City management - roleplay meets strategy

[Sench]

Here's an idea I wanted to try for a while. Rather than having the positions of rulers in roleplays be mostly formal and having large events happen pretty much at random, have a defined system which would control what's happening in a city/kingdom. A simple, but precise economy/management system.

I even came up with a relatively simple system for it - as long as we're talking city states. The moment a kingdom gets more than a single city under its control, things start getting pretty hard to manage. Add the fact that there are multiple kingdoms with multiple cities which could switch owners, and the whole thing becomes chaotic. The problem is, it's hard to organize the whole thing, and there is a lot of information to keep track of.

So my question is, does anyone have any suggestions as to how this could be made simpler without degrading into a "on the staff's whim" kind of thing?

[LawOfTheLand]

Actually, much of Nation RP (which has many of the same elements) revolves around such political wranglings and the resulting pitched military engagements. It's a bit of a niche around this site and it's pretty hard to muscle in on, so your best bet is probably to ally with one of the major existing factions: AzricanRepublic and his United Coalition of Nations, Ottoman and his Belkans, or barney_fife and his Aschen Confederacy. Granted, they're more sci-fi oriented, but the principles hold true.

It's a lot of work up front, but the ability to pull the focus back from a determined party of adventurers to the struggles of the kingdom they're fighting to save without losing much of the drama and action present in such stories makes it a trade worth making.