Feature Request: Subfactions (different from vassalage) OR a way to make town/vassal ownership less confusing

[ninjakitty844]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Currently, if a faction wants to give one of their towns a specific name, they have to create a whole new faction to give that town that name. That is currently what my players use vassalization for. Each town is a vassal of the kingdom that owns it. But a problem arises when nobody can easily tell which kingdoms own which towns. Since each town has its own name, they all appear as individual factions, when in reality they are meant to be an extension of their original faction.

When you enter a town, the name that pops up on your screen is the name of the town only, it does not say who the town is a vassal to. And in chat, when you see the town's members chatting, you see only their town name, not their main faction's name.

It is very important that people know who they are really declaring war against when they declare war against a vassal. They need to see which factions have allegiance to which other factions in order to make these decisions, and vassalization just makes it really hard. There are places where you can see vassalization info, but it is tucked away behind commands. If you have an encounter with an enemy patrol and you need to think fast about whether to engage them or leave the area, you need to be able to tell right away without running a command to whom their allegiance is, or whether they are independent.

Describe the solution you'd like
One idea I had was just subfactions, as a way to have a town name without it completely overriding the main faction's name in chat and in territory titles.

In chat and territory titles, you should either see both town name AND faction name, or you only see the actual owner faction's name, as that is the much more important name.
Perhaps the top line of a town's territory title should always be the main faction's name, and the second line should be the town's name? (this would unfortunately mean that towns can't have descriptions under their territory title though)

A subfaction could even be similar to a secondary role, where the main way to tell that someone is in a subfaction is by looking at their main faction's info with commands.

I'm not confident that my subfactions idea is a perfect solution to the problem, so I'm open to any other possible fixes you may have towards this problem as well, as long as the problem gets fixed :]

[dmccoystephenson]

Hey @ninjakitty844,

Thank you for taking the time to share such a detailed and thoughtful feature request! I really appreciate the effort you put into describing the issue and offering potential solutions. It’s clear that this is an important quality-of-life improvement for your players, and I can see how addressing this could enhance clarity and decision-making during gameplay.

This is actually what the Fiefs plugin was originally intended to address, providing a way to manage towns and their relationships with factions more intuitively. However, I still need to update Fiefs to be compatible with MF 5, so I haven’t been able to focus on improvements or new features just yet.

I’ll review your suggestions, particularly the idea of subfactions, and consider how they might align with Fiefs or other approaches. I’m quite busy at the moment, but I’ll look into this as soon as I can. Thank you for your patience and for contributing such a well-thought-out request!

Signed,
Daniel