Rejected: Auto 'loot'

[Nosferatus]

Title: Auto loot

Summary:
The longer an enemy unit occupies a region the more 'damage' it does to production and or morale.
This can represent the effects of an enemy army present in the region over time.
The unit's ability to preform auto loot could be limited to a unit type or require the unit to invest some hours or gold in order to us it.

Details:
Looting hurts regions allot yet summons peasant militia that can really break an army down.
A less aggressive and indirect approach could be auto looting where no hours have to be invested every time an action is preformed like looting and taking over.
It could work like digging in where a one time investment of hours is required, or by changing unit type.
In the end it would take much more time to damage a region instead of looting, but cause similar effects.
 
Benefits:
Less active players can rally in certain regions with the entire army and slowly damage the enemy's local economy without having to login every turn.
Rural battles could increase by luring the enemy into battle by simply staying present, encouraging rural battles and a defensive attack.

Possible Downsides/Exploits:

Larger realms would benefit from this especially if its power is troop or unit based.
It could be balanced out to benefit smaller realms only or more.
Combining this with minimum looting could be too powerful.

[Sharpspeare]

Interesting Idea. My concern is the possible downside you mentioned "Larger realms would benefit from this especially if its power is troop or unit based." Any idea how this could be balanced?

[Anaris]

Nope. You want to loot, you need to actually order looting.

The effect you describe does, however, exist to a certain extent already.

[Chenier]

I don't understand why you'd want this. If you want to damage a region, do so. If you don't, don't. I don't see a reason to benefit idlers. The game is based on logging in once per turn.

[Zakky]

If you don't want to devastate a region, just bring a small unit.

Maybe instead of auto loot, why not ask for a feature something along the line of limited looting where you can decide how many men you want to send to loot? If a small unit like 30 men loot a region for 8 hours it isn't the same as 150 men looting for 3 hours (which is the current minimum).

[Chenier]

If you just want to do a bit of damage, you can loot 3 hours for tax gold or for food. If you want to do more damage, you can spend full hours doing the more brutal stuff.

I really don't see any interest to adding passive damage. If one wants to damage an enemy, there are already mechanics for that. There's really zero reason not to use them.