That's not a good example, since courtiers cost 500 coins each.
Since the goal is not solo world conquest, your analogy is flawed anyway.
I think I shall sell spy power at 40% base price, on a one-week contract. I will not take contracts against someone who already has an active contract, and will not reveal anything about my contracts beyond who has them.
Fakeedit: Will there be tooltips on the map? Clicking a hex to get linked to a page with the hex info will get tedious quickly.
I am hoping to modify the database call to make the world map load faster. I am kinda shocked to see clicking a hex, then hitting back when you are done, called tedious on the forums for a game called Dwarf Fortress.
I don't know about tooltips but there will be some visual stuff. A nation's land will be denoted by a blob of color in the middle of the hex.
The thing about tooltips is that I have to break out the Javascript, JQuery, and Ajax to transfer server data to the client. So, you will have to wait another week minimum for game start to see that kind of thing if you really want it.
As a comparison, the way these games usually run you have a giant excel sheet with nation/province data and a copy pasted hand colored map and there is no connection between the province/nation data and the map unless you are aware of the names of the nations based on memory. So having an interactive map at all is a massive step up.