Flari-Merchant

Azure_Zero
You don't need as dynamic a system and as UNFUN taxing as you think you need.
I propose something that WON'T cheese off settlement leaders and players while keeping "Bad Actors" in a weaker state.
Simple put, have all settlements have a base support of 14, each hex of there core 6 gives one support level,
Any additional hexes mean jack all.
Bad actors tend to be kicked from a settlement so they would auto drop to the support of level 8.

It would also remove the UNFUN of bulk resources.

I like this elegant solution, to a situation that is just too mechanically heavy now to be justified by the current pop levels. Especially seeing as larger pop levels look like they will be real world years away in reality.

Flari-Merchant
Well I think that we all added(back in the day) to the pressure to encourage characters to polarize to established settlements.

I also think that it has proven to be a penny wise, pound foolish angst since there are not any masses of homeless characters.

Something that again, feels like it would make sense if the world was crowded but(with the world empty) turned out to be very burdensome, bothersome and unnecessary.

Until such a time as the world does become crowded, I feel like this system will heavily contribute to the factors that slowly kill the game off.

Bob

Azure_Zero
This new tax effectively sets settlement level to the activity of a settlement, this means that if a settlement was running at level 20 and had nothing, but casual players, it would nuke the players to say low teens, and the players would Hate this and leave.

This proposed change would indeed limit settlements based on the activity level of their characters, but that doesn't necessarily mean that many (or any) existing settlements would find their settlement levels reduced. It all depends on the exact numbers. As an extreme example, if we set the Max Influence reduction to .001 per Holding per day, a settlement could have 30 holdings and only need to generate 11 influence per year to keep that running.

Admittedly, a number that low probably wouldn't have a significant impact on the overall balance, since the additional influence needed per holding would basically be .365 per year. Then again, groups considering having 30 underutilized holdings might at least think twice before increasing their influence needs by 11 per year to do so, unless holding them serves other important strategic purposes.

Our goal is to find a number low enough not to put an undue burden on more casual groups will still being noticeable for more active groups. The originally proposed reduction of .5 per day was probably too high, and very well might have pushed the more casual settlements down to something like level 14 or 16, depends a lot on what one means by casual. We still think there's a number in there somewhere that hits the right balance, or perhaps a slight tweak to the calculations/rules that does the trick, but if not, then we'll look for a different solution.

Flari-Merchant
Totally off topic but the entire Settlement Support for character level maintenance needs a real hard looking at. The concept, if I remember correctly, was originally an ideal to place a check on "Bad Actors" in game play. It has morphed to something much more invasive towards overall game enjoyment, or it would if there were enough players for it to even matter.

Taking(even temporarily reducing) player POWER was never going to work out favorably in gen public realization… Notice I call it "Realization" rather than knee jerk "Opinion".

This is one of (and as Azure is trying to point out, I think) part of the many "frustrations" that playing the game so sweetly delivers in a negative snowball accumulative way.

Messing with, what people see rightly as, earned power potential has probably grown into a badly implemented mechanic. It can still work but needs real revamping and original goal re implementation.