Couldn't snowballing just be seriously slowed or even stopped by enacting a serious autocalc siege attack casualty debuff? With also changing AI to postpone actual assault until loss ratio is more favorable?
I mean isn't stopping loss/gain of real estate the main driver of snowballing?
Regarding defections, isn't there a cultural bias that influences clans defecting to other non-culture nations? Couldn't that be increased to lower defection % ?
Hopefully they'll figure out why it's impossible for castles to be defended by players. If they figure out the pathing for defenders, the correct placement of archers on walls, the amount of time it should take to knock down a door with a ram.......then defending a castle will be a lot more likely. It should require a massive force to siege a castle with a reasonable amount of defenders. There's a reason why there are so many castles scattered across Europe: they're easy to defend. Most castles were sieged by starving out the inhabitants because the chance of capturing them through attack was very small.
All of that should be taken into account for the auto-calc on castle sieges. It should require a huge advantage in the amount of troops to storm a castle. It should require the right type of troops to storm a castle. A dismounted cavalry army should struggle to siege.
My concern is the balance. When they finally figure out the correct balance of castle/city sieges, is that going to push snowballing to the other extreme after all of the fixes to snowballing have already been put in place? Will it become incredibly difficult to expand your territory because they didn't fix castle sieges before they started clipping factions abilities to grow their territory?