I've noticed that leaving your companion in a village does not raise relations with local notable in time. It works only for towns. Is it intended or a bug?
It's a perk, if you haven't the good perk, you can't raise the local relation in village. I think you have the perk for the town not for the village. If you have a companion with the good perk as "quartermaster", normaly, that workes. That workes with a "party companion" too. if the companion have the good perk. Each time he returns to a village he will raise the relations.
The current casualty rate is absolutely out-grown by the birth rate, as all lords will have multiple children but rarely killed on the battleground.
To have the option of enabling KIA of all NPC is a great approach to balancing the population, and it offers more fun by adding weight to NPCs' lives. Therefore, I wonder if it is possible to add a "hardcore mode" that makes player, NPC companion, and NPC lords almost as fragile as any trivial recruited militia. (Not like now, NPCs will be chopped down way more times than a valentia militia)
Since all characters including the soldiers and NPC lords and players are using the same armor system, we can determine death using the damage overflows - for example, all characters will be KIA in battle if the damage received exceeds 150% of the maximum hitpoints. Because of the better armor quality, NPC lords would still survive more than a peasant militia, but not by much, which is more realistic. With the same mechanic, the player has to be more cautious early game as the inferior armor could cause more casualty, and the player can be more adventurous in the later game as being protected better.
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I propose (this is only a vague idea to develop) to solve the "overpopulation" problem and to make the game even more realistic would be to introduce the concept of an epidemic into the game. This great epidemic could be triggered automatically from the moment the population of the Lords reached a limit level. This would allow the game to restore a balance between Lords and it would be a major event in the game since all factions, all clans would lose Lords. Obviously, we could not simulate a real epidemic as there was in the Middle Ages, it could decimate up to 80% of the population, especially in times of war where populations were already suffering from famine.
This epidemic would only happen in the very long term, we would probably have already passed 1500 days, we would even be very close to 2000 days. A very long game.
This epidemic would only trigger once when we had reached level 5 and when the population of Lords reached a critical level X (to be defined) in order not to overload the game. The epidemic would kill an equal% of Lord in each clan,% defined by the developers in order to restore a population to a "playable" level. We could imagine that this epidemic lasts a number of days to define killing Lords by "wave". To see later, if our "hero" can himself be a victim or not, I think that it would create great frustrations among the players, so to be avoided. This would also pose the problem of marriage, if we have married Lords and their wives die, we would have less choice to remarry them. So we should not start the epidemic too early. It should be triggered when we reach a significant number of births of the third generation (after having married our children).
We could also imagine that the epidemic would claim more lives among the older Lords (> 50 years old) and newborn (babys). .
We could also imagine that this epidemic decimates the troops in the garrisons, makes the villages even more vulnerable ...
(Any resemblance to recent events is purely coincidental.)
It's a complicated calculation, but this epidemic would restore the game to a functional level and add a small "realistic" dimension.