Hi.
Excellent mod.
Any chances adding food economy?
The persians were what they were because they were in the most fertile region in the world. Rome became what it became because their first big conquest was sicly from the cartago empire. Sicily was the best food supply in europe. From there, they kept groing and carefully paying attention to rich provinces. In that time, rich provinces meant those with the best agriculture. There was a reason the apital was moved to constantinopla, the richest provinces were nearer there than nearer to rome.
It is a fact that the roman empire melted down when they lost the grain rich provinces to the vandals in africa. As pointed out by Chris Wickham and many others, thats what originally made everything colapse. Also, it destroyed mediterranean commerce.
Same happened to the eastern roman empire when they lost egypt to the arabs.
Rome went down from 500.000 to 60.000 habs. There should be some way to reflect this. Every history book about society, politics and war makes emphasis on the importance of having enough grain supplies. Rome was what it was because of sicily, tunez, egypt and levant incredible rich provinces.
They lost tunez, western empire collapsed. The lost egypt and syria, eastern started to collapse. Muslims were able to expand that big because their first conquests were those provinces. Thats why bagdad x1000 their population. There were actual revolts in egypt because the abasids where forcing grains into their capital.
A simple solution is to assing certain regions standard levels of food supply, and give special regions like sicily, egypt and tunez huge boosts. Holding those provinces should give big bonuses such as tax income and levies.
Of course, a mechanic should be made such as if your realm levies, including your vassal's, are over your realm supply limit, you get different type of penalties. That is a good way of preventing just random blobbing just because it makes you stronger the more you paint the map. That wasnt how history at all worked and it really bothers me.
Small nations were able to stand and rise as much armies as 3 times other nations because of food economy. That is the way its always been in history. Size really didnt matter, resources did. How well fed you could keep your country.
Levies should be based on the amount of food you can bring your country, not a base 1.3k because castle. A castle shoud only give maximum ammount of levies if you country is well fed, otherwise it should be half or whatever your countries food economy can afford.
It has to be dynamic. A region, lets say a recently conquered duchy, should be able to support 3k man by food, if its maximum levie size is 2k, then you have 1k extra food. The next time you conquer a, lets say, arid region with low food supply, it will help contribute to maixmize the levy size in that province.
adding baronies everywhere for extra standard levies when your realm was the same as always makes no sense at all, just because you have money.
Creating a barony is good, if you have extra food to support the men. A way to balance this is to actually make castles and buildings cheaper, since now to fully maximize their use you need also enough food supply.
Imagine if history was just about creating castles and suddenly 1k men for free, lol. My liege, it seems that everytime we build a castle suddenly one thousand man appear from nowhere. We should spam castles everywhere and then conquerer the world, easy.