Knights will take an estate, usually in city if they can, but there’s no benefit to the lord. It just means he has to share his gold with somebody.
You say lords have no incentives to set up estates as they only lose gold, and yet you recognize that knights have no trouble finding vacant estates. Why do you want to incite people to do things they clearly need no incentive to do and are already doing anyways?
No it doesn’t. One noble can rule a region just as easily as 4, and the more nobles there are, the less revenue. That’s why the most powerful realm on Dwilight (Morek) has only 1.3 nobles per region, and the most powerful realm on Beluaterra (Riombara) has about 1.2 nobles per region.
You oppose what I say without contradicting it. I said "more nobles means more power". I did not talk about density in that sentence. I don't have access to the stats, but Riombara has a lot of nobles, hence they have a lot of power. They also have a ton of wealthy regions, far superior to average. As for Morek, it has the second-highest noble count, and is pretty much tied with a bunch of other realms which, a few months ago, could easily have been said to be comparable in strength. But again, all of these top realms in strength are the top realms in noble count.
More nobles means more resources, be it by being able to manage a greater number of regions or by having a superior tax tolerance and tax efficiency. Density changes little to this, it's all about raw noble count.
First of all it’s not true. Secondly, the benefits include the following:
• It recognizes the inherent strength of the team, thereby promoting teamwork.
• It assigns value to knights and encourages dukes and lords to attract knights to their regions.
• By making the increments cumulative, it recognizes that a team is more powerful than the sum of its parts, which in turn promotes increased density.
• It provides you with some background information about the char you’re interacting with and where you rank in comparison.
Look, there are already values assigned to honour, prestige, and about 20 different fame scores. This IMO has a lot more practical use than those other ones, and frankly, there's no downside. Either players will find it useful, or they'll ignore it.
It's true enough that the realms you've stated as super powers are the realms with high noble counts. The three realms with the most nobles on Dwilight are the three realms with the strongest militaries. I'm pretty sure similar statements can be said about the rest of the continents.
It also doesn't promote teamwork, it promotes internal competition.
It doesn't really assign any
additional value, because clearly knights are already valued given that vacant estates are abundant and many lords try to attract knights, and because I've not seen any suggestion as to what this new stat should do, and vanity stats don't create value.
The increments are flawed by design because, depending on how you calculate them, they either reward large realms that need no additional rewarding just for being big, or they incite large realms to micro-manage estate distribution which is most unlikely to generate any fun. Nor is simply adding a new stat likely to change anything about density, because density will only change if the number of nobles on a continent increases or the number of regions on it decreases, and this stat has no apparent power over either.
As for background, we can already look up H/P and the titles are all displayed. People don't really pay attention to the other game-given stats (H/P and fame, namely), why would they care for this one? There are downsides. I already mentioned them. Others expressed concerns as well. This feature would only have downsides, and no advantage.
