Thought for discussion:
Maybe frequent investments by the same character with no family contributions should suffer penalties/diminishing returns just like requests for family gold?
I want to be clear I'm not making an accusation of abuse. Heavy investment, IMHO, is not abuse. I'm just wondering what people would think of placing the same or similar restrictions on family investments as we do on family gold.*
*Especially as investments are an infinite loop. If all recipients of taxes reinvest in their family, it generates more gold, for more investments next time. This can be continued ad infinitum to allow a small realm to accumulate large sums of gold. With, say, a 5% return on investment (not counting if you raise productivity from below 100% and thus gain food output for sale), it would take about, what, 15 investments to double your money? If you ran 1 investment every 4 days, you could double in 60 days? If a whole realm did that, you could double your realm's effective income in a couple of months, provided you didn't spend any of the excess gold and had perfect coordination.
90% of my investments are at a 10 gold loss. I have invested often in Iato and rurals in Fheuv'n, and except this last time, it was always at a 10 gold loss. It was not an infinite loop of money creation. Rather, that 10 gold penalty was my "fee" to not need to take a honor hit and to not have to bother redistributing it.
I am overall in disfavor of restrictions to how we can use family wealth, because of 1) there are so little ways to use it and 2) it dictates us how to RP our family. This second point is what bothers me the most. Why should the game tell me that it's not okay for well-off family members, who in their days received plenty of help, to back up another family member reach his ambitions. Nobody outside of the family needs to know who gives money to who, and there are plenty of ways to RP justify "investing" in family abroad.