[Discuss] ATTENTION: Another possible flaw in the trading system.

[Nate Shupe]

As you may or may not remember, a while back I had discovered that a realm 
could essentially gain large amounts of gold through trade.  This gold was 
not gained by generating profit in foreign lands, but applied towards 
deficit spending.  In that particular trading system, traders could buy and 
sell food back and forth in the same region for a tremendous profit.   The 
solution for this was to change how trade was conducted.  Instead of regions 
being able to conduct unlimited trade and only trying to pay for it with the 
entire realm's money at the end of the tax week, trade was changed so that 
the region must have the gold at hand in order to do business.

The fix seems to have worked fine for that problem, but I have recently 
thought about a new possibility.  The fix only changed the way trade was 
done, but not other ways in which a region may be swindled into going into 
deficit.  I believe that it still may be possible to gain an advantage by 
sending a region/realm into deficit spending.

Trade is changed, as is obvious since you are the one that coded that.  
However, militia payments happen every week, or early tax days in some 
cases.  So, what (in a game mechanics standpoint) is there to prevent a 
realm from establishing large numbers of militia?  In theory, a realm can 
recruit as many militia until they simply don't have any more surplus gold 
in their taxes to recruit more militia with.  As discovered in the previous 
trading system which was tested, a realm going into debt had no effect on 
loyalty, morale, control, production, or even whether or not militia 
abandoned their posts.  The only consequence was that all players were given 
negative bonds until the debt was repaid to the realm's treasury.  Even 
then, it did NOT make the realm pay off the whole debt that was made.

Now, this causes the expectation that the game mechanics have yet another 
flaw related to the previously discovered one.  In this case, the realm may 
recruit the maximum number of militia, and from then on gain their gold 
through trade.  The realm still produces just as much gold, but on tax days 
it spends it all.  So, what is there to stop them from spending the gold 
before it is distributed to the militia?  Nothing, as far as I know.  They 
may simply trade the realm dry before tax day, secure the gold from taxation 
like before (ex.- deposit into a guild), and then let the realm's budget go 
negative when it pays the militia.  Doing so, it could be possible for even 
the smallest realm to have hundreds of thousands of militia in a single 
region.


The realization of this potential bug is one thing, but the matter of a 
solution is another.  The last fix for an exploitation did a good job of 
preventing that particular problem, but as shown here it most likely did not 
fix things all the way.  A good solution would be to make it so if the realm 
went negative, it would terminate the expenses it could not support, such as 
militia.  Another possibilitiy would be to lower regional stats, but that 
would be to little or no effect to a realm that has a highly skilled 
bureaucracy.

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