SKM Development: TAXES! And the men paid with them.

What do your taxes pay for?

That’s an important question, one which came up in my mind when I was looking at the ACK system itself. I keep looking at ACKs because I’m knocking fences down all over, and I want to make sure I knew why they were standing up before I do that. ACKs imposes a standard tax rate of 2gp per family. Increasing that incurs a morale penalty (a not inconsequential one).

I was trying to figure out though? Why 2gp. ACK’s service rate is 4gp per fam. Land is 3-9gp per fam. But why is tax, the only modifiable rate, set at 2?

2gp only really shows up in a few places. The garrison cost for a “Civilized” hex holding in ACKs is 2gp/fam. It appears that tax is ultimately meant to pay for that garrison. This scans.

Taxes generally are representative of what the average citizen is paying the government for infrastructure and protection. Keep in mind the reason the modern mafia system appeals to so many writers is because its essentially a feudal system, but at the base of that system is the subsistence farmer, the serf, the schlub paying for protection. So, the apparently intention is that the baseline cost of that protection 2gp/fam for a garrison, is the same as the tax for that protection 2gp/fam. It costs more in less secure areas (borderlands and wilderness hexes).

Therefore, the required Security rating for an area should track to the taxes (or income) being generated by the same area.  

Where we differ from ACKs is by breaking that sacred connection to gp. We do this because otherwise as we apply research benefits we encounter a book keeping problem. See, let’s assume that we make light infantry cheaper, under the ACKs system we’d perversely need more of them because the garrison requirement is really a fee.  The Garrison in ACKs is really just a hidden cost, a fee for the size of the population in a hex. Designed that way because in ACKs, gold pieces equate to experience points, and having too many flow in can become ‘a problem.’

On top of the garrison though, ACKs also required a stronghold to be built to hold a domain. That’s well and good, but our game is really about hexes. And the fact that moving into a borderland’s hex (let alone a wilderness) costs 22,500gp for construction of a stronghold, plus the fees for building the thing, and the months it takes to erect the one (while you’re losing cash building the sodding thing) made all of my players reticent about expanding (which was an absolute necessity to increase their financial situation).  Once the thing is built though, you’re required to pay 0.5% of the stronghold’s cost in monthly upkeep. This again makes sense, you have to repair the physical plant, and the ACKs developers obviously didn’t want that to be too onerous (it’s an 112.5gp monthly fee round-about for a borderland’s fortress of 22.5k), BUT we have multiple hexes, and thus multiple strongholds, and thus multiple fees (this is what intentionally put one player’s kingdom in the red).

For ACKs, having a stronghold was the nature of business. You had to have one everywhere just to “secure” the location. They did try to explain that strongholds in some areas could just be buildings though (presumably so we could explain why a city didn’t have a fort every 6 miles). For us however, I’ve got a different idea.

I already mentioned that we’re having the garrison patrolling around everywhere to secure the hexes. Well, one of the fun aspects of a kingdom management game is the idea of investment. If I spend 10,000gp on a tower today, that ups my security by a set value, that might be worth 6 months of wages to a squad of 20 light infantry men to wander around. And the tower doesn’t really go away (but would cost me some dosh every month, but less than the soldiers).  We can also get around the requirement for it to be in every hex just by deciding that we do need strongholds to secure wide areas, but that a fortress can be used to claim an area in the six surrounding hexes. This means that a built-tall kingdom (like Loyalty the boondoggle kingdom) can therefore more easily make expansions even into territory that might not be advantageous assuming they can afford to clear the hex and “garrison” the areas while others can establish footholds they can use to expand their influence out from. Since this fits the Civilization and Kingdom Management mechanic of building a ‘city’ in an area to lay a claim, I think its appreciable.

We could also up the investment mindset by making it cheaper to have garrison/patrol forces if they have some place to bunk down, or even make it so you can bunk peasant conscripts (our imaginary lowest troop tier) for free (since the stronghold’s upkeep would cover their room and board).

I still like the idea of a per component total cost upkeep fee (I might even keep ACK’s 0.5%)

We could also have the individual strongholds’ components contribute to their defense/security scores. AND since most people aren’t going to have more than a few to manage, it makes book keeping them easier.

Still, our average tax rate should pay for that stronghold, BUT since we’re only really requiring 1 stronghold for 7 hexes (the central and surrounding hexes), our security ‘fee’ should be based around an expenditure of about 14gp/mo (7 hexes, with 2gp tax income).  We might need to increase that a bit though, since having garrison/patrol units will be useful for other stuff. And since we’re not tied to ACKs and its experience progression, we could just increase the tax rate to accommodate (3-4gp tax per turn for example).

AND, by having the stronghold provide a set 'security' value to those nearby hexes, we could help to decrease the required 'overall' security requirement to something manageable, while still having the required security costs be high enough to give justification to players wanting to build a fortress instead of hiring a few hundred guys.

Lets assume, for giggles, that the required security for a kingdom is 1/10th its pop. Just a quick number. Now, lets assume that across seven hexes, that pop comes to a total of say 713 fams, that'd make the security requirement 71. Now, lets imagine a cheap little light infantryman gives say 0.25 security rating by his lonesome. You could hire 280 of the guys at 2 gp each per month (560gp/mo) or.. maybe spend 15k on a fortress that grants you a flat 50 security rating and only need to hire 84 (168gp/mo) and see the fortress pay for itself in three years (or less if we decide that say garrisoned light infantry only cost 1gp if they have a fortress to stay in). 

We'll need to work on the numbers, but I like this mechanic.