I've been brainstorming a couple of things and I want to know what you guys think.
Contract System
As I've mentioned before, I'm going to use a lot of stuff from Grand Ambitions for Dark Republic. One of the things I wanted to use in both mods was the concept of "unit contracts".
The unit contract system is an alternative method of experience designed specifically for enormous unit sizes. The basic idea is that you can prioritize experience gain based on a rank you give newly formed units (Conscript, Regular, Veteran, Elite, etc), simulating how an army might transfer good soldiers to more specialized, more elite units. All garrisoned units will have access to a pool of troops of differing experience, and depending on the priority of that particular unit they may be able to pull experienced troops from other units or lose their own.
The challenge would be to balance the composition of units. Too many elite units and they'll become mediocre and expensive. Too many conscripts and you're not effectively taking advantage of your troops.
Immediate pluses:
a) No ultra elite peasants. A band a war-hardened peasants armed with clubs will only remain so until they garrison. When they do, those elite peasants will be sucked into regular army units whilst new peasants will take rank.
b ) Experienced troops are earned in combat and not trained. You can't just make someone elite.
c) Elite units are valuable but not so rare you always try to keep them out of combat.
Immediate negatives:
a) No training system. There might be a way to adapt it but there's no immediate need for one.
b ) Might be confusing for some players.
c) People might get really attached to their super-elite clubmen and might not want to see them getting taken apart into different units.
d) Gets hairy with multiple races.
Other ideas:
It might be cool to buy and sell soldiers by level of experience.
Populations
One of the critical #1 functions is to get Kingdoms to be huge population centers. How exactly that is going to be executed I have no idea yet, but there's a couple of directions I could go, and honestly I'm not decided yet.
OPTION A: Keep things pretty much the same, but allow housing to carry much, much more population with generally much higher levels of prestige (like maybe 10 times the current prestige). This is definitely the most "doable", you could probably do it right now.
OPTION B: Flip things around. Let food resources determine population growth, and allow housing prioritize where people eventually settle as opposed to prestige. In this option there really isn't a strict upper limit to population, simply as population reaches Malthusian levels it'll slow down and eventually stop.
OPTION C: Allow "rural sprawl" across kingdoms that hold populations but are not specifically built by the player. I like this idea but I'm hesitant to suggest it because I'm not entirely sure how to do it. Compatible with Option A and B.
OPTION D: Allow for migrations based on a variety of factors. I don't this would be difficult but some people might get frustrated when all their people ditch their hellholes. It would be a interesting way to make cities compete with each other.
Well that's it for now. If I get the time I'll try and prototype some simple things into python.
