When you go to war, you don't get regency?
The regency trigger is only related to activities / travels and not to location or to joining an army?
It's not possible to add a condition : if in army or travelling or doing activity then trigger regency?
Or maybe a condition : If not at home trigger regency?
Oh you certainly
can, but then we get into the weeds of functionality.
Does going to war put you into an entrenched regency or not? If it does, then does your regent invalidate if they go to war? If it doesn't, and we don't have support for travelling to/from armies, then what's to stop you teleporting back to end the regency then re-teleporting back out again to command your army? If it does and we
do have that support, then Code & UX need to make that work, and how do we then tutorialise that to the player, which tooltips do we need to overhaul to tell you this is happening and when, how does the AI deal with this? What're the performance implications of having characters travel to a moving target where we need to recalculate both the position of the moving travel party
and the position of the moving army constantly and also this is happening in dozens of places across the map at the same time? How does the player set a route if the army changes completely and the route needs to be adjusted so that now the player walks through St. Deathingtons (known for its extraordinarily high wolf population and curious preponderence for a sort of venereal version of the Black Death) even though the player's initial route was trying explicitly to avoid that? What happens if the army is destroyed along the way? What happens if the army literally moves faster than the travelling commander can but only gets the buff that lets it do that
after you set the commander off, do we just invalidate the commander and send them home, and if so, how do we alert the player (and train the AI) that something dun goofed? What do we do if the commander reaches the army mid-battle given that AFAIK, you currently can't change the commander mid-battle - does the player just have to watch their commander sit by the sidelines whilst their troops lose till he can quietly present a letter taking command, or do we fix
that and unravel whether or not the entire battle system explodes if you enable something that was never meant to happen and which the system may have been built to assume was impossible?
Most pressingly, which
other features do we want to cut (and we'd have to cut some stuff
hard) in order to provide the resources to support this?
... just for examples of a few problems that occur (and some of which did occur during testing) off the top of my head. There's a lot, lot more, and on top of that usually architectural/technical reasons why we couldn't always use the obvious solution, or why an obvious solution might not work or might be bad in some other way, and sometimes solutions cause
other problems. Sadly it's just not easy to integrate two complex systems with each other and make it work and run decently
and also retain moddability
and make a bunch of other stuff at the same time, especially when one of the complex systems is as old as a lot of the war code is (which makes it harder to work with).
These are all, ultimately, solveable problems. But solveable problems that still need UX time, that need Art time, that need, and I cannot overstate this enough,
oodles of Code time, and which'd need a decent chonk of Design time. We tried some of this, quite extensively even, and a simple solution that doesn't also suck in a million ways just isn't possible. Which kills me to say because it
is something I want and argued for at length, but it just wasn't worth the costs induced.
At least, for now.
