SP - General Council of the Commons Policy is Too Powerful

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Haikon

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Council of the Commons in its current state gives 1 influence per day per notable in each settlement owned by a clan. It also increases militia production by 1 per day per notable in those settlements.

The results is that with one settlement, you end up getting a hefty +10 or so influence per day passively, as well as massive militias. This allows you to spam influence at will (and also refresh cohesion at will) without any danger of draining influence.

Even worse, this allows the ruler clan to of a faction to claim every fief unchecked, assuming the ruler override mechanics actually operate on influence as the game seems ot suggest. In my current game, Derthert has claim over 9 fiefs (while the maximum on any other lord is 3), and has over 20,000 influence at all times despite constantly overriding votes. If +10 per fief is a good estimate to go by, this amounts to around 90 passive influence per day to the ruler clan, allowing them to override every vote that comes into play without draining influence.
 
Some policies like that have no downside and only massive upside. Needs balancing to tone down the upside and add a downside or should cost more influence and gold from the kingdom treasury. Or else there's no reason for any faction not to claim the policy early on for massive snowball advantage.

Also it's boring and pretty lazy game design for every faction even ones with different cultures to manage their kingdoms the same way, voting for castles and policies like a democracy among clans. You'd expect some factions to function more with a strong king/emperor where there is no voting. Or others like the northerners to function more like a meritocracy where whoever does the most work taking over a fief gets it and whichever soldier can prove themselves and kill an enemy lord gets to become a vassal or create his own clan in the kingdom.
 
Actually there are already possibility to make each faction different by just giving them a predefined or random set of policies when the game start instead of every faction started with nothing and have to vote from then on. There are policy that favour ruler, use less influence to overrule the vote and etc. so a kingdom will feel more despotic with those policies as default at game start.

Also I do agree that council of the common really break the game. Instead of gaining influence they should be losing it instead now that they let common people run the council.. they can however keep the militia boost as those commoner gain more authorities
 
Nerfing Council of the Commons into the ground should be a top priority to be honest. Influence is the lifeblood of a faction from a player perspective: it fuels your ability to create and maintain large armies, and gives you currency to spend on maximally supporting other Lords (thereby quickly trivialising Relations management - with a moderate amount of Charm, a single 300 spend on Influence will give you over +100 Relation with that Lord, for a comparatively manageable -15 with 2 others.)

Speculatively, if the AI plays by the same rules as the player for Army creation, then Council of the Commons may also be facilitating snowballing by enabling some factions to maintain sizeable armies and avoid getting picked off, as well as improving a kingdom's internal relations (fewer forced Abstentions owing to lack of Influence).

Also in my experience it's still possible to be assigned significant holdings with Council of the Commons. My Vlandia playthrough (only just Clan Tier 4) had Derthert assigning 4 cities and 4 castles to me, his primary vassal of the South (notably, I can't get anything north of Tubilis Castle - faction leaders take geographic proximity very seriously when contemplating candidates). I'm really not experiencing any downsides from Council of the Commons, and it's guaranteeing the complete dominance of my faction.
 
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I made a mod that removes the influence gain from Council of the Commons since it completely breaks the influence system.


Unzip to your Mount and Blade II\Modules directory and make sure to unblock the .dll file.

Thanks! Is this for 1.2.1 or 1.3.0?
 
Also in my experience it's still possible to be assigned significant holdings with Council of the Commons. My Vlandia playthrough (only just Clan Tier 4) had Derthert assigning 4 cities and 4 castles to me, his primary vassal of the South (notably, I can't get anything north of Tubilis Castle - faction leaders take geographic proximity very seriously when contemplating candidates). I'm really not experiencing any downsides from Council of the Commons, and it's guaranteeing the complete dominance of my faction.

Wait till Derthert has 10k influence. He will overrule the vote on every new conquest that borders his fiefs, which expands his fiefs even more. It wouldn't matter that you have 30k or 50k or 100k influence to his 10k, you cannot use those influence points to stop him in any meaningful way.
 
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