[Sombre]

Well the question is really more how bad does someone have to be and how long do you wait, rather than how can you tell if they're bad.

In my second example, the amount they have lost is not really important, since anyone can lose everything they have given certain circumstances, I just mean to indicate that the player is indeed playing very poorly. Let's say for example that they've spent fortunes on 30 pd in every province, have their thugs all researching at home, haven't scripted anything or have scripted very poor spell choices, have suicided many of their forces in essentially unwinnable attacks and have alchemised all their gems to try and get more gold to boost up their pd. They have done this not to be purposely bad or spoil the game for anyone, but because they just aren't good at the game. Equally their diplomacy has amounted to making an expensive NAP with a neighbour they were previously conquering with ease and attacking numerous other neighbours who are well situated to attack them and do a lot of damage.

With subbing in a better player, the hope would be to manage to do so before the game gets too warped, hence the question of if/when it's ok to forcibly sub someone out.

To provide another example from the start of the game - this is actually from a game I played in a year or two back: Player A did not do well in expansion. In fact on turn 8 (iirc) they had only taken 1 province. They had to leave the game due to other time commitments and a sub, player B, was found. Player B knew the position was bad, which was fine, and they weren't able to do that much about it before they were killed off. Player B did report that the previous player had built up a lot of pd in his two provinces. Although I don't know exactly what happened, it looked like Player A just wasn't very good/experienced with MP. They didn't seem to have staled or thrown the game or anything. Now if Player A hadn't left the game, their position would have been conquered with even greater ease, which would certainly have warped the game more than it was with the sub in (Player B did manage to expand a bit more and fight a rush off for a while before going down).

Had Player A not left, should he have been subbed anyway for his very poor performance?