What would it take?

[Zauper]

Some age off a top kingdom should start with say 19 guys and let a random come in. Then invite the rest of your guys and vote the random(an active one) in as king and just run everything like you do, never letting on who you are. Of course you might have to be a bit demanding to get stances right, but other than that....

only monarch can invite :(

[Chrystal Palace]

I think the key component that most kingdoms miss out on is not having a whatsapp channel filled with aehtak selfies.

This right here. +1

[mkirby2]

I would definitely say get rid of magic

[StratOcastle]

only monarch can invite :(

Yeah, that's why I'm saying you vote him in after you get your 4 recruits. You'd already have had one.
Age off to account for slow start ;-)

[tetley]

I believe there should be some implement that makes more land inherently good and better. Bishop has repeatedly stated that the devs don't want players forced into playing a certain way, but the side effect of this is that the majority of organized ghettos don't care about land. There is the "obvious" point - that if you're the biggest, no one can push you around. But so many would rather avoid that facet of the game entirely.

I DO see a fair number of ghetto players who individually want to fight over their land against bigger kingdoms, but they are usually just a few people in the whole kingdom. And then I assume the activity and such of a top kingdom is beyond their interest which is why they stay in the ghetto.

There are far more warring&active kingdoms than there are whoring&active kingdoms; yet as I said before they don't care about land. Because more often than not, acquiring land is counter-productive for the ends of warring (maintaining good bpa and wpa etc).

One suggestion to resolve this dilemma would be to link more directly the acquisition of science, more honor, and possibly even WPA to the immediate acquisition of land (ie give other or more resources along with oow land hits). The resources taken would obviously scale with kdnw difference. This way, when a "warring" kingdom got waved, they would actually care about their land, because tied with it was substantial wizards/books/honor that they just lost. Bishop's response to this suggestion was that it forced players to play a certain way and was therefore bad for the game.

A lot of people said in this thread that they didn't want to deal with the diplomatic factor or have CFs or fight people with 10x their science etc. But people's problems and misconceptions with "the top" (pumping, diplo, etc) are a self-fulfilling prophecy: it wouldn't be that way if so many didn't refuse to enter the competitive realm. Kingdoms are only able to pump on 40% draft for weeks at end because there are so few kingdoms up there. If ten war ghettos were to spontaneously make a play for the land crown next age, the climate at the top would be entirely different. Full of war, waves, and other excitement, like the game used to be.

[noobium]

Fixing the gains and t/m mechanics so that larger provinces aren't overly punished would be a step in the right direction. It's annoying that a lot of conflicts are decided by nw gains manipulation.

You can't really force people to play competitively when the culture to do so simply doesn't exist. Right now the game is more pro-growth than the low- and mid- tier kingdoms act on, but they choose not to for various reasons (even though it is strategically the correct thing to aim for land expansion early on regardless of goal and what kind of kingdom you are in, assuming a halfway decently organized kingdom. The only exception would be some really bad ghettos that cannot agree to a coherent province management strategy and suffer from inactivity, which usually leads to a few provinces growing large and quickly getting farmed out - and there is really no way for kingdoms like that to play the game successfully. (Even then, if the big provinces are playing rationally and not for stupid selfish noob reasons as many ghetto provinces do, they can find a way to leverage their early growth in a way that is better than if those provinces stalled their growth...)

Introducing patch mechanics which make it easier to acquire land-pumpedness just means that growth kingdoms get the most out of those bonuses, being able to spend less time and resources building up their provinces and more time on continued land expansion. It doesn't change the fundamental problem that the smaller kingdoms just don't want to deal with BS at higher levels.

Being a truly competitive kingdom at the top isn't going to happen for a lot of kingdoms, but a lot of kingdoms could do better with their position, and if they did then the charts wouldn't have a glut of warring kingdoms all around the same size, that need to be on high alert against each other and can't really grow too much. When the mid-tier and lower tiers have more differentiation, it opens up more possibilities for those kingdoms to play a game out of war rather than being obliged to war and hope to win.

There's also a mentality that managing a province oow is "boring", but the actually good war kingdoms pay attention to their province out of war and work to put themselves in the best position to actually win, without having to resort to horribly unbalanced wars. A lot of bad war kingdoms seem to think they can force outmatched kingdoms to war rather than actually build up their provinces correctly, and sooner or later they get humiliated. I don't see what's so boring about spending time to prepare a province and play the game out of war, it's really fun to be able to build up a losing kingdom up to a respectable level and to do that requires some planning oow.

[StratOcastle]

Perhaps a completely different approach might be in order. My first draft was running a strat called 'playing house'. I haven't figured a friendlier way to pull it off, but we should be able to run small high quality kingdoms with an eye toward 1st world Europe as an influence.
I realize we can lower/release thieves to allow an ally to steal resources, but I'd like to see a more formal system. I find it a little odd that the largest kingdoms compound the highest science. I think they should potentially, but we can observe large countries in our world and see this: there may be high order science, but it's hardly uniform.

Figuring in the devs have left happiness in the dust I'm not expecting help from that end. So all I can say is try to perceive your kingdom as a visionary. Titling may not be realistic, but to attain superior quality and react otherwise like a SK might have traction. Again, you have to be more dangerous than your value so keep that in mind.

I'll continue to support merging as the best way to advance kingdom quality on the server. The most daunting challenge is leaving space for the heritage kingdoms in Utopia. I'd be happy playing in one of the old lower tier kingdoms myself. I could be overly concerned since a few I can think of have survived the ups and downs for many ages.