We here at court have many things to discuss. First of all, my congratulations to Stefano von Thun for his appointment to the Cortz. I am sure he will serve me and his fellow nobles well. Now we have plenty to vote on.
We have several laws proposed by the court that should be discussed, Including the implementation of church taxes in the future. I also wish for the court to consider the revision of the Strategic Islands Act. It is vague and suggests that any island in a "strategic position" be "possibly" given a fort. What constitutes a strategic position and who decides whether a fort should possibly be built? I suggest the fort portion be removed entirely. I see no problem with building up our islands as naval bases though.
Speaking of forts, I believe it is time to consider dismantling a few. There are some that are of little strategic value and simply drain our treasury. The ones that come to mind are in Cadiz, Murcia, Messina, and Roussillon. For Cadiz, the fort in Granada provides protection for the same provinces and some more. Murcia only protects itself and La Mancha, but perhaps it is still useful as long as Castile shares our border. Messina does protect all of Sicily, but the island has not been invaded in over half a century. Our navy is more valuable in protecting the island than a fort. As for Roussillon, its proximity to Girona makes it virtually useless except in slowing down an invasion from the north, but with the French on our border that is unlikely. In fact, it is even more useless because enemies can march through Navarra or Pirineo without interference. I thus propose we build a fort in Navarra to keep enemies from marching through France and through our northern border, as well as to hold back the Castilians if we go to war again. It also has the added benefit of slowing down any future naval invasions such as we faced against the English.
There is also the matter of our goals. Years ago this court decided that we should take Negroponte as our own. While we are rivals of Venice, we have not had the opportunity to move against them and perhaps we shall not for some time. Our focus seems to be shifting westward. Perhaps it is time we consider pursuing other goals.
- His Majesty, Ferran II de Trastámara, King of Aragon and Naples, and Protector of the Greeks
((As you can gather, this will be a large vote. Before we proceed, there is one more matter I wish to discuss for an OOC vote. With exploration on the horizon, I need to figure out how to manage the process. I already have decided that explorers will get to choose from the in-game missions and are then funded by the Crown to explore those regions, but I need to figure out something for how to choose explorers. It's clear that multiple people are interested. I was originally going to have only one explorer, since we can only manage a small number of expeditions at a time. However, I want to give multiple people the chance to explore. Assuming we only have one or two exploration expeditions occurring at a time, we have two options to choose from: assign a limited number of generic explorers to all exploration missions and roleplay that they are the players (
Plan 1) or add in every player explorer and manually swap them out between missions (
Plan 2). The first option is a lot easier for me for managing exploration, but would take away from player interaction. The second will involve adding a lot of players as explorers and could get quite frustrating if the game keeps killing them off. If I do this second option, it would be assumed that whenever a player explorer dies, their proposal for exploration is either denied by the Crown or they died during the expedition. I'll add an OOC vote for this.
Anyway, this vote will last until
Tuesday at 12pm PST. Please
bold your votes and include your character name and class. Here is the long list of votes:
Court Chaplain's Plan:
Yes/No/Abstain
Recognition of the Trans-Pyrenean Trading Company:
Yes/No/Abstain
General Ordinance of 1507:
Yes/No/Abstain
Disaster Prevention Act:
Yes/No/Abstain
Revise Strategic Islands Act?:
Yes/No/Abstain
Cancel Negroponte Mission?:
Yes/No/Abstain
Dismantle Cadiz Fort?:
Yes/No/Abstain
Dismantle Murcia Fort?:
Yes/No/Abstain
Dismantle Messina Fort?:
Yes/No/Abstain
Dismantle Roussillon Fort?:
Yes/No/Abstain
Build Fort in Navarra?:
Yes/No/Abstain
OOC Explorers:
Plan 1/Plan 2/Abstain
I apologize for the spam of fort votes, but I really need to know if they should be kept or not. They're such a drain on our treasury.))