I will try and answer those questions that kind of "expand" the main text - the other ones we will talk about in the next devblog. So yes, random, really.
How will the game handle whole AFK castles? Will the servers not be region based so you can have NA players watching guard, while EU players are asleep? 
alright so how is everyone else going to defeat the crpg players during the night when all of us no lives are raiding their shit
One of our core ideas is "what you have when you go to sleep, you have when you wake up". While you might be able to be a small nuisance during the night, you cannot raid a city unannounced. The big deciding battles over "claims" happen with armies that you send. I never liked the idea of getting screwed over while sleeping, we want you to have a normal reallife. So, your claim is safe during the night, as long as you check approaching armies during the day.
So, there are two instances where you can fight: wars and instanced round-based battles. So, am I not supposed to encounter enemies when riding through the lands and have some small but interesting skirmishes with them?
There will also be fights during the day, mostly robberies and similar. We want to have gamedesign that highly encourages those encounters to be non-lethal, but you never know when you come across a jerk.
With each player having a family of 5 working, don't players become jack-of-all-trades? How do they specialize? F.ex. the blacksmith, do you have one of your family members being that, whilst others have to work in support of that?
That's really up to you. You start with one guy, and getting up to 5 will take time and effort. It would both make sense to have an entire family run blacksmith, with different specialisation, or to spread it. My assumption will be that, the larger the faction, the more specialised the families in it.
You say there will not be an item in the game, that is not made by a player. Does that mean that at the start everyone will be running around naked?
Was an exaggeration, you start with basic tools with bad quality. And basic clothes.
How will death be handled outside a War? Is permadeath still in?
How will death be handled inside a War? Will a faction go to a War with lives/tickets like in strategus? If so, how do you acquire them?
What do you mean by 'those armies will move slowly across the world', will behind an open world be a strategus-like map where you send your army to attack? Is the War in an instanced zone / separate server?
Will world outside the war be open, as in one map?
- There is permadeath, although highly discouraged.
- Yes, the armies are tickets. The tickets are characters from your city (possibly with a multiplicator, depends on gameplay tests). Which means drafting an army blocks individual characters of everyone in the city, hurting your economy. There is still some discussion going on about the details of this, but it's about the symbiosis again.
- Strategic map: yes, armies move in a different "layer", but it's still based on the open-world one.
- When a war happens, it's locked off from the main world. Considering that war is a main gameplay part, it is most important for us to have a lag-free experience.
- It is one open map, but split on multiple servers. So there will be small loading times when moving from one area to the other, but we'll try and keep that experience as smooth as possible. It will be possible to stand on a mountain and spot castles in the far distance built by other players
