> And finally, something that would, in my opinion, really add to the realism and historical flavor of a medieval-themed city builder would be the introduction of mechanisms in which agricultural surpluses are skimmed by the church and the feudal lord. Tithes, taxes and rents! Instead of merely abstracting the taxes into an income modifier or letting the player be the extractor himself, we could be shown the tax collector visiting the village, counting the sheaves by the side of the road, selecting the calves and chickens. This way, the experiences of our medieval forebears are visualized and may help to educate the public about medieval village life.
This is the part that's most interesting to me. I always feel tax policy & land use is very rarely explored in games; in most of these games if you can set tax rates at all it always seems to be a straight tax on productivity so you just have to pick the amount of deadweight loss you're willing to accept to generate the revenue you need to run your government. There's also very rarely any distinction between government spending and private spending, and how government spending on public goods influences the asset values of private interests. You could make an entire game about just that subject.
EDIT: As a follow-up, I found this history of land & tax policy in Denmark going back to the middle ages to be quite fascinating and might be a useful point of contact for this sort of thing: https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc...
This is the part that's most interesting to me. I always feel tax policy & land use is very rarely explored in games; in most of these games if you can set tax rates at all it always seems to be a straight tax on productivity so you just have to pick the amount of deadweight loss you're willing to accept to generate the revenue you need to run your government. There's also very rarely any distinction between government spending and private spending, and how government spending on public goods influences the asset values of private interests. You could make an entire game about just that subject.
EDIT: As a follow-up, I found this history of land & tax policy in Denmark going back to the middle ages to be quite fascinating and might be a useful point of contact for this sort of thing: https://bibliotek1.dk/english/history/centuries-of-experienc...