Back in '06, regions were changing hands at an incredible pace. At times it seemed odd for a day to go by without someone taking a region from someone else.
Yeah, I miss that. The high pace was fun.
There are, I think, three things that have changed that have had a rather large effect in slowing down the pace of the game. This list is not necessarily in any particular order.
- New tax system. If you lose a region now, the lord and knights are suddenly without income. They have to find new lords in order to have incomes again. And the amount of income each noble gets varies widely. You have low-pop, low production regions that still have to have lords and knights, except that they get horribly !@#$ty incomes, and need constant subsidies from the dukes, that all have to be handled manually. Maybe this is realistic, and helps internal politics, but it sucks for team-building, and sucks for army-building.
- Estates, and the requirement that all regions must have lords and knights. This greatly increases the requirements for regional maintenance work. Especially when combined with the next point.
- Lowered player count. When you have only played in realms that have, at most, 50-60 characters, or hell even 100 characters, you can't comprehend the way things work when your realm has 180 nobles. Your army moved and left 20 nobles behind? Hot damn! That's an 80% movement rate!
Yes, I think you're right on the money with these things, but I'd like to advocate that the pop growth system changing also did it's part.
Estates will be changed, this we know. The new tax system is here to stay I'm guessing? I agree that it sucks in many ways, but it was fun to get your own knights as a lord. We have to recruit more players, but that might come naturally if we solve some of the biggest problems with the game (the things we are now talking about).
Speaking of the high amount of nobles, I remember Avamar having more than half of Ibladesh's current nobles (77) at the end of it's life (I count 42 avamarian TL's participating in the mother of all battles) with only 1 city and that's it.
Amazing how 1 city at full tax rate (25% at the time) could support so many, especially since the amount of militia in Avamar city was quite large too.
Then imagine how 80% of these joined Oligarch. That was one well packed realm at that point.
