But hey, wait up. Estates weren't made to be punishment. Estates were made the way they are now to give knights some power on the overall scheme of the realm. "A region shouldn't be able to survive without a knight" - that's what we thought then, because many people didn't bother with oaths at all, they preferred to keep their money to themselves.
Okay, nowadays we think "fine, then the region should be able to survive without a knight, but at non-optimum values, like 50%" Except maybe cities. Optimum values should take in regards the local population, and estate requirements. A city can't be able to function at 50% without any knights, it's still a fortune in a single person's hands.
Estates were the punishment for people not having knights (get knights or your regions will not work). The work around before estates was having high-cross wide taxes that everyone received instead, however that was nixed with the "administration fee" - effectively making Realm taxes at above annoyance levels being useless except to maybe give the Council some gold. Before a Realm could tax its cities fairly heavily, allowing for that gold to be redistributed to the rural, duchy, and unaligned knights easily.
Now if you want gold redistributed to rural knights: City produces gold - offers to buy food - rural offers to sell food - gold is transfered to rural - knight receives small % of gold
It's all a very long process to get a low-gold producing region some extra funds at the end of the day.
I still want to see a middle ground - regions that can function properly without knights, but something extra added in that makes it worth while for knights and lords to have an Oath exchanged between them. We're lacking that kind of positive incentive - all we have are "your regions don't work right" warnings and half-mangled realms as a result.
Estates have *so* much potential to be interesting, unique, and viable aspects of game play. Right now they are just a gimmick to make Lords require knights.
