2 Things this game desperately needs

[MaxWilson]

Taqwus said:
The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too.

If you're talking about realism, you've also got the same problem with unrest being generated by the simple presence of your armies in a province, regardless of whether they've been disbanded. Dom3 is actually pretty minimal on the province-management thing, being more of a wargame than a Civilization game, and you could easily take this idea about soldiers and unrest far enough for it to be a tedious micromanagement detail. Morale and inaccurate fire add a lot of fun to the game because they add new tactical dimensions that you can exploit, but I'm cautious about adding a new detail to the world model purely for realism's sake. In the real world, your population should be fluctuating slightly even without a Growth/Death dominion or huge drought/blizzards/immigration, but it's nice to have that detail abstracted away because otherwise I'd feel compelled to pay attention to it, even though it hardly matters. If the unrest from disbanding were small I'd probably feel that it was a needless hassle.

-Max

[Nick_K]

Weren't employed soldiers quite keen on rapine and pillage in mediaeval times too? I don't think making them unemployed would necessarily dramatically increase this.

[Sombre]

If you make disbanding cause unrest all that will happen is people will either not use it or feel forced to move all their guys to one sink province in order to disband them. Is that realistic? Is that fun? Does it satisfy the people who are asking for the disband command in the first place? No on all counts.

Dom3 isn't even a realistic game. It's far more arcadey that a lot of 'risk' inspired strategy games. I mean this is a game with simple recruitment, economic, political, religious, diplomatic etc systems. If you want extra annoyances based on 'realism' then feel free to roleplay that your commander got drunk that day and failed to lead his army to attack or that your troops are unable to march during winter due to a lack of adequate blankets, or that they'll all go back to tending the crops during the summer. Why should everyone else be forced to deal with extra pointless micromanagement?