You know what is a GREAT idea? A game that would be like the title of this thread: Crusader Kings crossed with city building. A game where there are lands and titles that people could fight each other and conspire against each other for, much like CK2. A game where marrying into the right dynasty would be important, where knocking off the guy ahead of you in the line of succession is a possibility, where going to war to assert your claim is a real possibility.
the game more or less is that.
It's not, though. You can't do any of the things I described. Marrying into the right dynasty doesn't really mean much, since the marriage won't produce an heir that gets claims on the titles of both parents. There is no line of succession. You can't assassinate anyone. You can't really kill anyone without insane amounts of effort, except when they're new and haven't had time to build up their defenses. There's no way you can lose your lands, and there's no way to manufacture claims on someone's lands or conspire to take their lands. You will never run out of heirs for as long as you want to keep playing. It's all very safe and boring.
i think people will agree with me that the game was incredibly fun when it first started, because while we were all small domains and had no micromanaging problems at the time, we all expected it to be improved over time.
I must have been having fun since I attempted to run several domains at once. But it was the game that I wished it was -- the game I described above -- that made it interesting to me; once reality set in -- and the reality is that the game is like medieval FarmVille -- I lost interest.
i personally left because of the terrible admin. instead of actively improving the game with things players found fun, he made it his mission in life to make the game as irritating as possible with micromanagement and bad/worthless features nobody (NOBODY) wanted. many now mature domains simply started to leave because the micromanagement was intolerable, with no hope for improving.
to illustrate my point: the game was more fun at release than it was at any other point after. i cant think of a single update that added something good, or fixed something broken (its most likely still the case)
if this game had a serious dev team, i would still play.
I know a lot of people seem to dislike the guy, but I never really thought he was terrible. Though I never had any contact with the guy.
He took the game in a direction that I didn't really want it to go, which is fine. Not every game has to be one that I want to play. People are still playing, so there must be some demand for the kind of game he has made.