One benefit of the ability to delegate more responsibilities to stewards is that it gives new players learning opportunities so they can know how to manage things before they get their first region.
I think there's a line to be drawn between buttons the Lord can press that require authority and those that merely maintain the administration.
Managing estates is not something that can be delegated. Period. That is part of the Lord's feudal duty to and authority over his vassal knights, and needs to remain something that only the Lord can do.
That I totally agree with. I assume you mean "managing estates" as in changing their size, kicking knights out, setting the lords share of taxes etc. I remember back when knights had to "manage their estates" by setting them to either authority or production.
I wonder though if it might be worthwhile for all knights to be able to influence the tax-rate of their own estates, just so they can get practice managing a tax system. It would be a good way to encourage more p2p interaction. Lords will have to warn their knights not to over-tax their peasants and might have to expell a tyrannical knight for being greedy.
Others of these fall in the middle between these two; personally, off the top of my head, I would say that building infrastructure and holding courts both require the Lord's authority, while setting taxes probably falls just this side of the "administration" line.
I'm ambivalent about the militia ones.
I'm pretty sure historically a lord wouldn't need to personally hold court like that. It even says here that medieval stewards had to oversee judicial proceedings:
https://www.sfsu.edu/~medieval/Volume6/steward.html#:~:text=On%20the%20estate%2C%20the%20steward,perhaps%20others%20with%20various%20duties.
You could have it be that a knight only holds court over their own peasants. In mechanical terms, you make it the same hold-court process but apply a penalty based on estate size. So if a knight would normally cause a 5% change but their estate is only 20% of the land they'd only cause a 1% change. You could also have a limit that if the estate is too small they don't gain this ability. In addition the court time should be only 3 hours or so since the knight is judging fewer peasants. The knights holding court also doesn't prevent the lord from doing so, though all can only hold court once per day. Now I know what you're thinking "that sounds like it would give a lord with knights an advantage", yup it would give them a small advantage provided they have loyal knights who will cooperate with them, and that's a good thing. IMO any mechanic that says "You can gain a small, non-game-breaking bonus if you talk to another human being and convince them to do something" is a good mechanic. This could make for a lot of fun p2p and roleplay potential. When a region is on the edge of revolt the lord calls his knights to help him restore order, holding court by day while policing the streets at night.
Creating a new building I'd agree should require the lord's authority, but repairing them shouldn't.
If we're concerned about too much delegation, the easiest solution is to limit the numbe of roles the lord can assign to a single knight. Also I've suggested this before, giving each role a different name would be cool.
So in summary
Suggestion one:
Stewards- remain the same
Magistrate- can hold court
Warden- can recruit or disband militia
Master Mason- can repair buildings and fortifications
Suggestion two:
Eliminate magistrate and instead any knight can hold court in a region but with a lesser impact than the lord.
Suggestion three:
Stewards get food and repair of infrastructure buildings
Wardens get militia and repair of fortifications and RCs
Court can be the version from either suggestion 1 or 2.
Allow stewards to embezzle from their regions like a banker can.
That would be cool, especially if we ever got around to giving the banker investigatory powers.
