Scoring in Stronghold

Stronghold is a game about being the highest position of authority in a castle - that means building the castle, assigning people to jobs, ordering troops about, and other things that a lord would do. In turn, it's also about making decisions on what to sacrifice - bigger rations to make people happier, or smaller rations to keep them from starving? High taxes to provide public services, or low taxes so people will come to the castle?

I've been playing through the campaign for the first time, and had to defend my people from a pack of hungry wolves. I was able to fend them off with archers, but lost a few woodcutters and hunters in the process. This made me feel bad, of course, but sometimes not everyone lives.

In the end, I was given a score, part of which was 10,000 points for not losing any troops. This surprised me, since I had lost peasants - but then I realized that even though wolves had torn apart a number of unarmed peasants, it didn't count against my score because I hadn't lost any archers.

The funny thing about scores is that they encourage certain behaviors and act as an implicit approval of those behaviors. The logical extreme of this scoring mechanism would be to never put my archers at risk, and use my peasants as fodder to stave off the attacks of the wolves. This is the opposite of what I would have thought - to use my archers and other military units to protect the innocent peasants from harm.

I suppose it's wrong to try and impose my modern morality on lords form the middle ages, but it certainly struck me as odd coming from a modern game.