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With a popular ruling family, that is quite often the case. Insult to the royal family is a good rallying call for those interested in steering the realm in a particular direction.

Yes, it served my war-mongering agenda quite well.  I couldn't have pulled Enweil is the direction I did was it not for that event.  8)

*ahem* back on topic, if you please.

No. SA TOes other threads all the time, I see it perfectly fair that a thread about SA gets TOed by something totally random.  8)

In order to combat the fanatical theology of SA. VE became more fanatical... :o

Fanatical?

I don't consider "If the gods hated heathens, they'd have destroyed them themselves already" to be fanatical. Unless you mean fanatical apathy.

I wrote another one, sorry bussy I'm moving into my new home and it needs a hell lot of paint

And I wrote a quick RP too. Happy?  8)

The theory of the silent majority makes me doubt the wisdom of such a move. If certain features advantage a minority over the majority, each individual person in the minority will have a lot more incentives to vote than those in the majority, as they individually have more to gain than the person of the majority individually has to lose.

Use diplomats/ambassadors/priests to improve loyalty at an astonishing rate. Your realm decided it could allow several faiths and has no hegemony? Tough luck.

Their efforts are useless when all stats reset to 1% at TC. I'm an ambassador with excellent oratory skill, and using those tools is a waste of time. I'm better off using my dozen or so men to do police raids, anything else before a lord is chosen is a waste of time.

I have in the past used traders and the black market to feed a region if it has no lord. I've never seen 96% of food stolen, generally I consider 20% loss on a ox cart to be bad. We have also never had a problem finding a knight willing to take up an estate in a ruined region, unless we already have a shortage of knights, in which case it is kind of mad to be trying to take a new region. Can always just offer to subsidise his/her share for a while, or promise to fast track their own advancement up the ranks for their service. Our biggest problem these days is the actual TO seems to take forever to complete. Could be something about the size of the realm.

Subsistence levels seem to be something not to rely on. Every full turn the region improves a little, which ends subsistence levels, only then they starve back to to them, or so it appears.

If you like to elect Lords, one way to solve it is to have an election before the region is TO'd and then appoint the winner, though I really don't love that option. Perhaps we need some code to reduce the negative effects in a region until a lord is elected? I would imagine the code would need to hold the region in an almost stable position to stop people using this to try and get a few days were they can really invest time to bring a regions stats up though.

Enweil is surrounded by rogue regions. But we can't really expand because we lack the nobles. But so does everyone else, so nobody is taking these regions. And since we can't increase our income by expanding to compensate for the loss of two cities during the invasion, we can't restore our economy, meaning a stalemate is the best we could wish of any war. It's rather stupid. And the region is question was taken in order to increase my duchy. It was taken by the western army for the western duchies, without the support of the main army and without the ruler being there to appoint anyone. How are dukes to gain greater independence if they suffer so many penalties from being part of a realm? And even if we had been sponsored and it was organized by the whole realm, I've seen enough times how even that is way more difficult than it should be. This particular case just made me realize how tired I was of how this issue evolved and how nobody was saying anything about it yet.

One thing that is clearly needed is for a way for bankers to control the markets of lordless regions and for new lords to be able to switch duchies immediately. One week of being imperial is just aggravating, when you consider that this first week is when it'd be most useful.

Yep. I agree. This really slows things down a LOT. Most realms fighting wars these days don't really try to take and hold land anymore. War has changed to a game of beating your enemy to a pulp, removing their ability to fight a war at all, and then dealing with the region TO issues in the post-war-peace-treaty period.

I've been heavily involved in military affairs on a different occasions, and this is *exactly* how I adapted my strategy. "Kill Riombara and DoA first, then we can slowly think about setting up friendly colonies there, when everything is rogue and no one is left to bother us and interrupt repair efforts".

I love looting, and was not the least sad to pick this as the general strategy, but as others have said, it sucked that no alternative was viable. Hell, we even tried a colony takeover in Rines, but they are so bloody difficult to pull off. Does anyone know why they are so frigging difficult? Colonies should be encouraged, if you ask me, but that's a different discussion altogether...

So did I, but it's hard to disentangle all the factor and say if the burst in gold was really coming from that.

I seem to vaguely recall it being enabled for a short while, and then being disabled again permanently because of "bugs" or something. I might be thinking of another feature, though.

Well, a "political party" wouldn't fit that much in a medieval setting of nobility, as it would more be a "faction". In essence, a faction that mostly has one clear goal in mind and cooperates to obtain its goals. In that sense, I think a guild would be perfect.

E.g.: in Riombara, my character would prefer to see a Monarchy over the Republic it is now. To obtain that, I have been considering founding a guild (a political faction), that would strive for the establishment of a monarchy through the current system of a republic (NOT a rebellion).

Also, I don't know how much you travel around... but in most realms, it isn't that much an effort to travel to a region once to join a guild. As soon as several lords join, your guild can spread and it's even easier to join up.

I'm sticking to the point that guilds are by far enough for this. Not to mention that every self-respecting noble will not submit himself to a "political party" that subscribes daily goals and policies of the realm. Think of it as "hawks" and "doves".

We don't need game mechanics to control how players interact, not to mention that it would be completely unmedieval.

Political factions are extremely easily expressed as it is. Most realms have various factions, with a set of notable nobles promoting them. Fwuvoghor had a strong teroist monarchist faction constantly fighting the qyrvagg republicans, Enweil has a more passive bunch whom the more aggressive try to move out of inertia frequently, Springdale had a more liberal and culturally open branch staunchly opposed by the isolationist one, etc. etc.

It's often implicit more than explicit, and better this way. Not to mention that political parties are a !@#$ invention to begin with.  >:(

Katja was well known for using  her connection to the rulership of Enweil to try to avoid punishment. She would often threaten the judge with war with Enweil if they banned her.

War was already declared, and there was a prisoner treaty with explicit articles about infils. And the royal family was not the main source of outrage, very little of the calls for revenge actually came from them at all.

Over the years, many new features have been implemented and that had probably unintended effects of making expansion much more difficult. It is now almost impossible to do a friendly takeover and then maintain the high sympathy in realms where lords are elected.

For example, ox carts used to produce no or little waste from my memory, and brigands have been made to steal a bunch of these transfers to favor caravans use instead. However, new regions without lords cannot set purchase orders, and as such caravans are completely useless in them. Bankers have also lost their options to move food around, and have much less power over warehouse settings in regions. As such, since most regions TOed tend to lack food, starvation always hits as soon as the TO completes, there is then no effective way to feed the new region, and sympathy drops to 1% within a day or two. And since control is often at occupied when the region is taken, ox carts aren't an alternative. Out of 100 bushels sent to a new region captured, 96 or so were stolen by brigands. Who can afford such a ratio to feed new regions? Even if people had caravans they couldn't sell directly to the region until a lord is elected.

Furthermore, the maintenance modifiers by duchy just aggravate the situation. It was desired to disfavor imperial regions in order to give incentives to lords to align themselves to a duchy... But all new regions are necessarily imperial. Maintenance efforts and therefore much less effective than they used to be. And to make matters worse: even when a lord is finally elected, it takes a full seven days before he can actually switch allegiance to a duchy. So that can easily mean about 12 days where all efforts show no gains.

And how is subsistence-level farming supposed to work? The other day, our new region was starving. Then it returned to subsistence level farming. Then this morning it starved again and all stats reset to 1%.

Also, without any knights, the region suffers a control penalty on top of the lack of estate penalties. But how could it recruit a knight when it has 0% production? And because of this, production suffers and a vicious circle tends to be created, one that takes disproportionate amounts of work to break out of.

On top of that are control issues due to the size of your realm that have a nasty centralizing effect. How can we honestly prone ducal independence and large-realm penalties at the same time? These harsh penalties force ducal cooperation, as expanding your duchy without the aid of everyone else in the realm is starting to get pretty damn hard.

All of these new features aimed at modifying how people act with a bunch of penalties are stacking up with what I believe was an unintended effect: expanding is now a hell of a lot harder than it was when I joined the game. This, imo, is a problem. Even if most these features affect those who elect their lords a lot more, they all affect everyone. And everyone switching to appointment is not a valid solution, as it only reduces the negative impact of new behavior-control mechanics and would reduce the gameplay possibilities significantly.

It is becoming more and more frustrating to takeover new regions. And I've been seeing more and more people say, over the years, "No, we will no get into a conflict with our neighbor, because we do not have the means to sustain any more regions". It's suffocating the gameplay. Wars are significantly delayed because of maintenance issues, when they are not avoided completely. Players are spending more and more time and effort on region maintenance over the years, and less over actually fighting. By focusing on the duchies and regions so much, we increased overall maintenance needs and made in sort that instead of having a few bureaucrats maintaining a whole realm, you now need a few per duchy if you want to avoid maintenance problems and seek to maintain reasonable tax levels.

Partly right now there is little need to impose the tax, thus it is often easy to find a Duchy that will offer a 0% tax on your region. By making the regional taxes more important to the Duke, we should see proper competition in regards to these tax rates, creating another consideration as a Lord when deciding what Duchy to join. I would also imagine that those regions that can't switch to another Duchy may become the target of more aggressive taxes. If everything works as Vellos imagines, then suddenly Duke need to do much more for region lords in order to keep them and preserve their Duchy Taxes, which would become a much larger part of their income then it currently is.

Which, in the end, could simply be used to make the cities richer and the rurals poorer, though...

An SA Madina would make internal Terran politics very, very interesting, as we kind of hate Madina by and large. But, if it was SA supported, then foreign policy would become much, much more political.

Which would make it in others' interests to prevent such a thing from being allowed to happen in the first place.

My idea:

As is, the realm can only tax the "duchy treasury," which is fed by "duchy taxes."

I suggest, instead, that the realm can only tax the "city treasury" which is fed by "city taxes."

The "duchy treasury" still exists, and is a personal income for the duke alone.

What use does it have? Simple: the city tax can rake in gold for the realm. But that will weaken dukes. Dukes can respond with duchy taxes, which are currently underused. As the duchy treasury would be untaxed, it is essentially a levy by the duke on rural lords, as it currently is, but would have a stronger motive, as the reward for realms to deploy taxes on cities would be greater, due to the taxes actually being effective.

Interesting idea.

Currently, it's so damn difficult to get to apply ducal taxes, though. Most dukes don't ask for them, and lords can easily change ducal allegiance with extreme ease if ever you ask for more than they care to part with. And it's usually impossible to justify as you get more gold than any of them, too.

He doesn't mention anything there about knights on the Ducal share though, just that they could use the Dukes power to tax regions in the Duchy to supplement income in the case that the Cities taxes are subject to realm tax.

Well if he gives all of his city's gold to the ducal share, then where do his knights get their income from?

You mean that Royal captured in the the lowly act of sabotage?

No, of course not. That royal on a diplomatic mission savagely arrested.  8)

Regardless, though, there was a specific treaty against executions of prisoners at the time. Breaking the treaty was supported by a great number of Riombara's nobles, and the offender was merely asked to leave, where he then went to serve in an allied realm that later backstabbed Enweil. Southern propaganda might have made people forget, but *that* is the reason that Enweil was on a war for the destruction of Riombara, lest it receive the head of either the executioner or Delvin as compensation, which (unsurprisingly) Riombara was never willing to grant. Executions of royals should not be taken lightly.

Realms should be able to tax cities as proxies for duchies.

That will provoke dukes to seek "supplemental income:" ducal taxes. As is, ducal taxes are, in my experienced, widely under- or unused. If the realm could tax a city it would provoke the duke to seek vassals who he can tax. This will promote competition for vassals, as a larger duchy could run a lower ducal tax rate and still have the duke acquire the same income.

Except that if you take on knights with a share of the duchy income, as far as I know, they don't get any estates. In which case you are paying them and getting nothing in return, or just about.