isnt that what projects are?
I get what you're saying but immunity to compulsions, etc isnt unique enough for you?
Sure, that's cool, but I'm talking about the hundreds of times that you have to click on problems and events that have no actual consequence on the game. 75% of projects and 100% of problems and opportunities do absolutely nothing for the core game experience. It's a time-wasting minigame that rarely impacts what you actually bought the game for (the isometric RPG).
There are tens of events like:
Adepts of bizarre cult insist that the forests are disappearing, and that Erastil demands a human sacrifice. Apparently, the trees will return to life if the soil is fertilized with blood. The cultists have armed themselves with bows and set out for the forest, murdering every passer-by for the glory of Erastil. The people are terrified, and now avoid woods and thickets.
A fey magician visited a settlement, and made everyday things come to life! The people seem to be more frightened than amused by the minor and generally harmless anomaly.
A druid fanatic, and defender of the forests, has appeared in the kingdom. He sends wild animals to attack woodcutters, grows forests over the roads, and destroys sawmills. His actions are damaging the local communities, and those who express outrage have only suffered his wrath. He must be stopped, or the lands will soon turn into a dense forest!
A band of arsonists is on the loose in the city. They're extorting money from the homeowners, threatening to set fire to their property if they refuse to pay. These criminals must be stopped!
A druid from the lands of the Linnorm Kings is offering to perform a bloody ritual called the Braided Man, which involves a human sacrifice. The ritual promises to grant a bountiful harvest. But is it ethical to burn someone to ashes for the sake of an abundant harvest?
But what do they do? Nothing. The only agency the player has is to privilege certain stats over others, and the whole thing basically consists in a very barebone resources management minigame where you have to optimize each advisor's time. It can be fun at first because you feel involved in your kingdom, but it quickly becomes apparent that there's nothing behind those events and that the whole minigame is just for its own sake. And the various "advisor X requests an audience" aren't any better, since most of them have exactly zero consequences. There's a huge disproportion between how much time this minigame takes and how little it actually offers in terms of gameplay. To me, the kingdom management feature was passable at best during the first playthrough, but became a burden in subsequent ones (I still played the game for thousands of hours and I will probably keep playing it in the future, so it's not like I don't like it).
I think that having a lot less kingdom cards with a lot more "gameplay content" (areas to explore, quests to solve, enemies to fight) linked to them would have greatly benefited Kingmaker. Not because the game doesn't have enough content, but because the core gameplay is so much more fun than the kingdom management part.
