Back to gameplay, the idea today was to add a “loyalty” subsystem so that the cities could rebel against occupiers based on their original allegiance; the idea was you needed to pacify the cities you conquer by standing armies there, else they would tend to rebel back into their original owner.

It went in two phases as I decided to further refine it to prevent exploits of leaving a single tiny unit to restore order in a city with hundreds of population.

After doing a lot of simulations, Claude had to add “Assimilation”, with cities changing their native allegiance definitively after reaching certain threshold. I don’t really like it since it makes the whole mechanic feel just a temporary brake instead of a latent risk. I’ll have to go back into this.

I’m thinking of “cheating” a little bit to improve the player experience, sporadically send him big armies based on his total army size, just to keep the tension especially in the end game when the player is just rolling through the opponents.

Also thinking of adding a population cap, or some penalty for amassing huge armies.