Successor game rules, draft one.

[Zim]

I know I didn't pay much attention to stat influence, don't think I ever qualified for more than one until I became Megas.

It would simplify things greatly as long as the list of ways to gain influence was kept fairly small. The influence from marrying a Princess and ex-Megas/Chancellor ones you mentioned from LotR are a good start. I wonder if the Prince should get a boost if he marries a foreign princess..

Should Princes get 1 extra influence?

The Triumph idea is neat. I wonder if there's something similiar that would fit in with the likely more western faction I suspect will be picked...

I really like the idea of some kind of influence reward for successful pvp/civil wars. I would be at least partly concerned about an automatic +1 influence for winning a battle. If a Civil war went back and forth a fair deal that could be a lot of battles. Then again, that hasn't happened yet in two games (I guess the Swabian Civil War had the greatest number of battles, although the War of the Basileis had the potential for more). Do you think that would be an issue?

What do you think of the number of ranks? As it stands except for Duke the ranks listed are pretty easy to attain (A House that managed to get 5 people counting the Duke could have two counts), but I did want to make it fewer than LOTR. I've been thinking over whether one more might be appropriate. Definitely not any more than that.

I think this is a good idea. It simplifies things for the purposes of record-keeping and makes pre-election vote counting easier for people who are trying to push through (or block) legislation. At the same time, I didn't feel like the stat-based influence really had any impact on role-playing, which is the most important part of the game.

What DID have an impact was influence earned by player actions. This was most notable in the bonuses for the Ex-Megas and for people who managed to marry a Princess. I think that it would work well to give everyone a base vote of 1, and only allow additional influence beyond that due to similar in-game actions. Other options along these lines that could be explored:

1) Influence granted by the consent of the Senate, such as a 'triumph' for a great military victory or some other significant achievement.
2) Influence granted to someone who has won a PvP battle.

I also think your truncated rank system is a big improvement. LotR ended up having too many ranks and it was too difficult to reach the highest ranks. Reaching a high rank should be hard, but not impossible which is how it turned out in LotR. I think your system will work better.