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Indeed, and we approve of bringing more people in!  We need those nobles  ;)

We need more empty shells following orders and setting estates, especially! Make sure to turn your family into loyal zombie BM players! ;)

For those who don't know, this dates back to ~2004, when Enweil took it upon itself to eradicate all Tyrannies on Beluaterra.

Then they started going after monarchies.  They parked a huge army next to Old Grehk's capital for several days before finally relenting (I don't remember the reason, if I ever knew it).

And I'm proud of Enweil for this. Not because I dislike tyrannies, but because they had the guts to bring on great wars for ideological reasons. And in my experience these tend to be fun.

Not enough wars are fought for ideology (or religion) imo.

Mechanics-wise, I prefer theocracies: ruler bonus to stats of the region he's in + ability to appoint himself as duke. Monarchs have the former but lack the latter. Tyrannies, as far as I can remember, go the other way around. Theocracies have both, and as such I greatly favor them to monarchies and tyrannies.

Republics and democracies? Meh. What's the point? One can have regular elections as a tyrant, if so he wishes.

People don't use weighted votes? I love them. I use them whenever I can. And push for them whenever I can too. Gives an incentive to lords to share a piece of their pie and to compete for knights. Them regular knights need a bit of lovin', after all. Hence my love for  republican theocracies: great power at the top, but great incentive to care for the bottom. With the extra stability of being able to totally muzzle exiles that come in batches from elsewhere by denying them any lordship and disregarding their opinions when it comes to voting.

Seems like more stuff disappeared that were built in my absence.

What's the ETA to not having any knights not ruin your hopes of your region ever quickly recovering anymore?

3/4. Maybe make CTO'd regions have higher states that other regions? Maybe, if a colony is formed, make it trigger an immediate productivity boost around the home realm?

CTOs, imo, should absolutely be easier to do.

I'm not sure we understand each other. I was proposing that newly created characters get the realm-wide messages of the realm they are being created in. They're not random foreign nobles, they are nobles of your realm.

New characters don't appear out of the blue; presumably they just turned eighteen or achieved recognition as high nobility, but they were there before. They are going to receive tomorrow's messages; why not have them receive yesterday's messages?

Indeed we misunderstood each other. You first spoke of "receiving realm-wide letters", no "having access to messages sent within their realm prior to their date of arrival".

I support the latter.

No one in Caerwyn will talk to Allison.  She is trying to convince them to capitulate!

Allison left a pretty haughty letter at a temple for the elders of VE. Got a chuckle, sent a "who is this schmuck to treat us as a courtier?" letter, and threw it away.

Good times.

Negative Reinforcement: Make council positions have costs. Got a ruler? Well, he has to maintain such a large staff... he has a "tax penalty" of 35 gold (maybe X Gold penalty per region of the realm?). Same for banker, general, judge... this means that council positions have a legitimate reason to demand that cities pay taxes.

Force people to take away people's gold to... throw it out the window? I hate this idea. The game has way too much negative incentives as it is.

At some point you have to consider, do I want to try what I can to keep things secret, or just share it with the realm so that everyone feels involved? Keeping things too much behind closed doors also frustrates a decent amount of nobles, people want to be involved, rather then just order following nobles. Ofcourse, you can't share everything, but most, you can.

Many people already feel the current compromising hard, without random foreign nobles getting a chunk of their messages. Don't underestimate some people's paranoia, despite their good will.

I've yet to be in a realm that discusses anything of importance to the enemy in public. If you're not in an army, you'll pretty much have no idea what the realms military is doing in most realms. Most you tend to see is maybe some scoutings, a few arguments about something and maybe a diplomatic update from the ruler on something that every other ruler already knows. So I don't really see the harm in giving a glimpse at the past weeks messages.

Though this does raise the point that the game has become somewhat segregated. Most orders used to go realm wide, but the army system has made that disappear. This has very effectively shut out those that aren't in an army from easily following what's happening in the war their realm is fighting. Mostly that means courtiers etc. live in their own bubble while the army lives in its own.

For example, in Darka my priest character knows about the armies of the realm very little. All he hears is a few battle reports now and then. He has no idea where they're going, when they're coming home etc. He has no idea that within the army there have been some nice arguments that would have been fun to read. That information used to be very public. Now it would be an hassle to ask for updates all the time so you could live a little through the other nobles in the realm. He loses out on a lot.

That's probably also one point to consider in retention. If your character is not in the right segment of the realm, you just miss a lot of what happens. A lot of that being missed used to be in the realm wide channel.

I have. "most realms" isn't all realms. And it's not only military orders I'm talking about, but more like political plans. It's already enough to have to worry about leaks and spies, but random give-aways? As it has often been said, the integrity of the message system must not be mined or people will use outside communication methods to compensate.

I already did state that I disagree with the war on it, criminalization is just stupid and costly. It should just be treated like cigarettes as far as I'm concerned.

If the government doesn't curtail some individual freedoms, then individuals will. So you pick between an accountable government to protect everyone from everyone, or letting anyone do absolutely anything they want. It's the principle where everyone's freedom "stops where others' start". To disagree with the government's duty to curtail some individual liberties is to oppose the prohibition of criminal acts. Look at countries where the government is too weak to curtail individual freedoms: warlords do it instead. Usually quite brutally.

This should probably be a feature request, but...

Can we have the army banners represented on the green battlefields? I'd love to see the armies charging at each other.

Don't they?

This is a very good idea. It establishes context and gets the player looking forward to the next turn. I can also act like a built in tutorial on what it means to act midevally.

I disagree. It'll discourage leaders to use the public channels to discuss and plan as random newbies might get their messages and share it with their new realm.

Is it lonely up there on your high horse?

Obviously I was exaggerating but the US' drug policies aren't far off from the liberty- encroaching policies of the soviet union. Let me clarify since obviously you don't appreciate subtlety. The soviet union actively policed what kind of music people listened to, while this is more blatant than trying to control which substances one is allowed to ingest into ones body, it basically equates to the same thing: a curtailment of individual liberties by the state

And I was born in the soviet bloc, so don't think I don't know what I'm talking about.

Also, just for the record, the soviet union wasnt communist. Not in any meaningful Marxist way. It was simply dictatorial.

Except music doesn't have negative economic externalities, while drugs do.

Curtailment of individual liberties by the state is necessary. One just decides how far one is willing to go, and on what grounds.

I think one problem is that our "incentives" are to avoid "bad things happening". We should focus more on rewards instead of punishments I think. Too much peace punishes realms that can't get into a war, while making it even harder for them to fight a war in the future. For small realms this is especially a problem. (and I realize this is suppossed to be exempted for small realms, but since small realms are quite relative and differ greatly on different continents, it is still affecting a small realm like Coria, on Atamara, and there is nothign we can do about it because we're too small to fight in the massive war that is taking place.)

A declaration of war will destroy our realm, and without one, our realm is being destroyed by Too Much Peace. We'd like to go to war, but can't without changes anyway.

Absolutely, all "incentives" so far have been along the lines of "do what we want or your life will become hell".

Rather than having penalties for peace (though I don't really object the current ones, though I'd like for some tweaks regarding the acceptable taxes to consider food shortages), we could just as easily boost control in realms who are at war, the bonus increasing for how many realms it is at war with. It'd also help realms that are being gang banged a little.

Treaty friction was supposed to add an incentive to not have all those extra treaties, by making you work to maintain them. I think the general consensus, though. has been that people *want* to have all those treaties. They don't like it when they can't have them.

Partly, but it's mostly the fact that it wants to make us put great work just to maintain the status quo.

Well, maybe we should reduce the peasant casualties from looting, or at the very least make it impossible to slaughter hundreds of peasants every day with impunity. I've always found it quite unbelievable that peasant mobs would take on professional armies that are 10x stronger or more, repeatedly, when 99.5% of those who did it before them died a pointless death. It would make much more sense for the mobs to attack the individual units that trigger them. 100 peasants attacking 500 professional soldiers is never believable. 100 peasants attacking a unit of 50 men is. There would be casualties on both sides. If the unit wins, the peasants all die. If the peasant wins, the unit is destroyed or routed (much like in actual battle) and the surviving peasants remain as a mob until TC. This would make looting more risky for the attackers, making them more reluctant to risk their units for a bit of production damage, and it would still cost peasant lives, but not on a ridiculous scale.

Also, this should probably be made into a separate topic :P

The big reason looting has become more popular is because of estates. Before, looting was rare because a TO was never out of the question. Now, with lack of nobles, we can be fairly certain that many regions will not be TOed, so one no longer cares for sympathy and one tries to deny his opponents in the only way other than TOs: revolt.