Why fight if it doesn't hurt the enemy? Why even bother going to war in the first place?
We had plenty of wars back when population had zero effect on production and gold/food income. Why do you think that was? Oh, right, because fighting a war was fun. You were free to always grow one more region and that was the main way of damaging your enemy. The only reasons peasants started to affect things was to give looting some power and to bring realism to the game, but it has always been imbalanced in my opinion and made looting/starvation tactics too crippling for a game.
It's all this realism BS that's bringing the game down in general and making it less fun over all because it becomes less a game and more like real life, which to be honest, is not fun at all.
