>Well, I see your point, but I think it would still be of benefit to
>most players. I'm not empire building (well, not at the moment :-),
>and I'd be happy to have 5 second-class nobles to run stuff around.
Yeah, but you're using up your noble points SOMEHOW -- perhaps you're
concentrating on magic (I dunno, I haven't run across any of your
nobles in ages...) Someone doing magic (which costs 1 noble point per
magical area studied by a character) also shouldn't have free trade.
>Alternatively, you could tie the charge structure to noble points.
As you know, there were proposals like that, and the alpha test had a
progressively increasing cost for nobles, but Rich finally gave up and
went back to a fixed cost. I think that it would be nice to have
players with many existing nobles have to pay extra to form new ones.
This would push empire builders into doing more magic and religion,
because making more recruiters etc would be plain too expensive.
Also, someone who got nearly wiped out would grow faster when they
were small. I would appreciate that ;-)
-- greg