Title: Refugees instead of militia
Summary: There is already a mechanism for peasants to travel from one region to another to escape warfare. Tweak this mechanism such that, in cases of looting or takeovers, more peasants will be refugees than forming militias.
Details: The mechanism already exists, this is just a matter of tweaking numbers.
One possible issue could appear when all neighboring regions are already at max pop. I think the game can handle this, since I have seen regions go temporarily above max pop. I imagine the peasants would move back to neighboring regions when the situation there improves; if they can't (for example if there is continuous warfare), eventually this population pool would die as the actual population decreases slowly to the maximum amount. That's ok.
This is how I imagine it works; not having seen the code it is possible it isn't and that new code would be needed.
Benefits: This would make war less devastating. Currently it is easy to completely ravage an area. Normal looting and takeovers push peasants into militia which get easily slaughtered; breeding back this population takes a very long time.
With this mechanism, the population would not disappear but become refugees. If the enemy army goes away they could easily repopulate the region, bringing it back to full production more rapidly.
This would have several advantages:
-It would incite losing realms to sign peace, as they could more easily rebound afterwards.
-It would force those who wish to permanently destroy an area to actually use the brutal looting options with the consequences attaching. It is now much too easy to act all honorable and do nothing but takeovers, while in fact genocoding the population.
Possible Exploits: With the absence of peasant militia it would become easier for small units to loot alone effectively.
