New penalties that replace the old ones. You are arguing that it won't be worse than what we currently have, that it will be basically equivalent,
I thought the consensus was that what we currently have is bad, because people already hold out on expansion. What's the difference if that's because of lowered income instead of increased unrest, if as you seem to say the end result is the same?
Seriously?
If that's what you think I've been saying, then you have not been listening. At all. For months.
The new penalties should be massively less severe than the current ones. They will
not make it impossible to hold a region with insufficient estate support without legions of courtiers stationed in the region.
No, they will not make a region with no knights equivalent to a region with 8. That would be stupid.
We are currently hammering people with harsh TMP mechanics *because* we have taken away their incentives to go to war with the old estate system.
If you're saying, "we implemented TMP to fight the peace problem caused by the current estate system," that's not true. TMP was implemented because of the Great Peace on EC and more localized incidents in various places in the game, most of which predated the estate system.
The new estate system doesn't seem like it will change the fundamental problem the old one had. It'll be much more possible to expand now, but this changes little if its not any more desirable to do so.
If
you don't want to expand once the new estate system comes online, you're welcome to sit on your hands and do nothing. However, I predict that most of your neighbours will not see it nearly as pessimistically as you do.
While this is true, most wars aren't for the creation of colonies.
Congratulations!
You managed to fixate on the
least important part of his post by far.It's not about colonies, Dominic. It's about all kinds of expansion. Colonies are just one kind of expansion.
Let me illustrate this for you with a brief example, because you seem unable to grasp it:
Current system:
Your realm has exactly enough nobles to provide 100% estate support to all 10 of its regions. You want to take five more regions, so you try to attract more nobles to be able to staff them. By the time you get half of these nobles, however, two other realms have already taken all five of the regions you wanted. Your realm is frustrated by the stagnation and inability to do anything, and half the new nobles leave.
OR
You take the five regions, and install a Lord in each one. You now have ~60% estate support in 2/3 of your regions, and your region stats start to slip. You try to attract more nobles to staff these regions, and get a few, but the rest are still in trouble. A month and a half later, two of the regions you took have gone rogue, along with two that you held before, and you're only four nobles up from where you were before. The new nobles are frustrated that they came here, to a realm that was just expanding, and they can't actually do anything but maintenance. Two of them, and three of your longtime nobles, leave.
New system:
You take five regions, put a Lord on each one, and have no problem keeping all 15 of your regions under control. Sure, you don't get full gold out of all of them, but you're still taking in some more gold than you were before you took them, plus the extra food. Over the next few weeks, you attract a few more nobles. When each of them joins, he gets to take an estate on one of the 10 short-staffed regions, which gives him an instant decent income, and increases the overall income of your realm. The general upward trend in the realm makes the old and new nobles alike feel good about its future, and new players who join are more likely to stick around, thus increasing its population and income further.
Are these contrived examples, meant to prove my point? Sure.
But I think that the gist of them is pretty accurate.
So instead of insisting that everything is doomed, the dev team is a bunch of morons who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper sack, and the only way to save BattleMaster from total imminent destruction is to let every realm control all the regions they want with no effort at all, why don't you shut the hell up and
try out the changes when they arrive, and make your judgement then?