Aoe2 and Civ II ( both came out around the same time IIRC ) are the best strategy games of all time imo, followed closely by Civ 5 ( but I have no time for games anymore haha )
- datameta 5y agoMmm, Stronghold. Tax and ration tiers were an interesting mechanic for morale management. That game also had perhaps the most intricate siege simulation I've seen (ignoring the fact that many historical sieges had attrition as the goal). Had quite the large community of map and castle makers.
- rytor718 5y agoYeah Ive come to learn that Stronghold is something of a semi-hidden gem that only really gained the popularity it deserved a good decade or more after its inception (I wager due to Steam and the efforts to renew its name). This game felt the most medieval to me when I first got it, not that I knew what realistic medieval settlements were like :) Its the only settler game I've played where I enjoyed the siege warfare at all.
- dimitrios1 5y agoMy historical accuracy may be lacking here, but IIRC weren't "tax rates" in roman and subsequent medieval times relatively light as a percentage of one's wages? Specifically in Mideval england, the taxes were mostly on land, which the majority of the population would have had to pay, since most weren't land owners. I mean obviously taking a dollar when you only make 100 a year will feel disastrous, but I mean, it's nothing compared to what we experience today in the developed world. It might be one reason for why this particular mechanic isn't so prominent. I would imagine if you were making an industrial age/Americana game some 100-200 years in the future, tax policy would be a primary mechanic.
- learc83 5y ago>subsequent medieval times relatively light as a percentage of one's wages? You owed the lord a percentage of what you produced as rent. You owed the church a tithe. You also potentially owed service to the lord and the church. Taxes were also paid on certain goods purchased. Taxes that in many cases nobles were exempt from. Kings and feudal lords could also enact special taxes to pay for specific projects. If you were a merchant of some kind and you wanted to float your barge down a river, you had to pay nearly every town you passed through. >it's nothing compared to what we experience today in the developed world. Your overall tax burden could still be tremendous even if it's not paid to 1 central taxing authority.
- Robotbeat 5y agoYeah, and from what I understand, it was a tax on revenue, not profit. If you harvested 10 carrots and had to give 3 or 8 carrots to your horses, you were still tithed 1 carrot.
- xyzzyz 5y agoOnly the very wealthiest of land-cultivating peasants owned large animals at the time, though (and pretty much never horses). Also, you wouldn’t feed human edible vegetables to animals, that would be very wasteful. More importantly, these income taxes were based on rather small fraction of revenues, since they were only based on agricultural production, and not on household production. Obviously, it was extremely impractical to tax household production, and it still is. Importantly though, back then, typical household consumed much more of its own production as a fraction of all consumption than today, and as a result, less of their real income was taxed. Here is a way to think about it: if you buy a shirt from someone, you might need to pay the sales tax. However, if you make your own shirt, you aren’t going to pay tax on it. Today, you wouldn’t actually do it, because other people can make a shirt with much less effort than you ever could, so it’s still worth it for you to buy someone else’s product and pay the tax, because the productivity gains of trade will more than pay for what government skims from the transaction. However, back before industrial revolution, the differences in productivity weren’t nearly as big, so it didn’t alway make much sense to specialize in everything and trade.
- pessimizer 5y agoGovernment is always abstracted in games, rather than being material. If a game had a tax collector, it would have to figure out what would happen if you killed the tax collector. What if the tax collector is actually a tax farmer[1]? Would his gang go after you? If the gang was too afraid of you, would they raise taxes on your neighbors to compensate? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_(revenue_leasing)
- mrandolph 5y agoseems like an opportunity for some fun game mechanics!
- jvanderbot 5y agoMajesty had tax collectors, a market economy, and a hands-off governing policy: You funded creation of main buildings, but they were or were not occupied based on demand for those buildings. You put up rewards for actions, but those were or were not acted on based on whatever your citizens were doing. You funded (from treasury) upgrades to goods producers, but nobody got those upgrades until they went and purchased those things from their own money. You had a little tax collector dude (or dudes) that went around knocking on doors and collecting a % their on-hand assets (which you set). You could exclude areas if they were too far away, or too dangerous. Your tax collector(s) could be ambushed, which frankly was the primary reason to build defenses. And, you could tolerate some thievery so that you could occasionally extort money from the thieves guild in sort of an unofficial tax collection of unreported income. All that in a fantasy game. It can be done. I believe there's a modern revamp version for mobile: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/majesty/9nblggh1850p https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/majesty/9nblggh1850p
- baud147258 5y agoSteam also a version that runs on modern systems
- cwkoss 5y agoMajesty was a really great game that I spend a lot of time on in my youth. I'd love to see more games that work similarly: every entity is semi-autonomous - gameplay is about incentivizing, guiding progress and managing resources, but the entities don't need input to act.
- perihelions 5y ago>EDIT: As a follow-up, I found this history of land & tax policy in Denmark going back to the middle ages to be quite fascinating and might be a useful point of contact for this sort of thing: https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc... Tangentially, there's a remarkable painting of a tax collection in medieval Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdemar_Atterdag_holding_Visby_to_ransom,_1361#/media/File:Valdemar_Atterdag_brandskattar_Visby_(1882).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdemar_Atterdag_holding_Visb... ("Valdemar Atterdag holding Visby to ransom, 1361", by Carl Gustaf Hellqvist in 1882)
- Brendinooo 5y agoI always figured that game makers didn't do this because it wouldn't actually be fun to play with. Reminds me of when I played Medieval: Total War and spent most of my time dealing with uprisings. Like, do we want to deal with regulation bloat that causes greater infrastructure costs, so you have to pay billions to build a big road or whatever? Can you account for a Whiskey Rebellion sort of scenario in a SimCity sort of game? Plus, most of these are predicated on the idea that you're the supreme despot. People can protest if you increase taxes, but they can't vote you out/execute you in public and put in new leaders who knock down the tax rate. Maybe it's the difference between Kerbal Space Program and Galaga. There are certainly markets for both, but less for the former.
- the_af 5y agoI agree with your assessment, but I'm also glad that games like Kerbal Space Program exist. There should be room for experimental, simulationist and niche games too, not just for the tried and true crowd pleasers, because how dreadfully boring would it be otherwise?
- nearbuy 5y agoKerbal Space Program is one of the most popular paid games on Steam, far ahead of every arcadey Galaga-like game on Steam. I agree with your point though. Kerbal Space Program, like all games, also sacrifices realism for fun in places. Like how you can send astronauts on multi-year voyages without any concerns about food, water, life support, radiation shielding, etc.
- CydeWeys 5y agoThere are mods that add support for those things, but most people don't use them.
- omegaham 5y agoSimilarly, you can play on difficulty settings that forbid reverts, but most people just want to build rockets and try again if they fail rather than meticulously engineer every aspect of the mission. I joke that the Revert button is the "never mind, that was a simulation. The next one is the actual mission" button.
- tompazourek 5y agoIn "Cities: Skylines" you work with taxes and land use. It sure would be cool if there was a medieval version of it.
- sershe 5y agoShadow Empire I think tries to model that, but I cannot tell if it's really bare-bones or if it just isn't surfaced enough so it looks too simplistic and you rarely interact with it, other than using political power to boost private economy, or raise public workers' salary to match private salaries. Or maybe I'm a beginner player so I don't "see" it yet.