Civil strife

[B-Wing]

I'm not sure exactly what Cyclops is suggesting regarding using agents to affect stability, but it did bring a thought to mind which I'm confident has probably been suggested before, but I'll bring it up anyway, since it seems relevant to the discussion.

According to the official FAQ, the team has not yet decided whether or not religion will be used in EB2 and in what capacity. I think one obvious application of this particular M2TW mechanic is to use it in a similar way that it's used in the Britannia campaign of the Kingdoms expansion. (If you've already played this campaign, you can skip the rest of this paragraph and the next two.) For anyone who hasn't played it, "religion" has been replaced with "culture", which is essentially the same mechanic, except with a different name, and priests are no longer recruitable. Since the factions represented in the British Isles campaign are all Catholic, each has been given its own culture instead.

Like religion in vanilla M2TW, the primary effect of culture in a given province is on the population happiness. If the Welsh take over a region with predominately Irish culture, that region will maintain a high degree of "cultural" unrest. That is, until its culture is gradually converted to Welsh over time. That conversion is accomplished through certain buildings and also by the governors' stats. Piety has been replaced with... something... I can't remember what it's called right now. Anyway, the higher the governor's stat in this category, the faster the settlement he governs will convert to his own culture.

The secondary effect of culture in this campaign is that certain faction-specific units can only be recruited in regions within which their corresponding culture percentage is above a certain threshold. Other factions can even recruit some units belonging to other factions if they control a settlement with enough foreign culture.

Anyway, I probably don't need to point out how this sort of "religion" system may be useful in EB2, though we could debate for days about all the potential applications of it. My main point is that if "religion" is used/replaced to represent "culture" (or perhaps more accurately, "faction-specific loyalty/pacification") then you could have agents who directly increase the rate of conversion in the province in which they are located. They'd simply be the priests and imams of the vanilla M2TW system, but you can call them whatever you like.

If it is deemed unrealistic to have a specific agent speeding cultural conversion, the trait system could be used to make them represent more abstract concepts. What I mean is, they could be made virtually immovable, so that they are restricted to the settlement from which they are recruited. Or they could be made such that they are only effective when stationed inside settlements (via stat penalties for traveling; stat bonuses for remaining in settlements). In this way, recruiting a "priest/imam" would be representative of investing money (or other resources) into pacifying and pleasing the local population. You could do this with buildings too, of course, but the advantage of agents is that they can have upkeep costs associated with their use, and their effectiveness can be altered dynamically. The main problem would be in getting rid of them once they are no longer desired...

Anyway, that was pretty long, but I thought it was an interesting thought.