I'm loving the government system at the moment. I love roleplaying which government system I will put in place depending on my expansion plans overall - makes for some interesting decisions. However there is one problem I have found, something which will be exemplified in the upcoming patch, I fear. If you cannot build any units until you have a government system in place then it does kind of limit your recruiting options if your working toward a homeland government system for 5 years.

Now I'm not advocating any serious change in the build times for government systems, but I think that a small change is needed. If you could still have the option of building other government buildings after building a tier 4 government building then that would mean you could recruit the simple troops from that province while converting them into a more loyal province. Once built, of course, the new government building would replace the tier 4 government building (so there are no conflicts). At the moment if you build a 4 tier government to tie you over until you get the money to bring your new province more firmly under your command you no longer have the choice to build any of the other tiers. This means that to upgrade a province to a tier 1 building you have to destroy the old one (thus losing the ability to build units) and wait 5 years before you can recruit units.

So after conquering a new province you would quickly put a puppet governer (tier 4) in charge of keeping the peace while you slowly place the its people under a more permanent subjugation method (tier 1+2+3), which makes sense to my mind. At the moment the policy is to put a puppet governer (tier 4) in charge of keeping the peace and then when you want to put them under a more permanent subjugation method you have to dispose the puppet governer and leave that province without a government (ie military control) for up to 5 years. That, to my mind, does not make any sense.

Does that make sense?

Foot