But isn't that a real world mechanic.
As in, in a real feudal society, the more lords and landowners who swear fealty to you, the more resources you can call on in war. The more your strategic reach increases.
There are so many historic precedents of powerful feudal lords essentially snowballing their local regions. France at the end of the 100 years war is a great example. Gathering up previously semi-independent or English aligned lords (e.g. Brittany), overrunning English possessions and eventually most of Burgundy too.
It isn't really a reflection of real life though, because for much of the Hundred Years' War, France was many times bigger, more populous and wealthier than England but still got carved up because feudal kingdoms weren't hiveminds in the way M&B factions are. The effectiveness of just being plain bigger was blunted by the disadvantage of the French monarchy's issues with actually asserting meaningful control over their vassals. That's why a good chunk of them flipped to being English vassals or managed to wrangle pseudo-/semi-independence out of whatever deal they struck with the crown. Speaking broadly, feudalism of that sort led to sort of weakness in centralization and royal authority where the most common reply to the king's orders was, "Yeah sure, but what's in it for me?", the next most common was, "No" and "**** off" certainly made the top ten.
In short, in real life, they couldn't necessarily parlay their greater paper strength into real advantage -- in fact, it actually contributed (in a very real sense) to their apparent helplessness in the face of a kingdom a fraction of France's size. A similar dynamic allowed the First Crusades to gain and maintain a foothold in the first place: going by "paper" strength, either the Seljuq Turks or the Fatimids should have alone been able to crush them, but for disunity in both of them.
As an aside, someone will probably say how that sounds so interesting, and how much emergent gameplay that would create but in practice we already have the unruly vassals, with the faction leader riding a tiger made of his squabbling underlings, and people hate it because it takes agency away from them. Vassals taking away the king's ability to make decisions and enforce his will would turn out to be one of those features that's much better to read about in some humorously well-written AAR than actually play through, for most players. (Or to inflict upon the AI king as a player-vassal.)
So since reflecting real history wouldn't be actually
fun, there should be something like a Threat meter or Aggression timer seen in games such as Total War or Crusader Kings, where aggressive expansion is punished by increasing the array of enemies against you.
So I'm starting to feel like the Khuzait (or any other faction) snowball issue is not an issue, but rather it's just a confirmation bias story we tell whenever they start taking a few cities. I hope the developers don't spend too much more time on balance, and look at emersion aspects or battlefield mechanics.
I haven't yet posted my 1.5.8 snowballing test results but the short version is that snowballing, as a meaningful impediment to slow twenty-year pacing, is gone. It has been gone from a ten year pacing (840 days!) since... September or so. It is up to mexxico to decide if he wants to push that out to thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred years (but given he said that he didn't have time to spare on the issue any more, I doubt it) so I can only speak for myself when I say that I actually don't care if factions snowball past that point because:
- 1) Like 95% of players will never reach that point.
- 2) Those that do will have ample resources with which to jump in and effect any outcome they dislike.
- 3) The campaign team has other areas that need attention much more badly.