Colonies and "Enough" Nobles

[Indirik]

If you ask me: the Atamaran prole (so to speak), I would like to see character numbers drop because I want to see realms struggle to feed their regions and I want to see realms fall and squabble. It will make good fun (except for the rulers being toppled ;))

That's really a rather ridiculous idea. That wouldn't be fun for *anyone* at all, watching their realms fall shrink and fall apart due to entropy. It also won't significantly change the political landscape at all. The remnants of realms would really have no incentive to shift things around. No new realms would form because there wouldn't be enough players to do it. Things wouldn't change for the better in any significant way, they would just wither and die.

If you want to see some big changes you need /more/ players. That way realms like Darka and Eston have the players available to do things like run a CTO, or capture a duchy and spin off a realm. Heck, Darka/EstonBoM squatted in Coria's capital for a week. You can sure bet that if we had 20 spare nobles, I would have called in a TO unit and started a CTO.

[De-Legro]

That's really a rather ridiculous idea. That wouldn't be fun for *anyone* at all, watching their realms fall shrink and fall apart due to entropy. It also won't significantly change the political landscape at all. The remnants of realms would really have no incentive to shift things around. No new realms would form because there wouldn't be enough players to do it. Things wouldn't change for the better in any significant way, they would just wither and die.

If you want to see some big changes you need /more/ players. That way realms like Darka and Eston have the players available to do things like run a CTO, or capture a duchy and spin off a realm. Heck, Darka/EstonBoM squatted in Coria's capital for a week. You can sure bet that if we had 20 spare nobles, I would have called in a TO unit and started a CTO.

How would you define 20 "spare" nobles. 20 nobles that you could lose without affecting the effort to control your own realm? Or 20 nobles that you can lose and still manage to hold onto your current regions with a fair bit of effort, hoping that you can pick up some more characters in the future?

[Indirik]

I would have liked the first. I would have settled for the second.

[De-Legro]

either option pretty much rules out colonies for nearly all realms. I seriously doubt we are about to get an influx of players to make it possible either. The options then are send out colonies and just handle the fall out. Or continue as we are, waiting for things to change while people become progressively more disappointed in the progress of the realm.

[Shenron]

That's really a rather ridiculous idea. That wouldn't be fun for *anyone* at all, watching their realms fall shrink and fall apart due to entropy. It also won't significantly change the political landscape at all. The remnants of realms would really have no incentive to shift things around. No new realms would form because there wouldn't be enough players to do it. Things wouldn't change for the better in any significant way, they would just wither and die.

If you want to see some big changes you need /more/ players. That way realms like Darka and Eston have the players available to do things like run a CTO, or capture a duchy and spin off a realm. Heck, Darka/EstonBoM squatted in Coria's capital for a week. You can sure bet that if we had 20 spare nobles, I would have called in a TO unit and started a CTO.

Nonsense. As I said earlier, back in 05 or 06 when there were easily enough plays to go around making colonies, it simply did not happen. Your idea is based on the presupposition that every noble of every realm is in love with their realm and wants to see it survive for some kind of weird artifical nationalistic feeling (I've boldened the place where you've implied this). How can you possibly say there would be no incentive to move things around? There is always incentive to move things around, incentive coming from players who do not occupy the hotshot positions (not you). What there isn't an abundance of, is opportunity, without opportunity, those with incentives cannot fulfill them. A cutting of the nobles of the current realms would (I would put money it) see the rise of many new realms.

[Indirik]

People were making colonies in 2006. (That's when I started, so I don't know about 2005.) Remember Kycyell, the Talerium/Minas Ithil colony in Wayburg? I also remember taking part in a different colony effort down in Abington lands, that didn't even finish running. So, that's two colonies off the top of my head, on Atamara, without even really trying to search. I have no idea about BT or FEI, since I wasn't on either one until later. (Much later for FEI.)

However, that kind of thing just doesn't happen anymore. Ask any ruler character in the game, and the answer will be: We don't have enough nobles to start a new colony. So, how will lowering noble count help us found more colonies, or allow us to TO/Secede more duchies?

And if you reduce the noble count, a higher percentage of the remaining nobles will hold lordship, duchies, and council positions. So where's the incentive to split away to hold a council position? Drop the noble count, and you have less competition for the available ones.

Dropping the noble count also reduces the ability of all realms to hold land. Not just the current realms, but the theoretical new realms as well. So, you start a new realm by, what, seceding a duchy? So you have the city and maybe two regions. And you have 8 nobles. Now what? Go to war to conquer more regions? Where are you going to get the nobles to control the land? Your new realm will fall apart even faster than the one you left. And since realms won't be able to support their existing land, which is what you're claiming is going to force them to fall apart to allow for more realms to be formed, they will have zero incentive to go to war. They'll be too busy trying to hold together what they already have to worry about their neighbors. This is what happened on Dwilight for pretty much most of two years. No one could really contemplate an actual war, because we were all too busy just trying to survive.

Sorry, but I completely, 100% disagree with your claims here. Dropping noble count to the point where realms start to fall apart would be a complete, unmitigated disaster. We need a higher noble density to drive up competition for positions, thus creating additional incentive for forming new realms with new positions, and allow for the existing realms to try new things, like colonies and TO/Secede new realms.

Edit: I just checked the wiki regarding a different one I seemed to remember: Drachenwald, a Darkan colony in Tarasac in mid-2005. So that's two actual colonies TOs that succeeded, and a third that failed, in 2005/2006 timeframe, on AT alone.

[LilWolf]

Edit: I just checked the wiki regarding a different one I seemed to remember: Drachenwald, a Darkan colony in Tarasac in mid-2005. So that's two actual colonies TOs that succeeded, and a third that failed, in 2005/2006 timeframe, on AT alone.

To be fair we didn't have estates back then and I'm fairly certain no oath systems either. Back then you could afford to send 10-15 nobles to a colony because they weren't tied in to regions like they are now(of course, we had more characters on the island in those days too). All you needed was a lord for the regions and you were good to go.

Now there's a very high minimum amount of nobles you need in order to keep your realm alive and well. So you actually probably need more nobles to found a successful colony and you need more nobles in the mother realm to be even able to think about doing so. This at a time when the game has fewer characters all around. Something really needs reworking. 

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Isn't there an estate feature currently in the works? It's under the Estate Commands and still does nothing, but it's there.

Also, perhaps we could do an experimental thing where we allow a model realm to use a different sort of control that doesn't rely so much on estates.

[Indirik]

To be fair we didn't have estates back then and I'm fairly certain no oath systems either. Back then you could afford to send 10-15 nobles to a colony because they weren't tied in to regions like they are now(of course, we had more characters on the island in those days too). All you needed was a lord for the regions and you were good to go.

To be even more fair, you didn't even need a lord. :) The "no lord=half tax" thing didn't go in until late 2006, I think. Before that it wasn't uncommon for regions to not have a lord. It just didn't matter. The "no lord=half tax" thing went in because it was so prevalent to not have lords in some realms. (Probably especially in those that had voting systems where lords got better voting rights? Control the lords, and you control the votes.)

But the point is that back in 2005/2006 we did have colonies, and TO/Secede, or just outright secession. And the reason it could be done was that we had enough nobles to be able to afford to do it. Regardless of the mechanics reasons behind why we don't have enough nobles, lack of nobles severely restricts your options.

And yes there are some estate changes in the works that should help reduce the absolute dependence on having a certain minimum number of knights.

[Chenier]

In many places, it's near damn impossible to get approval for an official colony because most realms don't really have enough nobles to sustain their own regions, and any colony would result in having to abandon a number of regions (especially on Beluaterra). Leaders are stuck between the desire to spread their influence abroad via a colony and maintaining their local power.

Colonist leaders, on the other hand, have a harder time recruiting because people have this guilt about the damage them leaving would cause. With less people inclined to join him, he therefore has harder times finding competent people to fill the government positions and can't aspire to more than a tiny realm as he'll lack the nobles to cover more than that, if he can even gather the critical mass necessary to even start a colony.

Finally, you can only do colonies where you could do FTOs. That's rather restrictive in itself, as usually you want to colonize enemy realms, and that's usually where sympathy to your realm is lowest.

[Solari]

BT should have remained closed.  Sorry, it's true.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Finally, you can only do colonies where you could do FTOs. That's rather restrictive in itself, as usually you want to colonize enemy realms, and that's usually where sympathy to your realm is lowest.

Isn't that actually a good point? I know that when Westmoor was formed as a colony back in 2008 when Fontan was going against Sirion, OR, Perdan, Caligus, and CoF, that some talk was started over whether Westmoor back then was made so Perdan could in essence shorten the distance to get to Fontan. Regardless of whether this is the case, you should have to put some work into a potential colony.

[Indirik]

Westmoor was not formed through CTO. We TO'd the entire duchy and seceded it all at once.

And I think that just about every colony or secession that forms during wartime is accused of being a strategic secession. I know that a very large number of people were convinced that SoA's entire purpose for existence was to allow Fontan to take more land from OR. And the Isadril secession to form Tuchanon V was claimed by many people to be to allow Yssaria to fight both Caligus and Itorunt at the same time. (I recall some messages being passed around that quoted various people in Yssaria saying that as soon as the war started, Isadril would immediately secede so they could fight Itorunt while Yssaria concentrated on Caligus. And it did.)

[Sacha]

SoA pretty much /was/ a strategic secession. Having been in the core group that launched the realm, I was privy to most of the discussion regarding the formation of the new realm, and from all I heard I could only conclude that they needed a new realm in ORs back yard to be able to crush them more easily.

[Silverfire]

There are quite clearly not enough noble characters to go around everywhere. I can guarantee you that Atamara could easily use another 200 nobles to just fill up the current space and allow more contention for regions. Coria has dropped from 45 nobles to 24 nobles over the course of the past 6 months or so, because there just isn't a large influx of players into the game. We are hardly able to maintain our current lands and if we had the nobles that we had 6 months ago we could have possibly won the war we just finished fighting.

The fact is, that Coria was spared from destruction because our enemies were also short on nobles. Shoot, i was able to state quite clearly to my enemy leaders that they couldn't even attempt to take over my lands so they might as well gain us as allies because they can't expand any other way. While it sounds like good diplomacy from me, it just means that the entire situation sucks. Battlemaster needs 1000 new players in the game and then things would be much better off with the current estate system.