Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:
- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.
Things I like and could possible be investigated more:
A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)
API exists, as far as I know, to create pages from external source (like some event in BM triggers the creation of a page with certain content). Not sure about updating an existing page through API.
I mostly agree.
Autonitifications sounds like a fair idea, keeping in mind to avoid it being spam. Completely legitimate to spam the realm for not having a description at all yet, or an empty bulletin. A bit less so for banners, which often take dev approval. Not a great idea for outdated bulletins and such though (which I know you didn't mention, I am), unless we want to lose relics of the past like Outer Tilog's (or code in an exception for that one). Forcing meaningless changes would not really be productive though.
Armies have descriptions? Where the hell can we read them? Maybe I'm just clueless because the armies I can see had none set.
I completely agree with giving players more information at character creation, always have. I've made relevant suggestions in the past, at least some of which are now live. Activity meters and chattyness meters have been suggested a few times, though the concern is always promoting spamming. Perhaps a breakdown of average messages per day, broken down by message type and by sender could help give a better idea. One could therefore see if "this realm has an average of 5 messages per day! but an average of 1 person writing per day... maybe I'll pick the other with the average of 4 messages per day sent by 2.5 people per day instead."
More record keeping would be nice. In the past many would do this on the wiki, but often only for rulership, mostly in non-elected realms, and only for as long as the record keeper was around. The list of past government members, how they got there (election, appointment, rebellion), how they got out (resigned, election, protests, died, wound), would be nice. Even if it only starts keeping records now.
Giving more things to do to knights is always a double-edged sword, though. This game is built on the premises of masses of knights blindly following orders into warfare. The game's culture has evolved much since, and so have demographics, with the reality of things being closer to equal masses of knights and lords sometimes following orders into the occasional war, but still. If the new things we give to knights remove from their ability to follow orders and go to war, then we are further handicapping realms' capacity to go to war, which is already at a historical low.
Knights having nothing to do in peace is somewhat problematic, but really, no one has anything to do in peace. Lord have more buttons to click, sure, but most of them you never touch. One doesn't change the tax rate every day, nor build new recruitment centers, and so on. Once a region is set, it's auto-pilot, you mostly forget it, at which point it's really only a vanity title (of decreasing value as the number of knights:lords wanes). The ruler might be in on some continental regal private club chat, but that rarely extends to all lords when it does not also extend to everyone.
Two things come to mind, though. First is to increase incentives to go to war and for what knights can do in war. The most prominent of which is looting. Make it more desirable (without making it cripple the victims for ages). Both by the ones at the top and lower down. For example, you could increase the gold and food reward going to all looting actions, without taking it out of the region's treasury (stealing goods directly from the locals). Add the option to knights to specifically target heathens, not just temples. For peace time, consider Civ-like quests. "This city-state wants you to go clear that barbarian camp nearby" kind of thing, but at the knight level (or both knight and realm level?). "You meet an aristocratic refugee offers you a reward for coming to clear the bandits in his region", which can be in foreign lands. Doesn't even need to be something external like actual monsters, could just be a link that appears only to the player once he gets there. Rewards can be gold and h/p. "Your subjects seek spiritual guidance from your part", "your subjects would like you to import food good from far away", "your subjects would want you to come deal out justice", and so on. Ideally these things shouldn't trigger too much during wars, if at all, though, to avoid dissuading knights from participating in what is the core of the game. Because let's remember that the only way knights are getting lordships, outside of war, is through player decay, and that's not something we should be aiming for.
