A point I've made on the IRC I feel the need to bring up here:
Large hollowed out realms are bad. But splitting large hollowed our realms into multiple small hollowed out realms is not any better. Arguably, it is worse.
The argument around capital radius shrinkage (and by capital radius, I mean the region mechanic, not the troop mechanic, which afaik does not work off the capital) was that it would force smaller realms, which would be more dense, and thus more dynamic. And largely, this is accurate. At least, in places where all realms basically just grow into rogue lands, without competition except from the monster spawns when people grow too much. Namely, Dwilight.
That's not the effect, though, in more dynamic continents, where land is mostly taken from other realms, and significant player migrations between realms have been seen. The effect is actually the opposite there.
Because if you take one large 21 region realm with 21 nobles, and you then tinker the capital distance allowance to force realms to be even smaller, you then end up with, say, three 7 region realms with 7 nobles each. Congratulations, you've made the realm full of smaller realms! But each realm just maintains the same low 1:1 density, so you've done nothing about all about everyone already being a lord and having no reason to expand. Not only that, but if you consider government positions, and duchies, the 21 region realm with 1 duchy had 26 titles to share around. The broken down version? 36 titles to spread around. For the same 21 nobles. So you've got even less competition going on, and even more titles where only 1 candidate runs or, worse, none at all. All while taking that pool of people that could interact with each other and breaking them down into small parts with very few people to interact with.
Small is not always better. And I say this despite historically always having been a fan of small realms, and having had many of my fondest memories in them. But the community isn't what it used to be. And promoting small realms was never about preventing successful dynamic realms from becoming sizable, or at least shouldn't have been.
To Gabanus,
On point 7, I haven't seen an RTO as of late. But it's in the same spirit of things than the rest. Would rather not wait for it to become a problem before dealing with it.
On point 8, because I feel player actions should stop player actions. If you want an army to stop looting you, attack it. If peasant militias due to looting must remain (those due to travel should absolutely be utterly removed), then they should spawn in lower numbers (maximum 4k CS in the best of cases, more typically 2k CS), and they should spawn with the scattered condition, rallying only on the following turn, so that when an army decides on whether to loot or not, they already know ahead of time what forces they will fight. This would eliminate the risk of having a 7k army loot, and after the 14th noble does it, 10k militia spawns: "SURPRISE!". It's dumb, and it seriously limits tactics.
On 9, I wouldn't have them return. I mean, I'd love for realms to have an option to actively move population around, but I'm not counting on it. Looting is supposed to hurt, reduced population is one way to achieve that. The kill count could be lowered to compensate, though. After all, looting many regions in a row would mean population moves back and forth, they aren't all lost. I think it would be too much hassle to script something for a return mechanic, but the natural migration of high pop regions to depopulated regions could certainly be increased.
