Yeah, lots to eventually figure into for morale. For now, I'll probably have most battles be simple morale and just add a bonus when defending a city or whatever. But it'll have to be reworked eventually.
In other news, fun with math!
Been calculating out how much units should actually cost, based on a bunch of historic numbers I could dredge up off the internet. It's all fuzzy, of course, since costs varied depending on the region and time period. But it works out pretty well.
So right now we have a base faction income of about 1760 gold per year. That's for a small city-state with about 6,600 in population and no wealth modifiers on anything.
With my new calculations, the unit costs are as follows (In gold):
Swordsmen - 600 to produce, and a yearly upkeep of 720
Pikemen - 500 to produce, and a yearly upkeep of 720
Archers- 300 to produce, and a yearly upkeep of 1080
Horsemen - 1600 to produce, and a yearly upkeep of 2160
Militia - 150 to produce, and a yearly upkeep of 180 (note that is only 50 men, not 100 like the others)
So our basic city-state could afford to have a few decently trained troops, 1 good unit and some militia, or a bunch of militia. Horsemen are out of the range for most small cities unless they are wealthy. Factions with larger cities, or multiple cities, could probably start to utilize them. And, of course, if you go with a smaller military you have more money for other things.
The unit sizes keep the % of the population supported as a standing army for any length of time pretty close to historically accurate, which is about 7% for the medieval period. You can do more for shorter lengths of time, but it's risky if they get slaughtered since your tax income will suffer dramatically.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with it from a realism standpoint. Using a 'Build up a big army, go squash someone, and then disband most of the units' tactic will be pretty common, and that's more or less what was done in period.
I may need to play with my Town/Village tax stuff a bit, though. The raw amounts work well, but seasonally things should matter more. Having your people around for the Spring planting is important for a good harvest, and you need them back in Fall to actually harvest everything. I can't just have Winter and Summer give less income, since then you'd go off on winter campaigns all the time, so seasonality should matter there.
Initially, of course, that's not a big deal.
Ultimately, I think I need to model a few things.
The amount of wealth you can get from a village should be effected by available manpower in spring and fall the most. Spring is potential, and fall is how much you realize that potential. So...the # of people taxed in Spring is your potential amount for Fall. The number of people you have in Fall determines how much of that potential amount you can get. Having extra people doesn't help as much as having good potential and being able to use all of it.
I think I need to do more research on medieval taxes and how that worked.
For winter campaigns, it should be possible but maybe just more expensive. If I have my supply train logic in place, I could simply make the costs go up a lot faster. So a campaign in summer that would cost, say 2000 gold might cost you 3000 gold in winter because of increased costs. I could also model attrition of a sort, with units taking casualties for every turn spent out of a town/village/fort. Most wouldn't' be deaths, but they could be serious enough illnesses and whatnot to keep the soldiers out of battle.