So, what would you consider to be some criteria that couldn't be gamed?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any. Hence why I favor removing the rule altogether.
(FWIW - I can't remember it ever happening the the 5.5 years I've been playing, even though I've seen two that I think were rather blatant.)
This only reinforces what I wished. Even when blatant, it's easy to make up an excuse and then profit from plausible deniability to not be punished.
Over the years, all of the other restrictions on secessions have been lifted, I think we should finish this trend and remove the strategic secession ban. It would make it fair for everyone, as right now it gives greater rights to rulelawyers and otherwise deceptive people over less knowledgeable well-intended people. Further, there are many drawbacks to splitting off your realm, namely when it comes to communication and coordination. With a constantly decreasing player base, it can become harder and harder to fill certain government positions, especially with competent people. There are less and less candidates for lordships as well. The more fractionned a realm becomes, the more difficult it becomes for all new realms to find competent people for all the positions. The drawbacks are hard to quantify, but they are important and present. Furthermore, these communication gaps allow for newly formed realms to seek new means to differentiate themselves, and eventually drift away from their host realm. Generally speaking, you have much more odds of having conflicts with many small realms than few large ones.
I would also do with the strategic capital move rule, because that too can be gamed, and I've seen it. However, I would implement a new dynamic to the distance from capital penalties. Allow people to move their capital to a border region if they want, but have the game calculate the most central point in the realm and the realm's radius from that point, and then add extra penalties to all regions that are beyond that radius from the capital. As such, if a realm was 7 regions wide with the old capital in the center and decided to move their capital to the border, inflict considerably harsher distance from capital penalties to all regions more than 3 regions away from the new capital. Therefore, you could do away with that rule that is too easily gamed, and have a fairer game that will passively balance those who would move their capital on the border to help them in their war. Such new penalties should be exponential, though, to make sure that the regions just outside of the normal control radius aren't too severely affected while those at twice the distance of the control radius and punished in a crippling way, because it's not always possible to have a capital in the most central region of the realm (as it may not even be a city).
