Taxation and Events...

[Saber Cherry]

Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny too... a pound of gold would make a person wealthy, back in feudal times. Let alone 4 pounds of gold per soldier. Not much incentive to stay in the merc biz after the first contract, with that kind of money...

"Gold coins" (say, 1 ounce or .5oz) sounds so much more appropriate to me than "pounds of gold".

[licker]

Sigh, once again the realists have to try to inject some form of 'our world's reality' into a fantasy game...


Maybe gold in Dom is as common as dirt... who's to say, who's to say...

Certainly there were civilizations in our world that didn't value gold as highly as the europeans, mostly because of its availabililty...

Heh, when will you all learn that trying to impose your standards on a work of fiction will only result in lost sleep and probably lost hair

[PvK]

There's a good example of how the anti-realism camp would rather have their game worlds be completely silly than use a reasonable unit of measurement, even when it has zero effect of gameplay.

PvK

[Johan K]

Hmmm... let me guess what the Proportions mod in your sig does. It desillyfies Space Empires without affecting the game play.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Johan K:
Hmmm... let me guess what the Proportions mod in your sig does. It desillyfies Space Empires without affecting the game play.

Actually, it desillifies SEIV, but has rather deep and profound effects on gameplay. Don't let him mod Dominions; he'll take the magic system out

[licker]

Originally posted by PvK:
There's a good example of how the anti-realism camp would rather have their game worlds be completely silly than use a reasonable unit of measurement, even when it has zero effect of gameplay.

PvK

Ahh yes, that's the entire point isn't it? The anti-realism camp (though that's a bit of a misnomer, but I'll stick with it for the sake of this discussion) doesn't give two #@$@s what the monatary unit is called. We (assuming I'm speaking for anyone besides me) also don't care what the names of the units are, or how 'accurately' modeled the weapon system is, or a variety of other things that, as you say, don't have a great (or any) impact on gameplay.

I like to think that we are simply more imaginative than the realism crowd, you know the guys who will spend a week debating the impact of a broad sword on a watermelon or whatever inanities they prefer

[PvK]

No, I think you are saying you don't care about realism, but actually you seem to be against realism, even when there is no gameplay or balance reason to be against realism.

The PvK Balance Mod for SEIV is the one that fixes the (empire design) game balance issues without complicating the game at all, simply by changing starting point costs.

Proportions Mod, as Saber Cherry says, turns gameplay on its head by half-correcting the proportions of many aspects of play. It turned out to be much more popular than I expected.

I actually think the Dominions games do an exceptionally good job of getting cause, effect, and even proportion pretty close to realistic or at least resembling the real-world (with magic, of course), which is a big part of why I like the games so much.

Gameplay and reasonable game balance are important to me too, but I find that there's rarely a need to make things totally unrealistic in the name of gameplay or balance. Unfortunately, there are those who mistakenly think that realism is incompatible by nature with gameplay or game balance, or who simply make zero effort to make game mechanics make any sense. Then you get games that pretend they are about a subject but get so much wrong that they'd be better if they just admitted they were about a completely imaginary situation where any similarity to the real universe is pure coincidence.

PvK