Okay, so we've been struggling a little with the most literal of the "what do I do" problem: literally when a player starts and has a blank map, what do they do?

We can make orthogonal systems all day but that doesn't help the first 15 seconds.

Here is what I propose. I'm going to implement this shortly so we'll see how it actually comes together, but this is the gist.

• Shift log up to the top left, move rank/resources to bottom left (mirroring and matching importance of "actions" left)
• Add a tab to the log, and make it the default tab.
• This new tab will be the "council advice" section, similar to how King of Dragon Pass does it.
  • Vertical tabs inside this tab on the left edge, 1 tab per council slot.
• Each council content area will have
  • Portrait of character on left
  • Name of character on left
  • Their opinion of you on left
  • Their advice on the current mode (see below)
  • Forward/backward bars to cycle through advice
    • A council member can have multiple "pieces" of advice for the same mode
      • e.g. "cumberland is gearing up to declare war", "ocean is on the brink of collapse", "you should develop your fields lol"
• Advice itself will be in Nobunaga's Ambition style; direct "look at mechanic X, Y is happening", with some flavor
• Advice modes
  • Map
  • Troop list
  • During event (give opinions on event target/involved characters, etc), maybe excluding involved participants?

I think this achieves a couple of things to great effect.

• Getting the player to feel like their characters are more involved/get to know their personalities better.
• Reinforce player choice: the player can assign whoever to council whenever
• Help onboard new players and directly prompt them with useful actions
• Don't distract veterans; let them only check when they want and don't hold them up (they could even just switch tabs to log)
• Very importantly: reinforce the fantasy of "leading" a faction; it's your decision, but it lets you "hold court" a little and roleplay from that perspective

Going to implement as much as I can now: we'll see how it goes!