I've been thinking about the problem of Parent and Child Dominions in this system. After a bit of struggling, I think maybe getting rid of the entire idea would actually make life easier for bookkeeping and also picturing how everything related. Actually, I think being able to switch from parents to children in a game session should not be allowed.
For example, say you have a city (such as Nexus). Each district (such as Cinnabar) could be considered a dominion in itself. Nexus is the parent of Cinnabar.
If we have a "district level" game, we simply say we are dealing with districts and Nexus is basically our "arena". As a game, we don't deal with Nexus as a whole and we assume most things under our scope (say a city block in Cinnabar) are extras and therefore do whatever the Cinnabar administrator says. Nexus never makes an independent action in that game, just the individual districts.
Likewise for a city level game. The administrator cares about Nexus and the Scavanger Lands is basically the arena. At this point, Nexus is the one making the actions and Cinnabar and the other districts are "just obeying". The Scavanger Lands don't make actions on their own (okay, let's pretend they could) since we are dealing with larger forces (Great Forks, Nexus, etc). If a district decides to fight against Nexus, it would just become a separate city for purposes of the plot and the ST could tweak Nexus' stats to reflect that change (or not at all, see below).
Scope can change over a game. Say the players start with taking over a small town. They deal with towns at that point including larger cities. Later, say they eventually take over more and more towns until the ST decides they are now a country. At that point, the game scope changes from city-level to country level as they work with opponents at that level. And later, in this theoretical epic game, they unify all of the Scavenger Lands under one banner. Then, the game changes scope to basically Directions of the world as you are now dealing with the Realm or the Blessed Isle instead of some towns inside those.
Parent Dominion Stats verses Children
I think we could come up with a rough guideline for moving up and down the scale of game, but something that requires more feedback from the ST than pure mechanical formulas. Yeah, I'd prefer formulas, but I don't think the entire parent/child with the exponential system really works. Plus, it occurred to me, a rather difficult child dominion may have Archery 8, but really only contribute 2 for the parent dominion. In the above example, Cinnibar could declare itself a separate city, but wouldn't impact Nexus since they were already witholding stats leading up to that point. Or, the ST could say Cinnibar contributed a bulk of the Craft and lower Nexus' stats appropriately. So, we could say the parents are entirely separate from the children and deal with it in scope of game more than mechanics.
