Mundus Magnus economics

**Zarax** · April 10, 2006, 06:03 AM

Playing with MM is ridicolously easy, with the increased settlement number all you have to do is wait and starting to see the cash rolling in...
Economics needs a big tightening, what do you think about revising upkeep costs?
I've been doing a little maths, if you start with an empty 400 people town you will get 330 denarii just from taxes, meaning that even the most useless settlement can support 2-3 units alone which is out of scale both historicall and in gameplay logic...

I suggest to put upkeep for levy units at 250-300, raising +50% for every extra level so that you obtain:

300 = militia/skirmisher/slinger

450 = levies/archers/parthian/schitian/numidian light cav

675 = main battle units/artillery/light cavalry/parthian/schitian/numidian medium cav

800= medium cav/parthian/schitian/numidian heavy cav

1000 = high level units/heavy cav/eastern cataphracts

1500 = elite units/cataphracs/hietaroi/sacred band cav/pretorian cav

modifiers:

barbarian = -20-30% from upkeep
roman = +20% cavalry upkeep (representing the use of mercenary/foreigner cav)
mercenary units = +25% upkeep (except AOR units)
recruiting = 150% upkeep cost

These values are based on tax income so that you will get extra cash for building, recruiting and generals from farming/trade and should be fairly scaleable so that more settlements won't mean too much of a cash increase.
Also, this way economical temples will start making sense too if you want to finance your campaigns.

Also, we can set by script to give some economical help to the AI (i think we can set their upkeeps to be lower from the balancing script) so that the game won't be impaired by the lack of development skills by the AI...

**zodmaner** · April 10, 2006, 06:50 AM

Looks good! I'm all for it.

**DimeBagHo** · April 10, 2006, 08:05 AM

I can help out the AI economies in limited ways. AI leaders already get substantial economic bonuses for example, but the AI often leaves settlements without governors, so that is an unreliable method. I can also spawn buildings at the start of the campaign which selectively give economic bonuses to the AI factions, but that would require quite a lot of work to make them have universal effect (I would have to make a new building type for every faction, and then write scripts to spawn them in every settlement). Alternatively I could make buildings that give faction wide bonuses and just spawn them in the faction capitals. That would make the loss of the original faction capital crippling, which would be realistic in some cases, but not in others.

Conversely I could impose faction wide tax/trade penalties on the player faction through a building spawned in their capital. I can even make it indestructable. But of course the player could avoid the penalties by giving up their capital.

**Zarax** · April 10, 2006, 08:10 AM

Is there any way to give AI factions an X amount of money for each turn? It would be enough for starters, or maybe you can just max out economical buildings for AI at the game start, which should be a good enough counter to AI deficencies, at least for a while...

**Lusted** · April 10, 2006, 08:12 AM

Just some info for you guys. With my mod i have the mundus magna in it, and at first i tried reducing upkeep costs to see how that would help the ai. This resulted in too many battles, and as soon as one full stack had been defeated another would appear. Now, for 4.0 i have doubled the upkeep and recruitment cots from 3.1 and it has really improved things. As the map is the mundus magna the ai gets enough income to produce large armies, but as the costs are higher battles are now more decisive. The recruitment costs are now double that of vanilla RTw, and the upkeep costs are around 4/3 of vanilla RTw, and the ai seems to do well with these costs. Hope this info helps you guys.