How about message boards in cities that retain their messages for one year.
Players would see any messages that were posted that have been posted since
they last saw the board. They could also explicitly read the board. 1 day
to post. 0 days to read. This provides local color and allows players to
locally advertise or warn others.
Should a noble point be required for castles? I think so. Perhaps a 20% to
50% increase in the rate of noble points. Or make the number of noble
points dependent on actions within the religions.
Still working on the "global" issues. Most of my thought revolves around
the idea of limiting the number of nobles to somewhere between 5-10. (I
grimace to bring this up since I've worked so hard to accumulate nobles,
but think that this would provide a major source of limitation to players,
forcing them to cooperate with each other more). To make this workable
there would have to be some source of noble's aides, similiar in concept to
the captains that were mentioned before. These aides would not accept
orders from the player the way nobles do, but would show up on the turn
sheet reporting what they did and what they saw. The player would control
the aides by telling the nobles to 'order' the aids to do something. This
order could be 50 commands long. The aid then goes off and does what is
ordered but will not be able to cope with unplanned contingencies and must
wait for a noble to pass by before they can be commanded to do anything
new. These aides should be able to move and attack and everything else,
thus they can man the trade routes, or sail a ship along a predetermined
route, but would be pretty worthless for exploring.
What do people think about this? Please let me know because most of my
other ideas hinge on a system similiar to this.
Harold
hal@ll.mit.edu