History XI: The Kingdoms of this World

I need to understand how the secession mechanic is working in practice, so I disabled it to see what sort of empires are built without it. Previously, many tiny kingdoms would spring up with no clear rhyme or reason - a city would be founded and immediately secede against its hegemon. Why so sensitive?

In addition, there's not enough war overall, and the wars that are fought are ultimately pointless for the attacker (with an overall success rate of about 6%, it's unclear why anyone would bother in the first place).

So there are some issues with the battle system, but I'll table that for now until I know what's going on with rebellion/secession. Really, these are secessions, not civil wars; civil wars are waged in the interest of taking over the central government of the entire hegemon, whereas seceding parties usually just want to be left alone. Of course, they are automatically at war either way according to the system.

These problems were addressed by a few tweaks:

• Cities will secede only if they provide a certain amount of infrastructure to themselves AND they have a minimal (1%) contribution from their initial hegemon's capital.
• Peace, being preferable to war, is still common. There is only a 1% chance for a relationship to increase above HIIK 0. However, I removed the restrictions on which cities would be attacked - previously only cities which increased the hegemon's overall desirability would be targeted.
• In addition, attackers will choose their targets a bit more wisely. If they suspect that the defending force is too large, they won't attack. However, I still think this suffers from perfect information. Perhaps this should only kick in at higher infrastructure levels, where the attacking army would have access to advanced intelligence and a better knowledge of the defender's strength.
• Cities can now be cut off from reinforcements. If an attacker takes all the hexes around a city, or a region, then those armies will have no expectation to be reinforced, and thus begins a catastrophic snowball. It could even result in another secession, depending on the circumstances. Right now, there's no specific incentive for an army to break the blockade by taking a strategic choke-point.

It's becoming more obvious that sub-kingdoms are the way to go if you want to maintain a large empire. Although I haven't worked out the mechanics for it, the only ideas I have so far are 1) conquest and submission and 2) voluntary submission. I would need a mechanic whereby a country would divide itself into administrative districts unprompted. I can use the current numbers, but the details of it elude me so far.

1160 years