Majesty had tax collectors, a market economy, and a hands-off governing policy: You funded creation of main buildings, but they were or were not occupied based on demand for those buildings. You put up rewards for actions, but those were or were not acted on based on whatever your citizens were doing. You funded (from treasury) upgrades to goods producers, but nobody got those upgrades until they went and purchased those things from their own money.

You had a little tax collector dude (or dudes) that went around knocking on doors and collecting a % their on-hand assets (which you set). You could exclude areas if they were too far away, or too dangerous. Your tax collector(s) could be ambushed, which frankly was the primary reason to build defenses.

And, you could tolerate some thievery so that you could occasionally extort money from the thieves guild in sort of an unofficial tax collection of unreported income.

All that in a fantasy game. It can be done.

I believe there's a modern revamp version for mobile: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/majesty/9nblggh1850p

Majesty was a really great game that I spend a lot of time on in my youth. I'd love to see more games that work similarly: every entity is semi-autonomous - gameplay is about incentivizing, guiding progress and managing resources, but the entities don't need input to act.

And the the tax collector had a very distinctive "tAx collECTor~" sound byte that he said OVER AND OVER. It is drilled deeply into my psyche

The voice acting was good, but they didn't have many sound bytes so it got pretty repetitive. Also whenever a gnome died they'd say "But I'm just a gnome...". When minotaurs were trampling your kingdom, it could get pretty annoying.

First I've heard of this game since I got it in a discount multipack with AoE, and something else I can't remember. I had absolutely no idea what was happening when I tried to play (age 9 or so).

Majesty was amazing! I think i got the expansion pack as well, I can't tell you how much I played that game, still remember taking it out the plastic cd wrap from Walmart

Steam also a version that runs on modern systems

I would like to QA the game using the cobra effect - if my kingly subjects start farming cobras then I know the game-AI is seriously good !

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origi...

seems like an opportunity for some fun game mechanics!