[Suggestion] Term Limits for Generals

[Commissar Caligula_]

So I know Causeless said there's important script stuff that has to be done first before other things such as army splitting can be worked on, but what are your thoughts on a script or perhaps a revamp of the War Weariness system so that generals have to have terms of office (excluding faction leaders)?

Eg you can have a character be general for 50 or 75 turns, but after that he has to give up power or you suffer worldwide public order penalties (or something that increases the chance of a civil war). This would be based off the Republican Rome system where a pro-consul was designated a province for x years, and then had to retire/become a normal Senator again. I assume other countries would have had similar systems, maybe based off paranoia that a general would become too powerful and overthrow the King.

If the general goes over their term limit, penalties start getting applied which get exponentially more and more serious and lead to the risk of civil war (if possible). The benefit of going over the term limit however is that that general can get really experienced. Also, perhaps make it so winning battles lessens the effect of the penalties, but you're still getting punished over time.

So yeah, its just an idea and I'm aware that even if you wanted to get it in-game, a lot of other stuff has priority.

[Causeless]

It's a good idea and would certainly allow the campaign to be more dynamic and engaging. However, it's low-priority and from a design standpoint there's certainly considerations to be made about how to make the mechanic obvious and manageable for the player.

I also feel it'd be rather difficult to balance this correctly. Trying to balance the pros of having a more experienced general with the cons of political disruption would be really tough and I feel like it'd be impossible to write this mechanic as a lone system that has both a proper effect on the game as well as not making either of the two options obviously better than the other.

I mean - the power of an individual general is rather limited in the game. They can have a significant effect on both the campaign and battles, but trying to balance it so that the possibility of full-blown civil war is a worthwhile cost is difficult. You'd either end up with the civil war potential very costly, having it never be worth it to keep generals on, or you'd have it be that the effect on politics is so insignificant it can practically be ignored. The benefits and costs are too disparate to effectively marry unless there were other benefits to keeping generals on or active cons (other than the obvious cost of losing the general) to taking the general off.

I feel politics should really be about balancing keeping various parties happy and to slow the player's expansion etc down by focusing on internal matters other than war. It shouldn't be about merely trading the chance of civil war with various buffs. To have this feature both have a significant effect upon the game as well as not having a consistently better course of action, this idea would require extra mechanics to be implemented. I don't think it would work too well alone but only as part of a larger system of politics scripts and mechanics that would need to surround it.

Right now there are really no serious plans when it comes to politics scripting, just a lot of ideas. However, most of the ideas for political mechanics end up overlapping to some degree and so ideally would all be implemented around the same time so the mechanics can compliment each other. Of course, this also means it's a lot of work, and there's not much point in implementing a mechanic like this alone. A big overhaul in that area could come later, but almost certainly not for release.