I'll address the whole landgrabbing/land thing first off, because everything really depends on that. I envision a significant switch up in the way we do land, and that would lead to changes in land gaining, land taking, and wars, as well as serve as a somewhat different foundation on which to build projects and such.
I would make the change from land as "acres" to land as "provinces." A province would be a number of acres in a unit - you couldn't break it up. They would take a number of turns, in addition to a number of soldiers or special "explorers" (maybe too complicated) and an amount of cash to open up. You would then have to secure them by building a fortification and stationing soldiers in them.
As such, you couldn't really make regular "raids" or anything of that nature. You'd either have to make the effort to capture an entire province - which would result immediately in a significant fight, and longer-term would inevitably start (or require the start of) a war. Thus, land changes hands in clan or individual wars, but not day to day.
This raises two questions: How do keep experienced players from farming newbies? And, How do we do that without making war impractical or imposing ridiculous restrictions? (I.e., you can only declare war within X percentage of your net. In addition to being nonsensical, these allow for all sorts of goony work-arounds.)
The way we do this is make it such that it costs significantly more to take a province then it does to scout one. This solves the first issue, but raises the second question: Why would anybody attack?
Well, you make it so it takes more money to develop a province to a person's relative development level then it takes for them to launch a military expedition. Thus, if the enemy has provinces of relatively the same development level, it would be worthwhile to take them by force (depending, of course, on how difficult the war would be - something that wouldn't be easy to calculate). On the other hand, if the provinces are all significantly less well developed, the costs of the military expedition to take them, let alone the defense the opponent might put up, would not be worth it. You could certainly take a province just to damage someone, which would be done in clan war type situations, but it wouldn't be the most advantageous thing for the attacker.
Another thing I would do would be to create resources. Some provinces would have these, some would not. (All starting provinces would have one.) They would be necessary to a variety for things, from building armies to building projects. They could include critical stuff like iron, wood, stone (building, armies, etc.) and boosters (wheat that can feed soldiers, gold that can be sold to the bank for extra currency.) Since every empire would have only one resource to start out, it would create a robust trading system, with empires trading wood for stone, iron for wood, with stuff like gold and silver coming to serve as mediums of trade. Game currency could also be a means for trade.
This could be used to address the issue of clan projects turning clans into "oldbies clubs." If we make resource appearance in new provinces inversely dependent on time the player has been playing and the number provinces they have, and make it so as things go on and projects and stuff get more and more expensive, clans would then have an incentive to recruit newbies and build them up with aid and advice - the newbies part of the deal would be gaining new sources of resources for the clan, and one newbie who was rocketed up through aid might gain more new resource sources in a month then the whole rest of a large clan.
As a part of this, sources of resources could have a limited amount of resource "units," thus putting even more pressure on people to obtain new sources, as their old sources would run out.
In terms of complexity, I think the key would be to make it so initial play is fairly simple. A little resource trading with other players, some economic fiddling, (balancing tax rates, interest rates, and maybe one other factor in response to changing economic conditions) but mostly just spending turns on various things, like building, recruiting and training troops, and piling up supplies for a simple project or two (fortress upgrades, city upgrades/building another city, a trade hub if they're part of a clan) or the acquisition of another province. (Supplies including cash, resources, turns, and standard food.)
As things got advanced, or as players got more advanced, more projects, more diplomacy, more complicated economic conditions (and I spout off about economic conditions while having no real idea of how that would work, but I know it's been thrown around) more game events and more wars/complex trade agreements/strategic maneuvers to get access to resources/other varied interactions with other players would lend increasing complexity to the game: however, I think, not (at least, outside of clan play - that will ever and always eat your time) anything that will cause it to take more than 15 - 20 minutes to make a run, once you've got a certain strategic project figured out. (For example, you're building up for a war - you come on, make sure you still have access to the resources you need, make troops, let your economy run and tax it, and then sign off.)
To further avoid complexity, presentation could be as simple (for projects) as a page listing "doable" projects (that is, the things they are developed enough for, they don't have other projects that need to be done first) a short description of what the project does, and the costs. Something like the old heroes page. Another page could list all the projects and what they require, thus allowing people to trace out and plan ahead - as much complexity as you want, when you want it, is the key. However deeply they want to delve, it's there. There's more development to be done with all these concepts - both fleshing stuff out and simplifying it - I think there's at least a start in this four page (double spaced) essay I'm writing. On a random note, I wonder if I could write a four page essay for school this quickly... not likely.
To address some specific questions/points.
"How did you envision your particular Clan Tax? Is this something that skims off of every turn? Does it go straight into the Clan Treasury, or is it auto-distributed in a strange form of automatic pseudo-aid?"
I would envision clan tax as a tax on the economic production of the clan - money, basically, and possibly food or resources. The tax would go to the treasury, from whence it could be spent on clan projects or sent as aid.
Hmm... This sounds like NationStates, which leads to the problem of having a regrettably limited number of "circumstances" to respond to. Unless we find a way around this, it can get kinda gimmicky after a while; I know that's why I quit playing NationStates, since telling the exact same environmental group that "yes, I do support you" for the fifteenth time just gets OLD.
I somewhat addressed this earlier. I would envision tweaking a few things on the economy, (interest rate and tax rate, maybe?) and maybe adjusting stuff in response to seasons/weather conditions. (I.e., shutting down farms in the winter, and directing more effort to be made in factories. That sort of thing might get repetitive, I suppose, but it wouldn't be the whole of the game - merely a little extra tweaking. Also, since it involves changes that affect the rest of your empire, it wouldn't get the feeling of "this is useless" like talking to the same group 15 times over.
I was reading that and thinking, "Sounds nice, but they're just gonna become an exclusive club...", and then you acknowledged that. Not much to say here - I'm mostly in agreement - but we certainly do need to expand on anti-oldbie-"lock" measures. It feels bad to be so cynical about experienced players, but it really is true that mechanics need to prevent abuse - the landgrab-happy game is partly a playerbase issue.
I addressed this somewhat with resources. That certainly gives (1) an advantage to newbies/new accounts, and (2) an incentive for clans to recruit newbies/new accounts.
Does it really have to be a wargame though? I mean life isn't a wargame and it's bloody violent. It could be that wars and attacks are the extra-ordinary means of getting land, and for all that they could be quite frequent. Imagine if we just upped the scouting percentages a lot. I don't like a completely HPR game, but I don't think we'd be in great danger of that. And I would not lose sleep if some proportion of the playerbase based their entire strategy on nonviolent empire and alliance building. I mean, the potential for conflict can be just as potent a player interaction as that conflict itself -- it certainly is in life. And the person at the top might eventually be toppled in any case.
That's exactly the sort of thing I'm thinking of - you spend most of your time on non-violent economics, trading, building, and diplomacy; then go to war over power, to gain land, to gain access to resources that are in short supply, or to important bonus resources, or simply for power and/or prestige (think being able to levy a tax on the rest of the game, or simply controlling the top 5 spots, or clan supported emping.)
Do we have anybody volunteering to redo the main page or right a paragraph or two? Also, yeah, something with the color scheme, definitely. The current one is almost annoying to work with, with all the little humps in the background, and there isn't much that's better.
Also, what about a theme for the game? Any ideas of something that would be a major draw and have fans that would tend to stick around? If not, any ideas for something that might be a little more interesting that history? Not that history is totally uninteresting, but most people would probably prefer something else - fantasy, a cartoon, something.
(I wrote this before I saw your post, Devari, but I see you express yourself just as strongly.) That's what I miss most about the old days of the game -- and I've posted about it before -- the lack of the sense of normalcy. It used to be the case that attacks meant something -- granted this phase lasted no longer than a month on either RWL or Warbands -- and it would be nice if that were still the case, if a successful attack in itself meant some sort of achievement, and would provoke a response. Of course, diplomacy stayed a major part of the game for longer than that, as Devari pointed out. On FAF nowadays it seems to be dead. On ME, politics (not really diplomacy as such) were important too though.
