Death of the faction leader (Suggestions)

[Mouzafphaerre]

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One of the good features of MTW is the emphasize on the faction leaders, albeit sometimes unbalanced or exaggerated. If you get your king killed or isolated (the most popular locations for that were the Mediterranean isles and Ireland) you would face the risk of serious turmoil, revolts, even a civil war. In RTW your FL is just another FM in that aspect. Have him killed in a crushing defeat and the heir will simply take his place. No effect on gameplay except the loss of a general/governor. (I don't know if rulers' importance has been restored in MiNO.)

Since I haven't noticed (maybe my bad?) any improvements in that area, may I suggest some scripted penalties for both the player and AI factions (especially in case of kingdoms with centralized government models) if the FL gets killed in a defeat or a riot, or isolated (besieged, campaigning for too long in enemy soil, in an island with no ports, too much away from the capital for too long etc.) in terms of increase in global unrest, disloyalty traits of generals/governors, drop to bribe costs for disloyal generals, loss of FL's influence, if possible aphistemenoi resurgences, decrease in tax income maybe, or something neater that I'm so sure you can come up with than I do?
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[Mouzafphaerre]

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Let me also add that FL based penalties will make oliphauntic expansions such as the overgrown Grey Death seen on many faction progress posts on AI's part and will force both human and AI players to establish better instead of crazily expanding. The FL will need to be kept carefully mobile, traversing his realm.
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[johnhughthom]

I would be nice if it was possible to put a "distance to leader" penalty on cities rather than "distance to capital."

[Tellos Athenaios]

This would indeed make it very difficult to play historically as the Seleukids. Consider Antiochos Megas (Anty III) who is singlehandedly responsible for many an EB historical battle. Or was that abou?

Secondly it doesn't make particularly much sense in the factions which relied heavily on:
a) Local autonomy & petty chiefs (think of the 'tribal' factions);
b) Factions with a strong developped Satrapal / Provincial / Similar system. In those cases -AFAIK- the Satrapy is pretty much a state within a state - more colloquial translations of the word Satrap often end up as something + 'king'... (as in local king) or viceroy. By this I mean that a Satrapy was arranged to be pretty much self sufficient as far as bureacratic, civic and military needs go.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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For Seleukeia, OK, point taken*. But how about -say- Lusotana, Epeiros or Pahlava? Suppose Epeiros lose Pyrrhos at the heap of their expansion.

*Still, my mind forces me to think that over expansion would result in a break-apart eventually.
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[Tellos Athenaios]

Historically Epeiros did lose Phyrrhos in the midst of an important campaign - and that didn't mean the end of Epeiros. Mind you, Epeiros turns out to be another city/tribal confederation and being king of Epeiros is surprisingly similar to being the Kunningaz of the Sweboz - at least if I understood Kos' description correctly.

Pahlava was kinda feudalistic if memory serves. Therefore the most powerful clan could largely do as it saw fit. And while all clans were de jure all united under the banner of "The Pahlava" (and would act as such when faced with foreign invasions) in every day matters they were de facto rather like a loose federation. A permanent KH of sorts.

To my understanding: with confederation-style factions and with factions such as the successors this kind of thing (loyalty) is based on the leading tribe/clan and the loyalty of the truly powerful rather than on the distance to leader. Distance to capital makes probably even less sense in this respect- as long as there is a clear dominant political & military factor in the internal workings of the faction and that factor is loyal to the current ruler; the ruler is pretty much safe from dissertion. And if there isn't any such factor the ruler simply isn't safe and dissertion will hapen regardless of where the ruler is located.

EDIT: To say there wouldn't have been any effects at all is probably not exactly true either. But to mod this in...