Slitherine

I couldn't understand at first why e.g Khazoth and the Iron barony are so passive for most of every game. Then i worked it out. The same reason that as a player there's no point in conquering provinces when you have provinces that still need upgrading. To capture a province you have to completely destroy its economy, so new provinces are completely worthless unless they either provide a resource, or you have a kingdom with a big enough income already to be able afford to upgrade them. And if a kingdom already has some provinces that aren't at maximum economy already, new territory is worthless to it until it has upgraded those.

If a kingdom only has between one and three provinces its income is so low that even upgrading all of those to max level will take it forever.

So you could start off with 3 provinces and conquer 6 more and you would have gained nothing - worse than nothing, because you'd have to garrison those provinces to avoid them rebelling, which would cost more than the zero income every one of them gets you. For small kingdoms expansion mostly equals bankruptcy.

As quite a few people have already pointed out, this doesn't make any sense. Worse than that it makes many AI kingdoms mostly passive for almost the entire game - including ones that are meant to be extremely aggressive and expansionist like Khazoth and the Iron Barony.

And it means small kingdoms can't use military conquest to conquer rich territories and make money from them - or at least not until 50 - 75 turns into the game, which is a long, long time to play for.

And on top of that, it slows the game down massively if you're starting as a small kingdom. Playing as Dragonhold it took me 73 turns and somewhere between 6 and 7 hours play just to get to one army of 15 units and an income of 2000 gold. And that was doing it the fastest way possible, by capturing three provinces that produced resources so i could sell surplus ones and ones i didn't need. Many new players may not even play that long, give up, and my go straight to negatively reviewing the game on steam, because a fair number will want to play the smaller, more interesting kingdoms, rather than just one of the big human kingdoms.

In shortm as others have said, the whole economy system would be better being changed so that you don't need to reduce a province's economy level to capture it - that would make more sense, make games faster for players (many of who don't have their entire lives to just sit and play computer games but have limited time to play them) and would also make AI kingdoms more likely to go to war rather than sit building up the economy of their existing provinces.

Now it'd be fine (great even) for AI to be different for different kingdoms, so some favoured building up the economy of existing provinces and making alliances, while others preferred conquering other kingdom's provinces by force, and some a mixture of the two.

Should say, for big kingdoms this is not a problem -but for any small kingdom or one with a weak economy (e.g any elven kingdom which gets a 40% income penalty) it makes a huge difference

Best solution would be to make it possible to capture territories without reducing their economic level - second best would be to make the cost of rebuilding a province's economy very low - e.g 50 gold to get to level 1, 100 to get to level 2, 200 to get to level 3 etc, doubled or more for terrain types that kingdom has no affinity for.

EDIT If the upgrade costs were reduced to a level that low, you could even make the upgrade costs for terrain your kingdom has no affinity for 10 times the normal amount

Thinking about it more that could result in big AI kingdoms having even more money and spamming even more armies, so maybe something in between on province upgrading costs, but they definitely need reduced a lot, unless the game is changed so that you can capture provinces without reducing their economy to zero

If we did go down the route of allowing captures without reducing the economy to 0, I think it very likely that there would still be some element of that in there - occupying enemy territory would still result in some sort of damage to the economy.

Right now I can't say for sure if we're going to go that way or not - it is one of the things we are talking about though.

Thanks for the info - like i said, that'd be a good solution, but not the only possible one. Greatly reducing the cost of upgrading provinces would work too, or even greatly reducing the cost of upgrading to economy levels 1 and 2.

Repair is already cheaper than actual upgrades.

It's definitely not in 1.9 - the opposite if anything. It's either the same price, or else, if you've lost the province and retaken it, the price of upgrading it to level 1 again goes up (e.g from 4275 to 8100 for Dragonhold for plains to level 1, and from 2250 to 4500 for hills).

And even the lower price is far too high to make it worth conquering new provinces if your current ones aren't already at max level, which makes it very, very slow at the start if you're a small kingdom (when only provinces that produce a resource are worth taking over at all) - and makes the AI of some kingdoms very passive (e.g Iron Barony, which is meant to be aggressively expansionist, doesnt expand much because it already has lots of provinces that aren't max level (and because its armies are numerous, but very weak)

Actually i see what you mean - it's just that all upgrades are far too expensive for any small kingdom to get any benefit at all from taking new provinces. It either needs to be possible to take over provinces without reducing their economy to zero, or else the cost of economy upgrades needs cut to a small fraction of what it currently is, or else both imo.

Same applies to big AI controlled kingdoms that haven't upgraded all their provinces - which is one of the reasons e.g The Iron Barony tends to do very little attacking or conquering other kingdoms.

Greatly increasing the amount of money you get from plunder when invading another kingdom's province - and ensuring AI kingdoms get it during autocalc battles, or even just so much plunder every turn one kingdom occupies another province.

In fact you could give players (and the AI) the option of plundering a province or not when occupying it. If they choose to plunder it they gain lots of money (thousands of gold) but the economy level of the province drops a level. If they don't choose to plunder they get no loot money, but the economy level of the province does not fall.

Could also make fortifications that arent just one hex super-forts full of cannons (bit out of place in medieval level of technology fantasy) and instead are fortification hexes that defending units can garrison to get increases to their Defence and maybe a plus 1 to their ranged attack too, depending on how strong the fortification is. As long as attackers havent taken all these fortifications then the amount of plunder they'd get would be reduced if plundering the province, and they couldn't take it over. They could still occupy it unless the defenders chose to leave their forts / castles/ walled cities to counter attack and managed to defeat them in a battle.

The highest level fortifications could cover more than one hex so more than one unit could garrison them.

I tend to compare this game with Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance...

In that game it seperated each province in holdings:
Law holdings: higher allowed the tax rate to be set higher without rebellions.
Guild holdings to get more gold.
Temple and Source holdings for the "magic" portion of the game.
And primary defense was to build castles, which actually tended to work the same way that you need to reduce the economy in this game. Each turn it goes down by 1 and when finally destroyed you were allowed to annex it with a seperate command.
While someone was occupying your province you got no gold from the place, but when conquered you would immediately get loads without the need to upgrade anything...

Yeah that'd be a lot better. I played Birthright, but it was a long time ago, so had forgotten that bit

When trying to think of a system that would compare to birthright I guess it would be a system in which the economy is not destroyed, you build castles for defense and you have to pay coin to take over the province... The amount of coin depending on the current economy level.