Estates

The new estate system is a streamlining of various old system that were only weakly related. It will be getting rid of all the exceptions and special rules and making everything easier and more flexible. It now applies the same concepts on all layers and integrates estates, realm hierarchy, taxes, etc.

At the same time, this system reverses the tax flow. Taxes are now collected at the bottom of the hierarchy and some parts of it "trickle up", not the other way around. There is no realm-wide tax collection anymore. Instead, every knight will receive taxes directly from his estate.

Hierarchy

The hierarchy is simple, but consistent on all levels now.

• An estate is always a part of a region. The lord of the region can, but doesn't have to have an estate. If he has, it must be in his region (can't be lord of region A and have an estate in region B).
• Regions are always part of a duchy - no more "imperial regions". However, there can be duchies with only one region in them.
• Duchies are their own entities now, meaning the duke does not have to be the lord of the duchy capital. In fact, there is no such thing as a duchy capital. The duke does not even have to be a lord. In addition, duchies can be created and dissolved, with some limitations.
• Duchies form realms. As before, the king does not have to be a duke.

Now for the somewhat trickier parts, assignements:

• Region lords define estates and anyone who comes by can take an available estate for themselves. This is much simpler than the old oaths system, because game-mechanics-wise the lord can also kick out a knight at any time. Knights can only leave and/or take up an estate once per turn, to prevent griefing and some obvious abuses.
• Lords are appointed by dukes and dukes are appointed by kings. The realm government system defines whether or not they can also be kicked out or not. (initially, they can not in any system, but we will be adding that for some systems later on.)
• Lords can change their region to another duchy and dukes can change their entire duchy to another realm as before. Regardless of diplomatic settings, this is a violation of the oath of fealty and will result in an automatic ban.

Estates

An estate is a part of a region, currently defined abstractly as a percentage part of the region (e.g. 20% of the region of Keplerville). Everyone can have at most one estate, and the size of estates is limited. There are minimum and maximum sizes that depend on the region type and size. The minimum sizes go from 5% to 20% while the maximum sizes go from 30% to 50%. So every region will need 2-4 knights (of which the lord can be one) to cover it entirely.

There will also be a "soft incentive" to not use the maximum sizes unless you have to, and instead offer more knights an estate. My design goal is that in all realms that are not severely overcrowded, every character can find an estate.

Estates can be created and resized at will by the region lord.

Vacant estates (those without a knight) and "wild lands" (parts of the region not assigned to an estate) will collect taxes directly to the region lord, but only at half efficiency, so half of the tax income is lost.

Efficiency

It is easier to control a limited area than a large area, and tax evaders can become a problem if the size of an estate is too large. Many smaller estates are more efficient than few larger ones.

The efficiency of an estate depends on its size and a couple of factors that differ by region (type and population, mostly). It will be listed in the estate display.

Taxes

Under this new system, taxes are collected by the knights in their estates. The details can be found on the New Taxes page.

Transition

The new estates will be set up automatically based on current estates, so those who enlarged their estates in the old system will start out with larger estates in the new system. Region lords are strongly encouraged to check the new estates to make sure they are nicely set up. The automatic code will try to match the old distribution, but due to rounding and estate size limits, it could still end up with unassigned land, etc. In fact, early tests indicate that most regions will have parts of their region as wild lands immediately after the transition.

Lord and duke shares are copied from old tax settings values (lord share and realm share respectively), while the realm share starts at a default value of 25% for all realms. Again, players are strongly recommended to change these settings to represent their realms and desires.

On the day of the transition, current imperial regions will be randomly assigned to a neighbouring duchy of their own realms (in most cases, there is just one to choose from anyways). If you want to be sure you will join a specific duchy, do it before the transition.

Changes to Existing System

• Things like extra tax and all the other complications will go away.
• No more region claims. They were an interesting idea, but didn't contribute as much to the game as I had hoped.
• No more good and bad marks. Again, they did not live up to the expectations I had.
• Yes, nobles with no estates will have no tax income. But there is space for many more estates in this new system, plus an incentive to give as many people one as possible (see below)
• Temples are going to pay taxes again, but at a reduced/half tax rate
• Right now, taxes are always distributed as bonds again. I may change that again in the future, in fact I have a few interesting ideas, but for the moment this is simple, straightforward and the least prone to any problems.
• Property and Wealth taxes are gone.

Question I Can Not Yet Answer

• How are newly acquired regions (TO, exchange, revolt, etc.) handled, i.e. which duchy will they be assigned to?
• What will be the role of the banker in all of this? (I can already give one answer: If there is no ruler at tax day, the banker will receive the realm share)

Q&A Log

There was an IRC Q&A session regarding the new estate system. Here is an edited log of the session. For ease of reading, it has been reorganized so that the questions and answers are together, and extraneous comments were removed:

IRC Q&A Log

other pages that need to be updated or removed

• Allegiance
• Hierarchy System and Rank
• Politics
• Region Command and Knight Commands
• Estate and Estates
• Manual/Realms_and_Regions
• Taxes and Region_Economy_Example
• Region_Claim, Claims and the pages linking there

context-sensitive help pages:

• Help:Estate
• Help:Hierarchy
• Help:Taxes