Resolved at game time as opposed to design time? Well, I suppose it's true we're not building a strategy game. We have significantly more flexible input to the system - a human DM. But I am worried that players/DM might start to forget all the things they've decided if the system doesn't encourage them to keep track of it. And if orcs magically switch from being unresty to just plain poor, it might be bad for immersion/increase confusion. Going full out and dividing a modifier into sub-modifiers is potentially bad, depending on how much book-keeping you approve of, but it might be reasonable to encourage DM's and players to write key-words like "Orcs -2; unrest", even if those keywords don't have defined values. Because at some point, the DM is going to flavor text explain to the players why their orcs suck, and then he might just flat out forget what he said next weekend's session.Frank wrote: Honestly, I don't think we necessarily do. Yes, it is entirely possible for each poptype to have 3 subnumbers (loyalty, numbers, and development) which sum up to the total profit modifier. And then you could undertake various actions or quests to raise those sub numbers. But it's a role playing game, you could honestly just assume that sort of thing and let the MC wing it as to the hows and whys of the Orcs providing a -3 or a +5 in some province or another.
As for the rest of your response, I think I get what you're saying. I was suggesting a mechanism where the DM/players was supplied with a helpful table of things like, 'sawmill,' and a bonus associated with them. This sort of method, to keep the fluff in line with the numbers, requires you keep track of the completion of these tasks. So I was concerned with a way to do that, and that meant formal infrastrucure, because if the table says sawmill, you need to know how many sawmills you've built, blah blah blah...
But... we don't have to keep track of those things if the way we improve resources is abstract enough. Example: "To improve this resource from X to X+1 it costs: (consult table based on resource type and current value, or apply formula)." When enemies attack these resources, it's just a campaign scale action with some success, and that success is measured in a number. It's not a mission to burn a sawmill. It's a mission to "attack the +3 wood industry". Sawmills can get tossed around in the flavor text, but we don't associate any individual number with a sawmill, so we don't have to worry about tripping over our pretty descriptions.
If it's done that way (and that seems like a pretty good way), we don't have to care about writing down sawmills. Similarly, adding resources to your resource list becomes a simple thing. "Adding this resource to your province production list requires these existing profit modifier types in that province, and costs this much resources."
@Fectin, well... Yes.
+1 (dwarves, orcs) as opposed to {+3 dwarves, -2 orcs} makes it hard to tell what parts of your economy are hurting. Simplification is good, but we don't want to streamline it so much that nobody even cares. Plus, it has real ramifications for gameplay, not just player-fun. Namely, DM's aren't going to be able to be consistent about what's going on inside the player's provinces unless they write it down (okay, in this province, the dwarves are doing great and the orcs are still in revolt). And if the DM's got to write it down to make it make sense, let's just make them separate numbers.
Also, how do players improve their profit checks? If it's harder to improve higher numbers, players are just going to improve every province in turn and they're all going to be equal (this is the optimum solution). If it's as difficult to improve higher numbers as lower numbers, they'll invest in only their safest provinces.
