Wow lot to catch up on here.
RE: Traditional Settlements - the idea is to give players flexibility and freedom to RP, so traditional settlements are considered outside of the Conqueror system. They do not belong to any particular faction's control and so provide nothing into the system via WRE. If they show the Conqueror HUD or a control score or anything like that via the HUD or other reports, that is a bug (one that I keep running into and don't yet understand...)
RE: Building Types Providing Different Benefits - In general, we're trying to move to a system where addon pack authors are free to experiment and create different styles of buildings that have different impacts on the settlement mechanics without having them destroy the balance of the Conqueror system which is much tighter by design.
So to facilitate that, all plots of a certain type are treated equally, with the plot level, assigned NPC role, and morale scores affecting the benefits as opposed to the design itself.
The vanilla settlement system is subject to all sorts of balance issues, as tons of mods take different approaches to the amount of Food/Water/Power/Defense they provide, since we can't really deal with that effectively, I've taken the stance of just letting addon authors go nuts with providing whatever benefits they want in their plot designs. With Conqueror - we had an opportunity for a fresh slate to build a "walled garden" of sorts, at least mechanically, where we could have challenging gameplay within the settlement system.
The benefit to this method is that we can provide the functionality and strong code backing, and allow addon pack authors to focus on artistic design rather than balance or gameplay mechanics. This is one of the reasons the Martial/Recreational plot sub-types were introduced and will continue to be expanded on. In the future, it is very likely we'll get into sub-types that directly influence WRE, Control, and Morale.
RE: Additional Means of Gaining WRE - This is on the horizon, possibly as soon as the next patch. We have a number of new gameplay systems in the works for this. This is one of the reasons I've opted not to loosen up the numbers any, even though they are pretty frustrating for some folks. Once we introduce all of these new elements, the challenge will be diminished, and I think some of you who enjoy it will request I tighten up the numbers a bit after those features are in the wild. (Conqueror Classic incoming?)
RE: Documentation - The plan originally with the launch of Phase 2 was to have lots of documentation and infographics, but due to the constantly changing nature of the mod and the fact that we had never designed anything this strict before, I knew we were going to go through a lot of iterations and features before we got to a good balance - so we only created a few graphics to date.
I think this was a mistake and we should come up with not only a good text/graphic manual for the mechanics as they stand now, but I should do a video tutorial series for them as well to chunk them out into simple 5 to 10 minute lessons.
I'm currently in an excessively busy work period that should be wrapping up in a few weeks, and I can add the videos to my task list.
In the interim, if any of you wants to suggest some summary documentation to explain the mechanics as you see them,
@WetRats would be more than happy to facilitate getting them onto the Wiki so we can provide a quick spot to point beginners.
RE: Everything Else - Apologies if I missed some important points, I'll definitely reach out for more feedback to future direction, and feel free to continue the discussion and I'll try to keep up.
Phase 2 still has a long way to go. Much like Phase 1, it will last many months of updates. Unlike previous expansions, Conqueror has a multi-year development cycle planned - so we won't be stopping anytime soon!