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.
Taxes
Every level defines the share the levels below contribute up:
- The king decides the "kings share" - the % of income the dukes have to send to him
- The dukes decide the "dukes shares" - the % of income the lords have to send to them
- The lords decide the "lords shares" - the % of income the knights have to send to them
The hope here is that this will result in multi-level cascading power-struggles. When the king needs more money, he can raise the kings shares. All the dukes now pay more. If they don't want this to reduce their own income, they can raise the dukes shares to compensate. Now the lords pay more. They can raise the lords share. The knights can't do anything to compensate, they have to eat it up. But they are many, and pissing them all off is a bad idea.
Taxes are collected by the knights, with the region lords setting the regional tax rate and the banker setting the tax collection day, as currently. Land that is not managed by a knight (i.e. vacant estates and land not assigned to estates, called "wild lands") collect taxes at only 50% efficiency.
Basically, we have a waterfall model: Knights collect taxes and pass on the lords share to the region lord. The region lord gets his own estate income and the lords share and passes on the dukes share to the duke. A duke can have income as a knight, lord and the dukes share and from all that must pass the kings share to the king. The king can have income on all levels, if he really bothers.
There are a few more details and a flow diagram on the New Taxes page.
Example
Andrew, knight of a 20% estate in Keplerville, collects 66 gold from the peasants within his estate. The lords share of Keplerville is 30%, so Andrew gets to keep 46 gold and sends 20 gold to the lord of Keplerville.
Brian, lord of Keplerville does not have an estate (for simplicity in this example), but collects lords shares from all estates, as well as the half-taxes from vacant estates and wild lands, for a total of 132 gold. Keplerville is part of the duchy of Keplerduck, where the dukes share is set at 33%. Brian gets to keep 88 gold and must send 44 gold to the duke of Keplerduck. If Brian also had an estate, that estate would not have a lords share (it would both end up in his pockets anyways), and the dukes share would be calculated from his total income, including his estate collection.
Corwin, duke of Keplerduck, is neither lord nor knight (again, for simplicity). The regions in his duchy grant him a total income of 230 gold. Keplerduck is, of course, part of Keplerstan. The realm share in Keplerstan is set to 20%, so Corwin gets to keep 191 gold and has to send 39 gold to the ruler.
New Tax Report
(while the duchies and regions used in this example are real, the tax and gold values are not)
Here is what a region tax report (sent to the lord and knights of a region) looks like:
Note how the numbers split up within the rows. The "Tax Collected" is split up into a share for the knight and one for the lord. The sum total lord share is then taken into the realm-wide taxes, and the final income is split between the lord and the duke according to the dukes share setting.
The realm-wide tax report looks like this:
The lord share is what the region lord actually gets to keep. The summed-up duchy share is again split into the part the duke gets to keep and the realm share that is being sent to the ruler. In addition, regional total upkeep (including militia payment) and average knight shares are listed to allow the members of the realm to spot regions that are either interesting due to high income potential or for their excellent economy or militia support.
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 is the future role of the Steward - can he manage estates or not? Probably not, his job is to help the region lord with day-to-day stuff, not major decisions.
- 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)
- You may ask yourself why a lord should have knights and not keep as much of the region income for himself. I have an answer to that, but still working out the details, so not telling right now. But there will be a big incentive for lords to have a fair number of knights.
Q&A Log
Tom held an IRC Q&A session regarding the new estate system. I have assembled an edited log of the session. For ease of reading, I have reorganized the log so that the questions and answers are together, and removed all the extraneous comments.
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:
