New food for the hungry: Titles sneak peek

[alpaca]

Some of you may still remember our not-very-successful outdrop which was called the Provincial Titles Project, and the promise that we'd have a similar but more complicated and interesting system for MA (and now for II and later AD).
The provincial titles are pretty much finished (except for individualising them for each settlement), with an important change: For each settlement there are four different versions. These represent the differences between a high or low control over the settlement on the part of your king (see the authority preview for further details) and the difference between a communal/rural focus of your settlement. Before I go into further detail, let me explain the feature to those who aren't familiar with it:

I think most of you know the titles system in MTW. One part of it were titles that designated one of your characters as the ruler of a certain province, giving certain bonuses which differed from region to region.
Our titles system is quite similar. At the start of the game, none of your settlements have a ruler. When you select a settlement, the advisor will pop up automatically, asking you whether you want to appoint one:



If you accept (i.e. you click on "Show me How"), the army overview screen will open where you can select a character. You can also select a character on the map, but only if he's not inside of a settlement.



If you dismiss the advisor, the process will be cancelled and you'll be able to do something else before choosing your ruler (or don't choose one at all).



Should you have selected a character, he'll get a trait marking him as "designated to rule" which means that in the next turn, he'll become the ruler of this province. However, you can still cancel this transition by selecting your settlement again, in which case another advisor will pop up, asking you if you changed your mind:



If you didn't cancel it, at the next turn your new ruler will have the Ruler trait. He will also get an epithet so in this example he'd be called Francesco of Florence if he wasn't my faction heir - both for style and so you can quickly find your current ruler via the army overview.

If at any time you feel like another character might be better suited to be the ruler of this city, simply request the settlement advice and you'll be able to change your ruler (but be wary as the newly-disposed ruler will get negative traits that especially decrease loyalty - it's more than likely he'll hold a grudge against you):




After this technical explanation of how the system works, let me give you a bit more info about what the results are in the game. The most obvious effect are the direct effects of the trait. These are Piety, Command, Loyalty, Authority (you can assign a province to your king this time around) and of course Chivalry.
The bonuses will vary from region to region, and even within a region - as I mentioned in the opening paragraph. For example, Florence in the above screenshots is a Rural province (our interpretation of the castles) with a Reliance as control level. The attribute effects for a Rural settlement with a lower control level are: +3 Command, +2 Authority, -4 Loyalty
For a Urban province with a high level of control, you'd get +1 Command, +1 Authority, +2 Loyalty and for a low level +2 Command, +2 Authority, -2 Loyalty (these all are just examples, I can't promise these will be the exact bonuses you get for Florence, but they'll be large).

In addition to these direct effects, you will get a passive effect if the province's ruler is also the governor of his province. These will range from happiness shifts (increases or decreases, depending on how loyal the character is, etc.), increased income and so on. They'll usually make it worth your while to let the character stay in the settlement a lot of the time but if he doesn't get his hands dirty with blood and a few miles under his feet he'll probably slowly degenerate into something nasty.
The last effect we already thought about is granting an Influence boost to your faction if you have good rulers (it'll be small but will add up nicely).

Lastly, let me explain how this system differs from the already fairly well-known approach that uses ancillaries (we'll have nice ancillaries with the Coat of Arms of the province, but only for show).
Firstly, it's obviously much more complex. Differences depending on how you evolved the provinces just don't happen with ancillaries.
Secondly, to transfer the rule of a province, the two characters don't have to meet anymore and you can quickly re-assign it to a worthy successor once the old ruler has passed away.
Thirdly, stripping a character from rule will now have severe consequences, which isn't possible with ancillaries.
You see, this system is very much preferable over the ancillary approach

And as a very last salute to modders who'd like to implement our titles system after our release: It will be free to use (although you'll have to implement it by yourself) and with the introduction of event counters in 1.2 the script has gotten much sleeker than the PTPV was (and also easier to understand).

Stay tuned for more info from us, and be free to ask any questions.

alpaca

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

[II] Feature Preview 1: View City
[II] Feature Preview 2: Degrees of Independence
[II/AD] Feature Preview 3: Authority
[II] Feature Preview 4: The Levy Script
[II] Feature Preview 5: Scalable Difficulty
[II] Feature Preview 6: Imperial Support
[II] Feature Preview 7: Influence