I want to largely decouple government from holding type. Feudal-type lords should be able to hold cities as well as castles, and at least for Catholics, theocratic lords should be able to hold temples, cities, and possibly castles as well. Temples would represent different things for each religion, but never city-size population centers - church towns that are the size of a city would be represented by a city owned by a bishop.
I'm thinking that castle holdings represent both the rural population, and a local aristocratic estate. The control of the local feudal lord over the countryside could be determined by a modifier or building (I tend to prefer buildings because they're more visible than the tiny icons for holding modifiers, and when you're looking at the holding pop-up display the name and level will be obvious), which gives more bonuses to the local lord, but causes revolt risk. And even if most of the peasants in an area are freemen, they could still benefit from the protection offered by the local lord's castle. However, an alternative could be to represent a rural area dominated by minor freemen with a non-standard city holding that has a special modifier/building...
With regards to the holding modifiers and decision for displaying the population, I had actually originally planned to use a building with the population as its name. Unfortunately though, localization commands, which I use for displaying the population number, don't work in the names an text of buildings. This was really dissapointing, and because of it I unfortunately had to resort to using a decision. For the modifiers, I wanted to be able to see the current status of the settlement size without needing to open up the building browser, so that was the reason for that design choice. I don't plan on changing it, but if a lot of people share your sentiment and would prefer a building, I might change it to that.
Actually an interesing idea came to mind when I read your idea of including a modifier for local control. Quite some time ago when I used to play EUIII, there was a mod, I dont remember the name anymore, that had a provincial modifier for every province that represented the control of the land that the provincial ruler had. By a decision, the ruler could embark on a campaign to unify the province, and a bunch of rebel troops would spawn to contest the province. Something akin to this for castle holdings could be an interesting way to implement what you suggest.
My only objection to that though has to do with some very long term plans I had for eventually reworking the troop system. As a very rough approximation, in medieval society, the origin of various troop types were likely as follows:
- the nobility with large landholding would likely outfit themselves as heavy cavalry. (though they are likely to have some retinue/guards outfitted as heavy infantry, light cavalry and heavy cavalry as well)
- the minor gentry/small landholders would outfit themselves as light cavalry and heavy infantry
- the burghers are also likely to be outfitted as light cavalry and heavy infantry, with the upper echelons possibly also being heavy cavalry
- finally, the urban poor, serfs, slaves, if they fought at all, would likely be outfitted as light infantry and archers
Now this might be completely far off from reality, as I am by no means an expert on medieval society... I'm an engineer, but from what history I have read this seems to be a general way in which members of societies take different military roles.
With this out of the way, I can address my issue with using a modifier on the barony to represent freemen holding land separate from the baron. My issue is that the liege lord of the Baron, presumably has lordship over all of the citizens living in the land. If you simply apply a negative modifier to the barony, it will then also decrease the levies of the liege lord, which wouldn't be accurate. Giving the baron access to the heavy infantry levies however would also be inaccurate as that would mean they have control over these troops. If the minor landholders are instead lumped into the city, then the city can represent the presence of a middle class, and the troop compositions of the holdings can be based around this.
The tendency for territories with a larger population of minor land-holders or very urbanized populations to favour heavy infantry would then be better represented. I'm still on the fence with regards to the representation of these minor land-holders though, so I'd be glad to hear your argument. If the idea is to completely decouple government from holding type, tribal holdings could even be re-purposed to represent this somehow. In fact one of the major ways in which tribes, which should actually be more accurately described as chiefdoms, differ from states is the fact that there is more of an equal distribution of wealth in chiefdoms as compared to states. The distribution of land ownership in a chiefdom might be quite similar to a collection of free minor landholders.
I guess I can outline some of my plans for temple holdings here.
I'd like each temple holding to, at the very least, represent a local church/mosque/temple/religious gathering site, and the most powerful local cleric, and no more than that. There would be no troops, and minimal defenses (outside of Tibet, where gompas would be repurposed as a temple holding), so that the temple is quickly sacked with the fall of the capital holding.
Different religions would develop temples from that starting point in different ways. Catholics and Buddhists could get big monastery estates, Muslims could get madrasas and/or Sufi lodges, Tibetans as hinted above could turn temple holdings into proper fortresses (along with monastery estates, which would be one of the ways to let Tibet punch above it's very small weight), and some types of pagans could develop religious centers into gathering places for warriors. All would be able to build grand religious buildings for prestige + piety.
Related to this change of temple holdings, feudal-ish Muslims would no longer be able to hold them. Muslim theocracies (except maybe Sufi orders?) would be the one type to not be able to hold cities or castles, and would instead represent the ulema. In fact I could say a lot more about properly representing Islamic realms, but I'll save that for another time.
The way I look at it, a properly implemented soft cap will, ideally, bring you as close as possible to modeling the actual upper limits on population growth. But if we have pretty good data about what those upper limits actual were for given areas, it's easier - and no less accurate - to just implement a hard cap.
There's also a big problem with soft caps, insofar as you ideally have to take into account not just climate and terrain, but also province size. And as that isn't measured anywhere in any value you can reference, as far as I can tell, you'd have to manually assign a size modifier for every province.
No problem, I'm glad to help.
Note that those maps don't actually distinguish rural vs. urban population, and it's assumed for the purposes of mapmaking that there aren't actually any cities. I haven't done any research on city sizes at the start dates, due to lack of sources, but once I start adding in historical cities I intend to reduce rural pop in each region to match.
The base game isn't anything special, but I don't exaggerate when I say that M&T has, since the 2.0 release, become the best historical strategy game available. It's the closest mankind has come to a proper history simulator. Rural and urban population growth, the dynamic development of centers of trade and production, the difficulties of effectively administering a large realm, and the push and pull between the central government and powerful estates, are all represented better than in any other game or mod I can think of.
I definitely agree with you in terms of temples. For the moment I don't want to make too many drastic changes to gameplay, but I think I will try to do something similar in the long-term with my mod. From a modding point of view though, the only difficulty I see here is if you let a theocracy hold temples, cities and castles,especially if there preferred holdings are changed to cities, preventing the government from suddenly flipping to feudal or republic on succession would be somewhat difficult. It is definitely possible, but decoupling government from holdings requires that you have some alternative to fix the government of the character in place. One way is to use title flags, but then you need to have a whole host of events to erase and add the flags when titles are given away or received. In addition, deciding what government the game should give a character when they receive their first title if you have no link between holding type and government would also be extremely convoluted.
