> 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-experienc...
The 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.
I 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.
But really, they were mostly just killed by Hippos. Just like everyone else in town.
I do believe you require approximately two fully-equipped and high-morale legions to kill a singular Hippo in that game, no joke. If you see 2 or 3 Hippos in a singular area, you'll need a substantial Army to clear them out.
EDIT: If you're lucky and can push the Hippos out to the river somehow, your Navy can bombard the Hippos with impunity, but it takes a long time for those ships to kill a Hippo. (I've literally built the Pyramids before the Hippos died. So a really, really long time)
The other plan is to set up a lot of Police Stations. Police don't have morale-stat and will fight to the death (in contrast: your armies will break formation and retreat). Each time a Police dies, they hire a new citizen rather quickly, eventually your infinite stream of Policemen kill the Hippo. This works because Hippos only attack citizens, never buildings. (In contrast, if you actually had an approaching army, the Police would die, and then they'd destroy the Police Station... so no new Police would come out to defend.)
Also, immigrants come extremely quickly in Pharaoh. You pretty much convert immigrants into Police (and then subsequently dying) at unrealistically high speeds. Armies actually need "training", "Morale" and all that stuff...
> I do believe you require approximately two fully-equipped and high-morale legions to kill a singular Hippo in that game, no joke. If you see 2 or 3 Hippos in a singular area, you'll need a substantial Army to clear them out.
Are Pharaoh's Hippos related to Dwarf Fortress Carp, perchance? Because this situation sounds familiar.
Pharaoh, 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.
Caesar 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 )
Mmm, 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.
Yeah 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.
I still remember Tzar fondly for it's in game cut scenes. Also, it's one of those games where assassins could could climb walls so even completely turtled up you couldn't be 100% sure that you are safe.
>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...
Tangentially, there's a remarkable painting of a tax collection in medieval Denmark:
Government 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?
Majesty 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.
Majesty 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.
And the the tax collector had a very distinctive "tAx collECTor~" sound byte that he said OVER AND OVER. It is drilled deeply into my psyche
The voice acting was good, but they didn't have many sound bytes so it got pretty repetitive. Also whenever a gnome died they'd say "But I'm just a gnome...". When minotaurs were trampling your kingdom, it could get pretty annoying.
First I've heard of this game since I got it in a discount multipack with AoE, and something else I can't remember. I had absolutely no idea what was happening when I tried to play (age 9 or so).
Majesty was amazing! I think i got the expansion pack as well, I can't tell you how much I played that game, still remember taking it out the plastic cd wrap from Walmart
I 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.
I recall back in the early 90s my buddy (who is now an EVP of games dev at blizzard) - was asking me why I didn't like playing masters of Orion- I told him "it's no fun to play a spreadsheet"
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Then I read this interesting article about a guy in SF several years ago and he was the key accountant, strategist for (whatever that massive space battle game is that was hyper popular with the russians) - and he didn't even play the actual game! All he did was manage the massive assets of their guild faction with excel and other tools and they were making hundreds of thousands in real dollars per year and that was his actual IRL full time job.
The one where they had that massive battle and thousand and thousand of real money was lost on the eradication of huge digital fleets...
Kerbal 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.
Similarly, 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.
I find that there are games that transition from low to high complexity over time, and I often dislike it, for example in Crusader Kings. I always love the early part of the game where I'm looking out for my family, building nice stuff in my domain, earning money, murdering siblings etc. Life is simple. I absolutely hate when you (either deliberately or by accident) end up in charge of a large kingdom or empire and suddenly you're having to manage hundreds of counties and deal with dozens of people who hate you. Feels far too much like work.
Many strategy games do scaling badly. You micromanage at first, but then your kingdom grows and you're supposed to use the same tools to manage much more. Real life doesn't work like that. If you go up in hierarchy, you generally delegate tasks. Time is not made out of rubber. Real life is not turn-based. You can't take as much time as you want planning your next move.
I 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?
See 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.
There 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.
Even 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.
You 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 =)
The tax stuff in EU4 is the exact kind of modifier-based abstraction of extraction that the article is saying is all-too-common of simulation/strategy games set in this period. EU4 is one of the most "board-gamey" Paradox games with probably the most abstraction of the individuals you're supposedly ruling over. The tax system is truly one of the most bland parts of the whole game. Saying this as someone with many hundreds of hours in EU4, it's a game I used to really enjoy.
Consider 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).
I'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.
You 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.
I personally find there's no depth to it: the winning strategy is to focus on growing your economic base and pump all spare capacity into research - by mid-game, you'll out-earn and out-tech every opponent other than the fallen empires.
In my last long playthrough, the second half of the game was literally me just racing against the victory condition clock to see how much megastructures I can cram in, so I can see what they do in a single game. It got briefly interesting for a moment, when a fallen empire decided to start their crusade at my doorstep - I had to engage in some micro-heavy delaying action for some of in-game years, until my exponential trajectory made me out-tech them and I could get back to building megastructures.
I mean, I like the game - but I wish there was some more meaning attached to things, for the actions to be more complex than scaling some numerical modifiers, for the tech tree to not be a tree and not be shared, for battles to be something more than "weapons are rock-paper-scissors, whoever brings more total points into the fight wins"...
Absolutely, it's been a long while since I booted up Stellaris. Something like Starnet and absurdly hard cling-to-life difficulties brings a little spice, but it's pretty much a solved game of tuning resource flows.
On launch they made a big deal about how they had the "cards" instead of a tech tree... turns out that's pretty much just a tech tree.
I don't feel like cards would be better :). I want the opposite - a kind of tech graph that's too large for any single player/NPC to explore thoroughly in a single playthrough, allowing a greater variety of opponents and games. I'd like different parts of the tree to offer different advantages, enabling different play styles.
Stellaris tries to enable variety by using "cards" to prevent you from seeing the entire tech tree - but you still know there is a tree. You'll still walk through most of it roughly in the same order. So will everyone else.
In this sense, my dream 4x is to Stellaris what StarCraft was to Dark Colony. Where StarCraft gave you 3 completely unique tech trees, each with its own mechanics, playstyle and lore, Dark Colony gave you 2 species that were really just clones with different sprites for the same units (and in few cases, slightly different stats).
(I could rant on and on. One day maybe I'll just write the damn game myself. I already have a sketch of a design doc assembled over the years.)
I agree that midgame is a bit of a slog: the most generic events, plus you're typically dominating the computer players. The for former, the Khan and L-cluster stuff have helped a bit (don't know if that was added before or after you tried it). For the latter, I've found that playing at max difficulty helps.
I once heard someone remark that for CK3 it is better dial back the grand strategy component and dial up the role playing aspect. Not to try to optimize an awesome long-term winning strategy, but to make choices with each ruler along their personality traits.
This may cause you to crash and burn with your kingdom, but it's probably more akin to how humans (and rulers) actually operated.
Ck2 was released roughly 10 years ago amd had tons of extensions.
I played recently ck3 and, even if the vanilla gamw is better than ck2, i got the same dull - boredom after 20 hours than i had when i played vanilla ck2 for thr first time. Give it some time :~)
Crusader Kings 2 and 3 are the only games that have ever recaptured the accidental all-night gaming session for me like Civ I and II did back in the day. Since discovering CK, I can't tell you how many times I innocently started a game on a Saturday night, have my partner come in and say good night... just to have my partner walk in the office and ask when I was going to sleep only to realize it's morning (my office has no windows). God I love it.
Personally, I prefer Aurora and Distant Worlds: Universe. Paradox games are fantastic but these are Dwarf Fortress-level detail (if you’re into that sort of thing).
Is this that VB game that got eventually rebooted(?) in C#, that's full of annoying little glitches[0] that would be trivial to fix if the author wasn't aggressively against any and all kinds of modding?
I'm definitely looking for a 4X equivalent of Dwarf Fortress. Stellaris ain't it - I like it, but it gets too repetitive after first longer game, because the mechanics is just rock-paper-scissors with a hundred thousand numerical modifiers that have little qualitative impact on gameplay.
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Like some number handling within the game being locale-dependent, so that unless you set your system locale to en_GB, it might behave unpredictably.
God, don't I know it. Between Crusader Kings and Stellaris I've burned a good-sized hole in my time budget haha. Great games, though. Stellaris' political modeling is one of my favorites in any sim game.
> 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.
> 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.
My 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.
>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.
Yeah, 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.
Only 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.
We don’t tax household consumption today, either. If you grow veggies, cook, mend/sew your own clothes, wash your own clothes, change your own oil, mow your own lawn, 3D print your own stuff, or produce your own solar power, you’re not taxed on it (although that doesn’t stop some folk, whether utilities or whatever, from trying to effectively tax you on it). Of course, household production is massively less efficient for many things, although people are forced into becoming DIYers if tax rates are high, prices are artificially high (think rent-seeking behavior by monopolies like utilities), or if money is scarce (ie if there’s a recession/depression).
And my point about carrots was deliberately cartoonish. The point is that revenue, not profit, was taxed.
Fun fact: At least in Germany you often end up paying taxes on self-consumed solar. They calculate the tax based on what you would have payed your regular supplier (or 20c/kWh). But otoh you get to declare your "solar plant" a business, with some nice perks:
If you buy the solar equipment for net 20k€ you'll pay 19% or 3.8k€ taxes. You get that money back. In addition, the 20k€ are a business expense and reduce your taxable income (there are two modes for this, either 5%/year for 20 years or a huge block [50%?] the first year and some smaller blocks the next two or three years - I believe). So if you pay 30% income tax, you'll save about 6k€. All other expenses related to the solar plant (service, repairs, insurance,...) also count as business expenses, with the same effect.
If you're not earning more than 17.5k€/a in addition to your regular income, you can opt to forfeit the whole stuff in favor of the "Kleinunternehmerregelung" (small business provisions), but then you don't get the above business perks. Though after a few years you can change from a full business to a small business, so you'll have to do the math.
Sounds complicated? Welcome to Germany! :D
(Disclaimer: This might be not 100% accurate, so talk to your tax consultant if you're doing solar in Germany)
AFAIK this is only true if you pass the power you generate back to the grid - which most people did as it used to be heavily subsidized. If you run your solar without powering the grid, you won‘t be taxed on the used power.
The subsidies still exist. And while in absolute numbers they seem low, the reduced costs for solar modules still make them worthwhile.
If you don't feed into the grid as a normal person you're right (that's either "Kleinunternehmerregelung" or, if it's obviously not producing any profit, "Liebhaberei"). But if I built a fictive 500kWp solar plant to power my fictive compute center I would have to pay taxes on the self consumed power. Mind I'm a layman, so I might have gotten that wrong, but I'm 80% sure I got it right.
Grass. I believe oats and seed is fairly recent development. Historically, you had animals grazing by rotating pastures, or consuming dried grass (hay) when you couldn’t graze (eg winter).
Also interesting tidbit — apparently horses of modern sizes cannot eat grass fast enough to sustain their size. They require the higher calorie density of oats and such. Horses that get back into the wild apparently quickly revert to much smaller sizes with a couple generations (according to acoup.net, which I never verified further)
I have the vague idea that in medieval Europe there would usually be one draft team which farmers would rent from whoever owned it. That supports the idea that owning draft animals was rare. But it doesn't so much support the idea that you wouldn't feed human-edible food to them.
Note that I said “human edible vegetables”, not “human edible food”, in context of a historical absurdity of a peasant feeding carrots to his horse. It’s as absurd as if 500 years from now, people on future equivalent of Hacker News claimed that in early 21st century, the poor complained about rising alcohol prices that they used to run their private jets on.
Now, I’m happy that your knowledge already allows you to infer that regular peasants did not, in fact, own draft animals, and I’m sad that it does not allow you to infer that the draft animals were not fed human edible food. Alas, that was the case: draft animals, which were universally oxen, would eat pasture grass, cut hay, and waste biomass like straw left over after growing grains. Human edible food was much too valuable to feed it to animals on a regular basis, and vegetables even more so, considering how little vegetables a typical peasant consumed himself (his diet was overwhelmingly grain based).
Shadow 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.
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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-experienc...