CounterPoint391 said:
Since you gain penaties by not helping your affiltated family members, perhaps a message should appear when any one of them gets captured in battle, with details on who got captured, location of the battle (ie....wilderness near Revardin) and the name of the Lord who captured your affiliate Lord. Successfully rescuing the Lord ought to provide a small bonus to all family members, something like +1 or +2.
I admit rescuing a lord would be very difficult if you don't even know where looking at. I support your idea to inform player about where and who captured your "brother". Infos should appear as simple log text or (more role-play) as message/quest from referent lord demanding you to free his membership as soon as possible.
It's up to Waihti to decide if he can and wish to implement that.
PS : Beeing affiliated give you a +10 golden hello reputation bonus with every family members, or set to zero if negative (even if you had -99). And maintain allegiance will provide +4 per month. Adding default native personal bonus lord rescue & free (can't remember +5 or +7), I think it's good enough.
Since you also inccur penalties if they get defeated, pehaps being affilated should provide bonuses to convincing them to follow you or your suggestions on where to go, giving you a way to keep them from foolhardy battles, and lead your 'family' to victory.
Actually relation points help in convincing lords. As I wrote, beeing affiliated is about gaining or loosing relation points.
As far as fief assignment, being part of a family should introduce a check to see if [player] is part of family, if so more likely to support. If affilated to a family, rivals of the family should be less likely to support [player]. This check should be added at the end of the whole 'how lords decide who to support for fief assignment' code. I'm no coder, I just barely have a passing understanding of some code. Perhaps something similar for selecting marshall within a faction.
The way it's coded, only King assign fief. Priority to lords without, then assigning randomly I think.
I thought about Marshal election, to press family to vote for one of them if candidate. But I realized it could collide to default code affinity between lords (honor/personality/rivality/...?), also could bug if ever two of the family were candidates.
Plotting with your affiliated family would be a little easier if you could gather them in one place. Perhaps have a dialogue option with the refernt lord to 'gather the family for council'. He can either refuse, be listening but not convinved (launching into a Persuasion attempt) or be convinced outright. This could be calculated using relation with lord, renown, honor(if applicable).... Maybe have an auto family gathering when a new marshall needs to be appointed.
"Family council" ? sound interesting
. Except Marshall election issue (if ever it's appear to be an issue), could offer quest such : to choose wich will represent the family at coming faction tournament. Who will be charged to challenge a rival (quite like lady champion quest). Or to persuade and ensure entire family will give oath to faction pretender
-before talk to him/her-
Rough Ideas, feel free to refine.....
Your ideas are welcome.
But as Waihti said, we must first focus and debug current basic features.