Here is an idea (more of vibe) I had, but that I don't have time to realize myself

A strategy game with a twist

You are the lord of some estate in some kingdom. You are presented with a bunch of "Focuses", (think projects, schemes, whatever), each with some costs that you most likely can't fulfill yourself. To be able to realize most of these focuses, you have to make deals with other nobels. Here comes the main gimmicks of this game.

Personality driven charachters

All characters are highly driven based on their personality, traits and primarilly their goals. Each character should have somewhere between 1-5 goals, and should be influenced by their personality. For example an "Isolationist" shouldn't have the goal "Deepen trade with neighbouring estates", they should have "Improve self-sufficiency".

Chain multiple deals in Agreements

To be able to pull off some of the more interesting and lucrative focuses, you are going to need to chain multiple deals at once. Let's call these deal drafts "Agreements".

Five minute gameplay example

You are the recently appointed baliff of some abandoned run-down town, with an entourage of refugees as your inhabitants. Your subjects are getting by, but barely. You suggest clearing a road to the nearest town, as it will improve trade between your two estates.

However this is a very expensive endevour, and it's not like you are getting a lot of money in taxes at the moment. Here is where we need to plan an agreement with multiple parts.

First of all, you deal with the lord of the neighbouring town that he will pay half of the cost. He won't accept this as it is, he doesn't have a need for an expensive road to some barely scraping by backwater.

However, you know of a trader who specializes in raw materials who owes you a favour. You bring them into the agreement to start a caravan between these two estates. Normally they wouldn't accept, but the combo of the favour and there being a road between the towns (when the agreement is signed! Thats the important part.).

However, now we need to deal with the players half of the cost. You manage to secure a loan for this, only because this agreement does provide you better income, which makes your lenders more confident in your ability to pay this of.

With all parties happy, you sign and enact the agreement. You and the neighbouring lord finance a road, the trader starts buying raw resources from your town and sells it at the other (You can make the economy/market system as complicated as you want), your lender pays for your part of the road, with you being obliged to pay it back with the increased earnings thanks to this road.

Implementation

You could implement this however you want, this could easily pass as a text based game, but nothing is stopping you from creating a 2d/3d world if you want.

I believe it would be easy to incrementally develop new focuses, personalities, traits, delibirations, etc.

MVP

Here's what aspects I believe are required for a MVP, which is what I think you should start with if you want to take a crack at this project.

• Player has an amount of resources (money, population), and trends of them (income, population change).
• Player is able to create an agreement for a focus.
• Player is able to create deals with other characters based as parts of agreements
• The characters should agree/disagree to these deals based on the collective outcome of the agreement with regards to their personality
• There are enough characters, personality, focuses, etc to fulfill the five minute example

Feel free to create your own milestones to get to a MVP. I think I'll create a "How I would implement this" blog post soon.

Open questions

Here are some questions that I don't have the answer too, think through if you think they would make the game better or worse

What to show the player

First of all, how much would you communicate to the player about the balancing of deals? You could go with the totally transparent technique of paradox games where all considerations are showed to the player in positive or negative values, and the deal would be accepted if the result is above zero.

However, to make this less of a min-max slider em up, you could make it a lot more thoughtful and seemingly emergent by simply not doing that. If everything that is communicated to the player is in normal text, then the player would have to pay attentention and intuit deals more actively.

There are many creative ways to communicate things to the player without numbers. For an example, let's take the lord John, with the traits Gloryhound, Risk-taker and Pious. Instead of just displaying these traits, you could build a description generator that would create some text like this.

Lord John Born a nobleman, famous for his heroic actions while commanding at the battle of %RANDOM_PLACE%. He has built his power influence by taking risks, even though at times it has put him in trouble. He is in good standing with the church aswell, making considerable donations and following doctrine to the letter.

Instead of making a deal being an affair of simply tweaking stuff until the text goes green, you could have a "propose" system, where you would recieve a response in text, with perhaps a counter-offer. You could generate this by basing the text on the traits that offset the desire of the deal most. For example

CONSIDERATIONS:
Large deal (Risk-taker): +30
Militarily advantageous (Glory-hound): +5
Base value (Base trait): -10
Cost (Base trait): -50
RESULT: -25

Dear %PLAYER% I have recieved your offer of building a road. I must say that a large deal like this can be advantagous, fortune favors the brave. A road could also be militarily advantegous in a time of war. However I must say that the cost is what makes this untenable. I have attached a counter-offer, where you will finance half of this project. Those are acceptable terms for me.

COUNTER OFFER CONSIDERATIONS:
Large deal (Risk-taker): +30
Militarily advantageous (Glory-hound): +5
Counter offer buff(Base trait): +5
Base value (Base trait): -10
Cost (Base trait): -25
RESULT: 5