Intro

Please note that this is just a sub-post covering only a puzzle-piece of my Land-Speculation.

To start on the "Front Page" or to return to the Overview-Post please click on the picture below:

So without further ado, here are my thoughts about the topic:

As you all know Splinterlands-Land will be seperated into:

• Praetoria (consists of 150 Regions)
• Regions (consist of 10 Tracts)
• Tracts (consist of 100 Plots)
• Plots

Apart from "normal" plots there will also be special buildings called Castles & Keeps on which this post will focus on.

Each region will contain exactly 9 Keeps and 1 Castle and those will be distributed evenly between all 10 tracts, meaning a tract contains exactly one special building. 9 tracts within a region will have a Keep and 1 will have a castle.

That should be easily understandable now, so lets head over to Stronghold and see whether they have a similar approach:

To ensure better understanding of the following screenshots check out my post about
[#1 World-Map]

The primary role of the Parish/County Capital is to give bonus to all the villages which exist within in the Parish/County. You know what? I think for better understanding its save to just refer to those as follows:

Parish (picture on the right) -> Tract
County (picture on the left) -> Region
Parish Capital -> Keep
County Capital -> Castle
Villages -> Plots

So lets try it again:
The primary role of the Keep/Castle is to give bonus to all the Plots which exist within in the Tract/Region

Really the only difference for the two would be that in Stronghold every Tract has a Keep and on top of that the castle is located somewhere in the region. Whereas in SL the tract with the castle is actually lacking the keep, so that could be interesting how they will handle this when it comes to Tract/Region Bonus.

But back to the Voting-System: how does it work?

1. Voting-System

Whoever has the control over the Keep/Castle is able to decide a couple of things. And to gain control over a Keep/Castle you have to be elected.

Tract: (in red) To become the steward of a Tract, you must own a Plot within the Tract and win the most votes in the election
Region:(in green) To become the sheriff of a Region, you must already be a steward of a Tract in that region and win the most votes in the election

For visual support I added the picture below showing the Castle of the Region (SALEM) and just 5 (out of many) tracts nearby

So every Plot within a tract is elegible to give 1 Vote daily, and every steward of a tract has 1 Vote daily to give for Region-Sheriff-Election. So in the example above the player who is sheriff of the castle (Salem) also controls 2 Tracts nearby, meaning from those 5 tracts he has 2 Votes at his disposal. And there is also a total points you can have.

The Votes are not set in stone though. The total vote-points of every player is reduced over time.

So thinking about Splinterlands now I assume they intend to pursue a similar (if not the same) approach. Every Plot gives 1 Vote for Keep Control and every Keep gives 1 Vote for Castle Control.

That System ensures 3 very important things:

• The player who is lucky enough to claim the one plot containing the keep/castle cannot just screw over the whole tract/region.

• The more plots/tracts you own, the more voting power you have. So it's just fair to have more influence the more skin you have in the tract/region

• Diminishing Voting Points over time (obvious to use the season as a time-basis) ensures that if the owner of the plots/tracts are not happy with their leader they can vote for someone else, however they cannot just withdraw their vote from one second to another so they might need several days to beat that player in the voting-game. So there won't be any cloak-and-dagger-operations/exploits.
  
  

2. Keep/Castle-Buildings

In Stronghold a Capital has various uses, including a bigger castle (defense) and Army the sheriff has at his disposal (Attack) because the games main focus lies on Combat which will not be part of SL-Land (at least not at the start). So the more interesting use-case to compare with SL would be Buidlings and production bonuses:

So as you can see in the picture above this is already a pretty advanced Capital containing several buildings. The Sheriff decides which buildings are constructed (and in which order) making it an important position. A sheriff can either just act selfishly and start with buildings he personally needs most (e.g. most of his villages harvest Salt so he builds the Salt-Guild first) or he listens to the other players within the tract/region.

3. Taxes

In Stronghold, Gold is needed to afford an army and defense, thats why the sheriff can decide whether there are high/low taxes within the tract/region.

During times of war that is mostly quite high and during times of peace a little lower but it comes down to the decision of the elected sheriff/steward.

As you can also see in the picture -> A proportion of the Keeps taxes is going to the castle storage.

Even when combat is not going to be a thing in splinterlands I can still imagine something like that, a tax that provides passive funds for the capital to be spent on certain special buildings.

4. Closing Thoughts

Given that a keep affects a tracts production bonuses and a castle does so for a whole region the question I immediatley had was: "But what about the tract containing the castle? Do they lack the Keep (Tract) Bonuses?" And I just cant imagine that.
That is also why I think that a castle is not different to a keep, only in the influence radius.
So I believe the castle will have its effect on the tract it is located in and on top of that also give its region-bonus to that tract (Making it basically a 2x Bonus). That would further give advantage to the castle tract as the whole region works together to level up its buildings. [I hope its clear what I mean by this.]

A solution would be if SL decides to give all 10 tracts a keep and additionally that one tract has a Castle on top. However I am certain that they won't do that as the sale already took place and it could lead to bad-blood from the investor/player-side if the Keep/Castle-Distribution is somehow changed at this point.

Maybe while reading this post you also thought: "But if the sheriff gets elected, what about the player owning the plot where the castle/keep is on? Whats in it for them?" And thats a good question.

I think that Keep/Castle-Plot should give its owner a share of all income/tax within the tract/region. Not too much but enough so its still a very desired asset because of its passive-income.

However I think a voting system is needed because what happens if the player lucky enough to get the castle-plot (and maybe he owns just that single plot) doesnt want to govern or manage that castle. Are all players within the tract/region just screwed then if he doesnt sell?

Or worse: There are currently 2 plots on Atomichub that got burned, what if one of those contained a keep/castle ? Is that just a dead tract/region then? I think it shouldnt be and thats why imho the best idea would be a voting system and just a passive income for the owner.

And the last thing I thought of was TITLES as I have absolutely no idea what they will bring to the table for title-holders. Maybe some sort of voting-influence-bonus. Really no idea yet, but I think the titles could bring some interesting aspects to the land-game. And if they don't come up with anything sophisticated, they can still choose the easy way: "Titles give Ressource-production-bonus according to their rarity", however I hope they'll think of something more elaborate.

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So as mentioned above there are different ressources and crafting items in Stronghold aswell. In my post "Resources" I will focus on that part So if you are interested in some more thoughts around land (and comparisons with Stronghold Kingdoms) you can either hop over to the next post "Resources" or return to the "Overview" Post by clicking the pictures below:

Either way, thank you so much for powering through the post. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Maybe you also have a particular game in mind or maybe just a particular mechanic you would like to see in Splinterlands.

I would also love some feedback so I can improve my posts so feel free to leave those aswell.

Thanks for the support

Yours, Moriarty (THE GRANDMASTER)