Progress of Version 0.2 (Pt. 3): The Court (Patreon)

Next, I will discuss another important aspect of city management: the court!

There are two types of cases that you can listen to while holding court: petition cases and crime cases.

PETITION CASES

Petition cases are problems that your citizens have that they want you to solve. The basic premise of these types of cases are replacers to the vanilla radiant bounty system though I'd like to later expand that to more types of cases. Your citizens can inform you of locations of bandits, vampires, giants, dragons, and Forsworn and they will want you to decide how to take care of them.

You have a few options on how you want to deal with them. First, you can do nothing at all. Your citizens will not like you for this and you will lost loyalty. Second, you can send out a bounty and wait for a bounty hunter to take care of the problem. Third, you can send out one of your armies and have it temporarily unavailable while it takes care of the mission. And fourth, you can take care of it yourself, which will increase your loyalty with your citizens the most.

In this case, Olfina wants us to kill the bandits at Redoran's Retreat. After we do that we'll get a notification:

As you can see, taking care of the bandits ourselves greatly increased our loyalty into the next level. 

Another way you could have handled this is sending the army. This can be done by either talking to a commander directly or talking to your Second In Command. I got another case to take care of a giant for this next one:

The army will then move to take care of the giant on its own:

Once they kill the giant, the loyalty of Whiterun will increase, but not as much had we taken care of it ourselves.

The final way is to put out a bounty. This will only slightly increase your loyalty but it's better than nothing. Later a bounty collector will show up at your court asking for their reward:

CRIME CASES

The next type of case is the crime case. You already have a taste of it in the original WIP release of the mod when you decide your prisoners' fates, but now there will be more of these cases and will have more consequences.

Another change from the original is that guards now arrest non-unique citizens who commit crimes on their own. You can hold court to decide these citizens' fates. Once you call them up, your steward will inform you of what their crime was.

Right now I have implemented the three types of vanilla crimes: Theft, Assault, and Murder. The punishment you decide to inflict depending on the crime will affect how your people view you.

Being too harsh with your punishments (i.e. sending a thief to execution) will cause your people to view you too harshly, which will cause crime to go down at the expense of the loyalty of your people. On the other hand, being too lenient (i.e. letting a murderer go free) will cause your people to view you too softly, causing crime to go up AND causing loyalty to go down. Loyalty will only go up if you choose a "fair" punishment(i.e. giving someone who commits an assault 7 days in prison). However, you may need to give a few harsh examples if crime starts getting too high.

That's basically all I wanted to go over for now. You're all probably wondering when this update will release and I am really hoping I can get it out by the end of next week. As patrons you all will get the update a week early so I'll post it here. There's a few things I need to finish before I release the update like:

- Finish parades (the core mechanic is done I just need to apply it to all the cities)

- Allow purchases of houses in cities (again, the core mechanic is done)

- Finish up the law writing system (I'll go over this in another post)

- Do some tweaking of the Rebellion system

- Fix as many of the bugs reported on the Nexus as possible

Again, Thank you all! This mod would not be the same without all of your support!