People don't usually try to starve rural regions. They try to starve cities. With the new market system, it is even more difficult to starve cities now but once cities do starve, they lose their population super quickly.
Look at Krimml. The city has less than 300 people now and it was like that for a month. How long do you think that city will take to recover back to 80%? Unless it is surrounded by regions with full populations, the city will take at least 8 months or more.
Unless the realm has a natural deficit or the defenders really suck at food management, starving cities is extremely difficult and tenuous. It takes a long time to do this, and all they need to do is send one steward to foreign lands and he can continuously buy food with the bonds given to him, food that just teleports over the siege lines.
If you let your attackers starve you, you
deserve to be crippled. The scheme I described above is so easy and effective it makes me feel filthy for mentioning it.
Do you think I don't know the impacts of starvation? I play in D'Hara, for god's sake, I can't even count then number of times our cities starved. Yet you don't see me whining about how long it takes to recuperate. Even if the last time was the result to a continental collapse of the markets due to number-playing from Tom.
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.
1) There are still plenty of wars in most realms.
2) You can't compare now with then. Back then, taxes were collected realm-wide, making region loss not that dramatic for anyone. The new allegiance system with its free-for-all mentality hadn't been pushed onto anyone. There was no such thing as estate efficiency or lack of control due to estates, realms could expand as far as their military allowed it and the returns were far from as diminishing as they are now. Realms were like ant colonies, where the general controlled the whole forces and not following his orders would usually put you in serious trouble.
3) Looting isn't overpowered. All of the damage achieved by it can be more effectively achieved by TOs, if you have the nobles for it. If you see more looting being done than 5 years ago, it's because tying tax efficiency (and previously control) over the number of nobles a realm has makes expansion for a lot of realms nonviable, not because looting somehow became overpowered.
