we shall all die willingly
Factions should facilitate story, not hold territory. People 'not wanting to invest the current work required' currently EXCLUSIVELY applies to actual story that makes use of held territory. That's the issue we have, not some perceived lack of interest in grinding away to gain 3 arbitrary ink blots on an imaginary map. There are some factions which make story their driving focus, rather than expansion for expansion's sake, and that's fantastic and should only be encouraged further.
Why should a faction that holds 100 hexes get to keep that territory? Just because they get three doms done a month? Absolutely not. When factions get that big, the focus should shift to utilize and develop the obscene amount of hexes that are already under their control and only use expansion as a tool to further facilitate a coherent story, rather than as a means in and of itself.
Vomiting out three dominions a month doesn't take any effort when you're an active major faction. Actually developing a story and using the territory you have to facilitate that story, on the other hand, does. It's easy to hold on to a fifth of the map, but it's not easy to actually use a fifth of the map to tell compelling stories. That's the problem people are trying to address here, to get more factions to actually start using the territory they hold prisoner with their influence cloud.
Because what's the point of holding on to it if you're not going to use it? Open the possibility for someone else who might actually want to tell a story in that space do their thing instead. Factions will still be able to hold on to the territory that matters most to them, but the excess fat would start getting trimmed when it becomes apparent nothing's actually going on there. Right now, up until this recent string of invasions, expansion for the sake of expansion has basically been the Modus Operandi of factions for almost two years and the mindset of constantly needing to expand is starting to take its toll on the stories we're able to write and clearly has an impact on a lot of people's enjoyment of factions, why else would a large part of the community suddenly start discussing things with so much vigour? I think it's fair to say there's a lot of room for improvement with the way things are right now.
So how do we incentivize factions to tell more stories that aren't bare-bones dominions? We incentivize factions to actually develop the territory they have and make continuous expansion less and less appealing the bigger they get. The idea of empire sprawl is a great one for that and I think it would be excellent if implemented, as it explicitly states what the partial map wipe hex decay is trying to accomplish. Work with the territory you control, don't just expand it for the sake of expanding it. By making it harder to maintain large swathes of territory as a faction gets bigger it incentivizes us to only expand to the point of comfort and to then use the territory we built to create stories and engagement.
Now that's a fantastic proposal if I've ever seen one.
And, in addition to this change, while an inward focus is a wonderful thing, I think we can also work on creating incentives to start collaborating with other factions to tell even bigger and better stories, something I personally think should be as important a goal as making factions actually use the massive clouds they build. To this end, this proposal for making gaining and losing territory easier, by Ronan Vizsla, could help actually facilitate even more stories between major factions, in addition to within them. Getting territory and the threads connected to their gain/loss to matter more while simultaneously becoming more accessible than they are now might actually see us write more interesting stories again, on our collaborative story-writing site. But until we stop moving at a glacial pace and large swathes of painted territory stop sitting idle, I don't know if it'll start to happen on its own.
100% this.
EDIT: PAGE CLAIMED BY N.I.O