My addled brain is still attempting to digest Caspian's explanation in Discord about how settlements acquire additional land. The relevant post is in the Soul Chamber in Chronicles of Elyria Discord and has also been copied by Ravenlute into his Soul Chamber echo thread here. I am including an abridged and edited copy here to more easily show the points about which I'm having mental indigestion. The bold-typed sections are the points I'm concerned about.
04.19.2019#Settlement Land Ownership
Caspian :cloud:: Ok folks. I'm sure this has been stated here in Discord before, but I'll go ahead and state it again.
When you incorporate into a settlement, land is transferred from the owners over to the settlement. It becomes the property of the settlement to do what it likes with. The settlement owns the land.
The leaders of the settlement, generally a village or town council, can vote on stuff, with votes weighted by how much land was contributed to the settlement. Like stocks in a company. The more land you contributed to the settlement, the more your vote is worth.
The settlement can choose to sell the land back to the owners, to other people, or to hold onto it as settlement land. If they sell it back to others, it's still incorporated, but is now privately owned. The settlement has no control over what happens on that land, but can collect taxes based on the sale of the land back to private owners. This private property can be used by the settlement as a source of income through property taxes.
If the settlement wants to grow, it must either purchase the surrounding land directly from the count as incorporated land, or must purchase it from private individuals who own the land in order to annex. If they purchase the land, then those new land owners potentially also get a vote in how the settlement is ran.
As to "Mayor" titles. They have a controlling interest in the settlement as though they owned a certain % of the land before it became a settlement. But all land in a settlement is, by default, owned either by the settlement itself, or has been sold back to NPCs as privately owned land. Any land owned by the settlement can, at the desire of the settlement leadership, be sold back to the mayor or councilmembers.
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... [stuff left out to minimize TL;DR]
Here are the things that seem a little bit unresolved to me:
Q1. The first bold statement asserts that votes depend upon contributions of land to the settlement. A question that immediately arises is whether the contribution is compensated (i.e., actually a sale) or not.
Q2. The second bold statement asserts that land contributed to the settlement (and perhaps any land comprising the settlement) can be sold to individuals. The question I have is whether land sold back in such a way retains its vote-generating capability.
Depending on the answers to Q1 and Q2, various seemingly unfair manipulations may be possible.
Q3. The third bold statement asserts that land owned by third-party individuals may be purchased in order to annex it into the settlement. It also seems to assert that such purchases also (potentially) obtain voting rights for the new landowners. Who are the new landowners? If the settlement itself bought the land with settlement funds, then it would appear that there are, strictly speaking, no characters who are the new landowners. Presumably in such a case the mayor would get the new votes enfranchised by the annexation.
Q4. The third bold statement also begs the question of who else but the settlement could be the new landowners. The most obvious answer is someone who donated the purchase price. If land sold from the settlement to private owners retains its franchise (answer to Q2), then that donor gets the votes from the land.
Q5. It is conceivable that the new landowners in the third bold statement are actually the old landowners and new settlement citizens. Is this the case? If this is the case, then the transaction is roughly the equivalent of a compensated donation.
Depending on the answers to these questions, various kinds of in-game power-plays and corruption are more or less likely.
Also, there remain questions as to whether some structures must be on either privately-owned or settlement-owned land. Can a town hall or mayoral manor be on private land, either originally or via sale?
I'm sure I've not exhausted either the questions or the possible unintended consequences.