Moved from here, topic started by SandLover:
When your morale is going up is will keep going up, when it is going down it keeps going down. This means you will move morale to 100% and then choose the tax setting that gives the smallest positive boost (18% tax, normal food rations gives +0.02% per turn). Negative morale will push you into a downward spiral because your people will become less and less productive in time. Wouldn't it be better that morale moves to a certain percentage at certain settings. For example 15% tax + normal food rations equals 60% happiness. Is your current happiness lower it will slowly increase to that point, when it's higher it will slowly decrease to that point. This would create a much more fun and dynamic system. And it will also be a lot harder to determine how to run your feudum as optimal as possible. Using my current game situation described in the food rations part as an example: When I set food rations to 'half ration' and tax to 4% I have positive food and coin flow. But morale is going down -0.36% per tick. But it will go down forever. If it would move to 70% morale and stick there that could be a viable option for me to choose.
If my understanding is correct, the main issue you explained is the "boundless" directional path (to one direction) of any morale change, so once set, you can just leave it and it'll eventually either falls to 0 or reach 100.
And your idea is to define a "reference point" for morale if various prequisites are met and letting it fluctuate around it, but making it sure it'll always attempt to return to the reference point while the prequisites are true.
If that's the idea, I very much like it! My only concern is the system's difficulty (and the increased difficulty to balance it out when linked to all the other systems). If players don't understand it's rules or we can't explain it on a screen easy enough, they won't see the system behind it and call it chaotic and/or useless. And it's a bit more complex and unpredictable than a pretty linear increase or decrease with a constant speed :) How would you present this info to players?
Others reading this idea - what would you think of such a system?