Could do it (coded into game) that when someone owns a fief/castle/town, it adds a colored area around that fief in their faction's color - a certain radius for fiefs, a bigger one for castles, and a bigger one still for towns. this would represent their general "area of control or influence".
if a faction owned a couple in an area these would start to "connect" or "overlap" and basically do the same as these player made area of control maps do.
could be something that can be toggled on or off.
just a thought.
Ideally youd want a web based application that draws provincal boundaires around each fief with some form of raster graphics i forget what its called. If you have these provinces setup you can display alot of information which would be toggled by selecting a view from a group of radio buttons.
Faction color: The web based application accesses the strat database and colors in teh provinces based upon the color of the faction who owns it, obviously some transparency in the color involved os you cans see the geography, and the feif would be printed over the colored in province. (scroll over displays faction maybe, or a better way to dispaly it)
Good price range: If the good sold in a province has is in the range of 20-25, color the province red, if 15-20 orange, if 10-15 yellow, if 5-10 green.
Siege: If the fief in the province is under seige color the province red, otherwise green.
Garrison: Again the same idea as good price range but with the towns garrison instead, population + garrisoned soldiers.
Money: how much gold is in the feif, or you could mix gold/garrison/equipement and create some sort of defense rating, the more troops and high end gear the higher the rating so the harder it will be for you to capture it.
Possibly player population
could include prosperity/SD if any of that stuff matters
Total size of armies currently moving through the terrortory
would also be nice to be able to look at a picture of a town when clicking on it, being able to see it will help you determine how hard it will be to attack it, althought you can do that on the website.
Im sure you could think of other things, you get the idea.
As you can see just creating these boundaries and connecting them to the strat database opens up alot of doors in terms of creating an information system like this. Even for data that the current strat map already displays, you have to click on a feif to get it, who knows how mayn feifs you will hav to click on to find what your looking for. With a color coded map you can quickly analyze large amounts of data (everything about every feif on the entire map) just by looking at it and easily find what your looking for (low good price for example). But you need access to this database, or the ability to query it rather, i doubt the devs will give that to anyone, if they even want people to know this kind of info i have listed. I had offered to attempt to make this a month ago when i had time to, asked chadz about ti but nto response, i assume hes not on board with the idea, which is understandable.
The guy who made the first strat map made with javascript and stole alot of existing code from the strat website (the client, (the user) can view the javascript code of a website) so he was able to get faction data indirectly from the database, atleast i think i know very little about javascript or web development in general.
