Taxes

[Xenoheart]

Hi! New here. the name is Leonard, from Israel. I LUVE real time strategy games. especially the AOE series, and i was totally exited when i heard someone is making a frreware game, and a good one, that is!(The reason is that there are almost no video game stores in Israel, and those that are are usually ill equipped and far betwwen).

Since i could not prevent myself from trying to give some minimal help to the projects development, i thaught a little, and an ide came to mind: In many, MANY strategy games, wealth is gathred from mines. I find it a BIT unrealistic. There is no friggin way there are so many mines around the world, and rich, veinfull gold mines that is. It is even more unrealistic for a nation, as small as it is, to base it's whole fragging economy on gold mining. Indeed, recently, many games have incoropreated trade into this whole system, which is good. However, i still find it hillarious that almost no one at all thaught of the most common way for nations to gain wealth today(And i think that in the past, to): taxes. Tributes of money from the people.

Is it that difficult to design such a system for a computer game? Is it unrealisic? Does it harm the "feeling" or the "pace" or something?

I will be glad to be ansewred.

Thanks anyway, Xenoheart.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I think Bobby, aka "Aeros", can answer this one.

[Aeros]

Well Xenoheart, I can sympathize with you here, because I for one find it totally unealistic that in these RTS games, the units mining gold spend their entire lives doing so! Entire wars may come and go, their homes may be demolished and rebuilt, but yet there they are, constantly mining 24/7. You never see them go to sleep. You would think that realistically they would need to take breaks or even go to sleep and that the player would have to accomodate this for them.

On the same topic, I find it totally unrealistic that units can conduct entire wars on empty stomachs, you never see them eat! Okay but maybe I'm being stupid, I didn't realize that when you train a unit, it always requires some amount of food resources, like 50 food and that this is the general resource required to sustain a unit and must be expended when you enlist the unit's service. But this is totally unrealistic, upon being trained the unit is given a lifetime supply of food? Wouldn't it spoil? Where does he carry it? If you research iron cuttlery as opposed to wooden utensils will he be fed more efficiently and be able to conduct battle better? This is totally unrealistic, why has no game considered this!

As I think about this something dawns on me...poppulation is totally unrealistic. You're telling me that 10 houses can support a population of 200 people? 200 people who never even sleep...if they don't sleep what is the point of the houses? Something here is being extremely unrealistic....

And what about the actual battles themselves. Clicking on units and telling them to move somewhere else is totally unrealistic. Historically these orders and plans were written by politicians, communicated to a military commander, and then dictated verbally by the commander on the field. Simply clicking units completely bypasses this and is totally unrealistic.

The point I'm trying to illustrate here is that within a video game, nothing is infact realistic. In an RTS game, models are designed to illustrate everything. You must ask yourself what you want to play, a simulator, a strategy game, The Sims, or a city building game. Upon deciding the experience you want to convey and what will be fun about it, in game design you then need to construct models that can create a gameplay experience that maximizes choice to the player - this translates to fun for the person playing the game. A video game can best be summarized as "a serries of fun and interesting choices".

If you want to know why traditionally RTS games have gathered resources in such ways its because of the fundamental model of resource management choice the games incorporate. For example you have a maximum amount of units you can have, in addition to a certain amount of resource income that is based on how much of this population you designate to gather that resource. The strategy aspect involved here is how many gatherers should you have gathering what resource allowing you to construct an army that requires many different varieties of resources. The focus being you need to create this army as fast as possible and balance it as much as possible before your oponent does or you will be destroyed by him due to his superior management of resources.

Thus at heart, many RTS games are at a core, a game of management through strategic decisions.

Although not impossible to incorporate taxes as a source of monetary income (it infact can be a good idea if applied properly), this challenges this fundamental gameplay structure as a focus is placed now on an entirely different system of gathering a resource. Through fine balancing and alot of work it can be made possible. The way I see taxes as something that can work is if a game has an economic model where resources are not physically gathered but rather a steady income is acquired. For every unit you have in your population you get lets say 2 gold every couple of seconds.

However there are dramatic and major problems associated with this, as game designers we have to think what kind of scenarios this situation will create -how can one player be better than another if they all have a maximum population cap and thus get gold at exactly the same rate. Also realism (which we love to represent) becomes a problem too - instead of fighting by destroying people shouldn't you instead capture them, and thus capture their tax income as well? That would be the model to defeat a player, by capturing.

Ultimately, this idea starts to lean very heavily into a simulation type of game, (think Sim City or Black and White) and the more you try to integrate it the more you draw away from the experience we would like to emphasize in our game, which is battles done historically and acurately where a combination of good economic and civilian management coupled with military strategy of formations of balanced forces will yeild a superior player that can win the game.

However, i still find it hillarious that almost no one at all thaught of the most common way for nations to gain wealth today(And i think that in the past, to): taxes

You would be very mistaken if you think that game designers don't consider any and every idea pertaining to the realism and immersion in their title. The art of being a game designer is not in just having ideas (anyone and everyone has ideas) but its about creating models and forseeing scenarios that will be fun for the player, and then testing and fine-tuning these ideas into a game that becomes fun. Your idea on taxes has been suggested atleast 3 times before on these forums, as well as discussed a full 6 years ago by our own development team.

gamers and game designers are in different worlds

gamers tend to all think that all you need to know how to make a game is how to play it, and they typically think they have the best ideas when usually in all cases they offer some of the worst and least thought-out ideas out there.

Its not the ideas that are hard to find, but rather the sollutions to make them work and make them fun - and this is what game designers do. There is a reason why game designers are usually the people who have been in the industry or on the project the longest - because they understand how an idea will affect every other aspect of a game experience. In the case of your idea, it adds a slight element of realism (which is no more realistic than having units gather a resource by mining it, infact your idea would turn into untis just standing around as being the way a resource is recieved)...you get slight realism and you get 50 other problems that ruin the flow and balance of the game, hence we do not have a tax system in our title.

So I hope you've gained some insight from this indepth response, we normally wouldn't go so indepth but...well, these ideas on tax simulations and "why don't you guys have lightning when it rains have it randomly hit units now and then as an easter egg because it would be realistic"...that whole line of feedback and suggestions can be rather humorous to us at how poorly thought out they are and how those are like the only ideas people have and for some reason think are cool. You will see something like this once, it might be slightly entertaining, and then in reality it will never be interesting again and infact be totally anoying and potentially stupid.

There are games out there who have incorporated random "realistic" ideas like this...and most of them have been very bad and not fun. Do you want to click things and watch "realistic" stuff happen or do you want to immerse yourself in thought and challenging ideas?

Edited April 25, 2008 by Aeros

[Mythos_Ruler]

I think it would be cool that you have to manually feed your units every 2 minutes of game time. A "chef" unit can be trained that follows the army around and cooks their meals (he can be upgraded to the "Sous Chef", then up to the Elite "Chef de Cuisine"!). Also, units should have to forage for food or else starve to death when they are idle for far too long (5 minutes+).

[Aeros]

Hmm the chef would also need a food supply wagon to follow him, you'd have to equip it with 500 food at your city center each time your army leaves town.

However if the enemy finds and destroys your food supply it would effectively cripple the chef and your units would slowly starve to death, many of them dieing before they can retreat back to town to the local pub. So if you just killed the food wagon you could defeat a player's army.

Since this isn't balanced we'll just make the food waggon have 10,000hp and it'll have a serries of armor upgrades you can research onto it to make it even harder to destroy.

But how to we protect it from bacteria, the silent and invisible enemy?

[Mythos_Ruler]

Well obviously you CAN'T! There were no effective methods of reducing food spoilage except pickling and drying. Soooooo, the army will have to be stricken with food poisoning and dysentery from time to time. I forgot about hygiene! How do you propose we solve the problem of thousands of men and horses relieving themselves in camp?

[Aeros]

Indeed salt and drying was one of the most important ways of preserving food in ancient times and salt was a very valuable resource. Perhaps we'll make it the 5th resource. Without it your food stockpile will decrease at dramatically increasing rates due to spoilage, making salt a very important resource to fight over.

About the hygeine...i'm not sure, perhaps we should get more historians to research the topic. I wonder if it will be historically accurate to have soldiers construct an outhouse in their camp...or if they used simpler means. Can a historian answer this?

Sorry XenoHeart...clearly we are a little jaded

Edited April 26, 2008 by Aeros

[Xenoheart]

Maby taxes can be a certain percent(Which you can choose in your town center) of all other resources mined being conveted into money. It can represent an amount of time you give to your citizens to work on their buissnes and families(Which are taxble) while not hunting for your army. This may lead to some interesting strategies, i belive. Will you sacrefice your wood gatering rate to get a higher trickle of dinarii? Will you use the money to buythe wood you were sussposed to gather? If so, what is the darn use?

Just a thaught.

[Apomonomenos]

Well in the game Glory of the Roman Empire (highly suggest you to try it out http://www.download.com/Glory-of-the-Roman...-10549203.html)

you would build a house and two people would come and choose their job. They would work for a little, get their daily needs and go to bed. Maybe if it was similar to this, you could put taxes in.