Okay, let's take a step back here:
1. Opinion is pretty divided.
2. At best, anything suggested (including my thing and all the others) is going to be a @#%#$ to balance, and possibly/probably still divisive.
3. Time is finite.
4. There are other things (woes, etc) that everyone is more excited for.
5. Therefore crime should be removed and nothing put back in its place (woes and bandits kind of fill that niche anyhow).
Thoughts?
I would suggest 'beefing up' crime to a more substantial point to make it effective in the early turns and tweak it as best you can for now. Yanking systems only makes the game more simplistic and reduces the number of interesting interactions in the game, which while perhaps not perfect, is better than a simple game.
I would prefer to keep as many 'systems' in the game to keep the gameplay and mechanics varied as much as possible.
just mho
-Teal
Normally, I would agree with this.
But I think part of the problem with the crime system.... and Chris can correct me if I'm wrong here.... is that it was designed around a different idea of what the game would be, in terms of what systems would be active. The "woes" idea, for instance, had not been thought up. Crime made sense WITHOUT that... to push the player to build more cities and such, and give them more reason to have more military units. But.... with the woes thing in place, that actually ends up being kinda redundant. Particularly since you STILL have the threat of bandits at all times, even with the woes, so.... if the woes are as "big" as I'm thinking they're going to be, removing crime wont actually lower the compexity of the game. Rather, it'll remove something that simply doesnt fit the current (and better) design.
So yeah, I'd say for now.... just take it out. The bandit spawning? I *do* like the idea of having more concentrated areas that they might appear in.... but that can be added by the woes even as well. Like the idea of bandit "camps" appearing throughout the map as one of those, or something. I've a feeling we'll still be seeing plenty of bandits, heh. So while it COULD be enhanced, it's also fine to just leave it as be.
