(In before "get a life.")
About the scripting. It's evident that certain limits on the Keep's progress are not being enforced:
21_Security_Land - land security is for our peasants and should cap at 100; it is unlimited
21_Security_Road - road security is for our moneymen. also 100, also not enforced
21_Peasant - the maximum possible number of peasants, supposedly 100, is unlimited
21_Merchant - ditto ditto for merchants
01_GC_UnitCount - This is the number of 'Cloaks. It's supposed to stop at 600, and training level is supposed to deteriorate by 1 point at 150-man intervals. None of this happened to me...
Without these limits, the math governing our rewards takes on a really lopsided nature. Ultimately things like the special mission rewards, the helpful little growth bonuses here-and-there, and even the level of taxation, all get dwarfed by the cascade of geometric growth caused by the failure to enforce limits. For instance, let's look at the formula for determining the number of merchants who join the population every time unit.
In plain english, the game looks at the difference between our road security and the number of merchants we already have (21_Security_Road - 21_Merchant), and starts collapsing about 10 percent of the gap every turn by bringing in more merchants. Then we get other effects on how fast this happens. The tax rate is an integer {0, 1, 2, 3} which means you can lose as many as 4 merchants per turn with crushing taxes ("We need every copper we can get...") or gain 4 by making an Appraise check and putting a clever tax in place that supposedly cuts red tape. I can't figure out if SmartTithe=1 actually works, though. It seems like the game stores this accomplishment as a local on Kana herself, but when it needs to look for it, it looks for a global. The local is double-bad because those disappear (perhaps when we reload the game outside the Crossroad Keep?) and we need to make the arrangement all over again. 21_Growth_Merch_Mod is also a small integer: just the number of extra men coming in from various sources. For example, Bevil brings in 1 extra merchant every turn if we assign him to "make sure that the High Road patrols encourage more merchants to use them." That's where that factors in.Δ MERCHANTS = (21_Security_Road - 21_Merchant)/10 + (1 + SmartTithe - 21_Tax_Merchant)*2 + 21_Growth_Merch_Mod
So that was for merchants. The peasants' formula is basically the exact same thing. The only extra term I saw was for unrest, another little integer that basically runs from -1 losses (happiness of lowering taxes in the special tax mission) to maybe 4 losses or so (say, if we have a huge gap between cloak and keep civility, crushing farmer taxes, conscription, etc.)
What do I make of this? Well, with no limits to security or the number of merchants or even our military strength, all the other factors become chopped liver awhile after those limits are breached. This is because of the security computation, and shortly we will see why. Let's say we're patrolling the roads. Here is how far road security advances or declines each turn (The math goes slightly beyond 5th grade now):
where:Δ ROAD SECURITY = Unit Strength - Timed decay - Sargeant Bonuses
The land security formula is the same as road security.Unit Strength = [squareroot((01_GC_UnitCount * strength adjustments)^1.5] / 4
Timed Decay represents the natural deterioration of security, and is an integer that creeps up to 10 points per turn after a while. There's nothing to do about it except overwhelm it. Work hard, and -10 to security per turn is ultimately negligible.
Strength adjustments from the Unit Strength formula are: Armor quality, Weapons quality, the number of sargeants (to maximize your military strength you must recruit both Light AND Jalboun), training level, morale, recruiting bar (e.g. "only the best") and elite status (Captain's Company). All of these are float values, as opposed to integers, and together their maximum possible value is precisely 4.608
This number is when we've done basically everything we can to get our troops ready:- TRAINING = 5
- WEAPON = 4
- ARMOR = 4
- MORALE = 6
- RECRUITING_BAR = 5
- SARGEANTS = 4
to apply the Unit Strength towards road security. Ditto land security. Whatever sargeants
you have on patrol still apply their bonuses and fight off decay without any help,
though. That's nice; the sooner we can get Light of Heavens patrolling, the better our lands AND roads.
So in the name of improving Unit Strength, how do we get more 'Cloaks? There's recruiting, but the best way is to sign Ziffer's charter ASAP and get volunteers. Here is the number of Greycloak volunteers added in a turn, once we've concluded our business with Ziffer:
Losses were not fully implemented. 21_Peasant is, again, the total number of peasants at the keep. We triple that and the subtract the number of greycloaks who have already joined up from the ranks of peasants, and that's our number who will join our cause on the next turn. So... the entire militarization process has nothing to do with merchants.Volunteers = (21_Peasant)*3 -
(losses)/2- 21_Num_Volunteered - 50
***********
The trick is that with a limited time of 40 turns, what can we do? What do we do? If we just want as many greycloaks as possible, it's simple: no taxes, no plotting and mischief, pretend the Roads aren't there. Just endless Land Patrols to get our land security up to obscene levels. Patrolling the land and getting more effective at patrolling experience continual exponential feedback. Patrolling increases land security, land security attracts peasants, peasants spawn 3x their weight in 'Cloaks, and more 'Cloaks make better patrols, and better patrols increase land security, and on, and on, and on. Compound interest is a beautiful thing.
But what about merchants, road patrols, and cash money? Lots of greycloaks is fun, but maybe we want something a little more tangible by which to remember our days at Crossroad Keep. A souvenier. When we patrol roads, we aren't getting nearly as many greycloaks into our ranks (although the game continues, as I say, to gradually collapse the distance between your number of peasants and your Land Security level, ten percent at a time. Not trivial.). But we're getting money. The strategy forms: we want to start out patrolling our lands to gather troops, but at some point we need to switch directions and patrol the roads instead, to get an army of taxable merchants. The optimum point is going to be somewhere in the middle, probably. Early enough where the peasant count has a nice, long time to catch up with land security, but far enough out that the number of cloaks is very high and their effect upon the roads will be utterly drastic.
To get an idea of where this cutoff should be, I worked the keep for a little while, up to about 27, and plugged everything into Excel. Microsoft said that from where I stood, I should continue my land patrols up through time 52%. At 55%, it would make sense to swap over to Roads and go straight to 100%. My estimates of the situation were, honestly, not very clear. I didn't bother with the gold income in excel... I already had enough degrees of uncertainty as it was, so I just tried getting a solution for maximizing the number of merchants. As time went on, I kept pugging in the ACTUAL values, somewhat better than the estimates for whatever reasons, and bumped National Road Patrol Day back one time unit, to 52%.
Here is how I faired by switching at 52.
Hey! That's a lot of gold! Basically this was
- 0 2 5 Train
- 7 Land
- 10 Old Man Morris
- 12 - 50 Land
- 52 - 100 Roads
Initially, taxing our peasants and merchants into oblivion may impede our growth significantly. Under a hundred units, -3 growth is a big deal. But taxes have a discrete effect designed to work within the confines of those 100 civilians and 600 'Cloaks (the script 21_inc_cr_vars comments that the maximum unit strength, 600 soldiers all decked-out, should be 2764.8). But we can astronomically excede that strength, and -3 growth while taking in hundreds at a time and tens of thousands of gold is no longer a big deal. Tax away. I think that by 57, I had the maximum taxes in place on everyone, although the optimum could be much earlier.
I hope this was helpful. I hope even more, however, that people are pulling in more money than me! I'd like to hear your stories.
Modifié par LoA_Tristan, 24 décembre 2010 - 10:32 .
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Save up on those diamonds, sapphires, & emeralds...
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