We often come to the Dev team with changes we'd like made that we think will make the game more fun, however we rarely ever talk about what we as players can do to make the game more fun for ourselves and each other. Most of the time the way to do this involves finding interesting new ways to start meaningful conflicts, conflicts within realms, conflicts between realms, even conflicts between two individual nobles.
Here are a few ideas people should consider to keep things interesting, all point out specific high power positions in the game that often get neglected, but they also explain ways for lower ranking players to get these elites involved:
For Judges:
Organize prisoner exchanges with enemy judges. You offer to release a prisoner if they do the same. Now you may be thinking "Wait what if they don't hold up their end of the bargain". Exactly! Now you've got a personal enemy. If you really don't trust them, demand a hostage. Their noble must offer to join your realm, or an additional noble can be sent to perform this service. If they break the deal then you can ban and execute their noble. Of course if he's real sneaky and all that fails it might be time to take some revenge on his realm mates with some quality time on the wrack.
For everyone who's not a judge, you can put pressure on the judge to get more involved. When you get out of jail and read your mail look for a list of captured enemies from a recent battle, then demand to know why you had to rot in a rat infested hell hole when they could easily have organized an exchange. Protest his indifference to your suffering, challenge him to a duel if you must.
For Bankers:
Get serious about regulating trade. Make sure no one is trading to enemies. Somewhere down the line we might have a black market to make this even more intriguing but there wont be much motivation if we don't have active bankers.
For everyone else, I hear the enemy is offering high prices for food.
For Dukes:
If a lord leaves your duchy, get mad! That's a betrayal. Have a duel with that duke, maybe bring your whole duchy into it, knights and all. It's the closest to private warfare the game can accommodate and that's really not so bad. Imagine two dukes four lords and four knights all squaring off and dueling on the same day. That would be an event worthy of tales. I'd find it infinitely more exciting then even a very large ordinary battle.
For vassals of these dukes, take a look at your taxes and see who's offering competitive rates.
Who else has ideas for how we can play the game in a more fun way using just the mechanics we have here?
