Quote Originally Posted by Foot
Personally I'm going to look into the idea of having permanent forts placed at the beginning coupled with a "city" resource. Capturing the "lesser city" will spawn one of your merchants on the resource to generate income, losing it will kill your merchant and replace it with an enemy one. We could then reduce income at the main settlement by a third (maybe), which would make the economy of a province reliant on maintaining a garrison in this "lesser city". This would be great for those large provinces of the east, and would also work well for those provinces where the starting faction didn't have complete control. It would also give a more permeable province boundary to the game as well.

Of course, we wouldn't have to place the "lesser city" resource next to the permanent fort, but could use the sahara (locked off) as a home for the placement of all these "merchants-as-cities". Or we could redo the model of the merchant to make it look like a city, and have the permanent fort adjacent to it to represent the military garrison. It might be possible to make it so that the permanent fort comes with no proper walls, but represents the defensive position of the military garrison on a field of battle, so we don't have to increase the number of siege battles (though that would require some Ai tweaking I imagine).

Foot
Brilliant! The 'permeable province boundry' reminds me of the old William Shepard maps, where he would use a stratified mixing of two colors that represented the different factions both having claims on the same territory.

The re-skinned merchant idea is interesting. Can you remove the aspect of 'getting bumped off' a resource by armies moving through?

I'm excited to see where you take this.