Okay, social unrest was not popular and with good reason. But now that we have a requirement that red and blue towns must actually be somewhat near one another again, I think that a big part of the battle there is won: you can't sequester towns way off somewhere.
On the negative side, you can have harmonious red and blue towns that have no military and which are off by themselves. I guess bandit keeps would be the biggest threat there of course, but that doesn't seem like enough because that could wind up never striking you.
So my thought is a return to crime, but in a different way:
- Crime counts up like it used to.
- Building military units in a town keeps crime down, like it used to.
- But here's where it diverges:
-- Every turn, based on the percentage crime you have, there is that percent chance of a yellow bandit spawning somewhere in that town.
-- As I've pointed out elsewhere, even with a 10% chance that could mean a bandit every turn for a while (sometimes the dice just do that). You are strongly incentivized to keep crime at zero.
That way you don't get towns that are just completely peaceable, ever, same as was in the earlier versions. But now you can't also hide mostly-peaceable towns way off in the boonies, which is an improvement over the original version. And the crime starts affecting you fast, versus being no threat at all until you hit 100% on a town.
