What I would like to see is the opportunity for banditry, murder, and fear to
dominate 75% of the lands, with people banding together to form outposts and
being overrun, and generally more chaos, more danger, and of course more
opportunity to reap the untapped resources or ambush the resource-tappers.
Yeah, a few towns should be made safe-havens (by the collective agreement of
the local populace), but making most of the known lands peaceful havens for
farmers and miners to go unprotected takes much of the fun out of it.
So, some specifics. First off, if one side kills or captures another side in
combat, that person should recieve no information about what happened or who
did it - there's no units to report this back to him. Obviously, this also
means no automatic death notices in the times. If a person flees from combat,
he'll find out what happened and who did it, and any bystanders will also
know. In fact, I'd suggest that if a unit is killed or captured during a month
then no reports will be recieved at all from this unit. Thus, if I enter
a province with 3 seperate stacks and wipe them all out, noone is left to
tattle on who did it.
In this way, if you succeed with an attack, you get away with it. If you don't,
then someone can post a report to the Times demanding retribution. Of course,
I'd also like some mechanism such that a determined victim can find out who did
the attack - perhaps a tracking skill to track from the scene of the battle, or
a high-level magic (costly in casting time or materials needed to limit the
usage). In this way, wrongs could be avenged, but only by a determined victim.
So, 90% of attacks would go unpunished, but many strange disappearances in one
location could eventually be dealt with.
Next, I'd also like a smaller number of people per area. The reason for this is
that with less people per area, only a few pockets of population could form
strong enough to make collective defense pacts. This doesn't necessarily mean
more land - in a companions system with the number of people who played Olympia,
something on the order of the land area already in the game would be fine
(though of course the bigger the better!)
Comments? Maniacal laughter?
Scott
Milinkthos
Geez, maybe I should have gotten into the Dark Empire when I had the chance!