William Blake

This is not an issue of many marshals. Or many armies for that matter. It is an issue of too many classes apart from marshals. There is no point in creating Merchants and Diplomats and Spies as separate classes. They would be either way less useful than others and you will never take them or they would be too few to actually use them in any interesting way. If you have just one merchant there is nothing to think about - select max profit trade and that's it. If you have just one cleric there is nothing to think about - there is just one job for him. If you have just one spy - there is very little for you to put him into. And if you have more than 2 merchants or 2 spies or 2 diplomats then you don't have others at all. What good a diplomat mechanics are if you can't fit them into you RC cause you like your 4 merchants better. And no matter what you do, there will be LESS useful out of 5 classes, just like builders and farmers were in the original game. If you want to limit number of armies, leave only marshals to lead armies, join Merchants, Diplomats and Spies into a single class and have Clerics as a 3rd class. But 8 slots with 5 different classes is very limiting idea. 5 skill trees is a very hard to make into an equal value for a player, so the least valuable and popular will be just waste of effort and game mechanics.

Based on the blog and your twitch stream discussion, it is quite clear to me that the design for the Royal Court (RC for short) took a wrong turn, much like the original game. Here is why: Given Mechanics: 1) RC is 8 slots plus a king 2) 5 classes: Marshal, Merchants, Diplomats, Spies, Clerics 3) “Usual” mechanics from the first game – capture by enemy, enemy spy in your RC, Pope/Patriarch, dying of old age and so on. Implications: 1) You will have to have at least 2 marshals in RC (very hard to have just marshal and the king for any sizable kingdom) 2) 8 minus 2 or 3 marshals = 6 or 5 slots left for Merchants, Diplomats, Spies, Clerics 3) If you take at least one of each it means that you can’t have more than 2 of these together at the same RC. So you choices to apply effects of merchants, diplomats, spies and clerics are in fact “where to put my ONE or TWO”, which is piratically like no choices at all mid to end game (there will be obvious one best trade choice, one best enemy to spy against or one most appropriate province to convert religion). There is in fact NO CHOICE because there are so few at hand and so obviously different outcomes of their actions while the world around you so huge. 4) With enemy capturing your marshals and infiltrating you RC with spies you will have even few active slots in RC so you won’t even have all the classes at hand at all. 5) This means at once a situation arises requiring a specific action of a specific class you most likely won’t have that class available in RC unless they are sitting idle waiting for an opportunity. If situation requires multiple RC members of the same class to deal with it you most likely won’t be able to even have slots available in RC to fit them all. Result: this mechanics of RC is very limiting mid to end game, very limiting at application non marshals classes and will create dull repetitive gameplay when you assign you one merchant, one cleric one spy and a diplomat and there is nothing else for you to do with them. Suggested changes: If you want to keep RC as 8 slots on same level with most of the mechanics of each class unchanged, I suggest the following: 1) Remove classes. Every member of the RC gains access to BASIC action of EACH class by default. There is no reason a noble man can’t lead a prayer, can’t be send to a foreign land to negotiate, can’t lead an army action or spy at the same time. These are the best most noble and capable men of the country. 2) Everything should come from a skill tree such that you can level your RC members either into dedicated or in a broad specialization. 3) Any advanced actions like “become a Pope” and so on should just require a skill at a certain level. Why should it matter if you started as a marshal, then went to negotiate to another kingdom and then became a great man of faith. Implications of these changes: 1) At any given point any interesting opportunity can be address with whoever you have available at the RC 2) Least used or boring classes (and there will be 2 out of 5 which are least useful no matter what) will not just disappear, but still be available for a player even if are not attractive enough to take a dedicated slot in RC 3) Any dramatic event – capture, revealed as a spy, death of old age which you can’t really control will not suddenly remove actions of this specific class from a player. Loosing your only cleric during conversion is basically instant “reload saved game” because you don’t have anyone possibly to replace him. Loosing 1 of 8 potentially available members of RC to fix an issue right away is way more interesting proposition. 4) Amount of skills needed to make ONE unified skill tree for RC members is way less than trying to create separate skill trees for 5 different classes. Trying to stretch skills for a merchant to even potentially match skills of a marshal is a pointless waste of effort. Yet even if you do invent a lot of skills for spies and merchants and clerics they mostly will not be used just because a player will have just a single of any characters of this class at hand. 5) No classes, single skill tree has very good replaying value. You don’t just level your marshals in a certain way and your clerics in a certain way every time you replay the game, because you don’t really know if this will be a dedicated marshal or a dedicated cleric or a merchant even if you need one now. With fixed classes if you take any of the least used classes (not marshals basically) you already set your mind on what they will do, so no real choices in the character progression over and over again. There are a lot of other possibilities to advance and tweak this approach, but I’d rather keep it short, or well... shorter for now. Cheers.